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Skills are specific things we know how to do, like how to make origami, how to weave, how to paint, and so on. They are generally things you learn by doing, rather than by reading about in abstract. Sure, you can gain knowledge about them by reading general theory, but you have to actually get [...]

Casa Blanca was a boring movie without a lot of action, but Star Wars, man did that have some great light saber fights. I’m speaking here, of course, as a kid: to see how children understand language, you need look no further than your own memory, specifically, your memory of movies and video games from [...]

If the odds of an event are one in a billion, you shouldn’t bet the farm on it. But these events actually happen all the time; they are ubiquitous. Say you’re walking along the street, and you pass a dozen parked cars. What are the odds of those cars being parked in that exact order? [...]

Child psychologists once noticed an amazing pattern. Whenever six or more children got together, either three would become mutual friends, or three would become mutual non-friends. It was more than mere rule of thumb: it happened every single time, without fail, without even one single “exception that proves the rule”. The psychologists were baffled, and [...]

Back home, my father is quite the gardener. I didn’t learn too much about gardening from him (might have to request lessons one of these days pending the economy), but I learned a little about mulching. Here’s the dilemma. You’ve got a rocky backyard, a modest bed of cheap soil poured over sand and rocks, [...]

In some games, especially RPGs, the “New Game+” option lets you start a new game while keeping all the powers you built up in the previous game. What if you could do this in real life? You’d pop out of your mother’s womb with all your skills intact: know how to speak fluently at a [...]

We see them all the time. On television, newscasters nod deferentially while Very Serious People tell us what to believe. On the street, we see them wearing their suits, scowls on their faces, always running off to their next Powerpoint Presentation. Who are these mysterious people? Why are they always so miserable and guarded? I [...]

Whether he holds great power or is just a figurehead, the ultimate measure of a king’s success is whether he continues his line. He might conquer the whole world by force and brilliant strategy, but if he has no heir, his accomplishment will be completely unwoven by the competing warlords in the vacuum of power. [...]

Exponential games are ones where the player grows at a rate which is itself tied to how big the player is: if you’re small, you grow at a small rate; if you’re big, you grow at a big rate. Typically, a feedback mechanism is involved, where extra growth in turn grants extra power to grow. [...]

Theoretically, there are two forms of future prediction. Interactive prediction and non-interactive prediction. A non-interactive predictor makes predictions about some world, but doesn’t share the predictions with that world. An example would be if I’m watching a play and try to predict the next scene in my head. The actors don’t know what prediction I [...]