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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 [...]

I was never a big swimmer when I went to the gym, but this Summer, my girlfriend and I moved to an apartment with a pool, and I’ve fallen in love. How did I go this many years without realizing what an amazing workout swimming is? It’s like a machine which hits every muscle equally, [...]

Isaac Newton famously attributed his success to standing on the shoulders of giants. Here are some tips how you can do that too. Before you know it, you’ll be wearing a huge British wig and inventing new branches of math and science. Work your way up. Before you stand on the shoulders of giants, you’ll [...]

Suppose you want to make a thousand dollars quickly. Somewhere, there’s a person who would give you a thousand dollars, just for asking over the phone. All you need to do is dial the right number and ask. Making a thousand dollars only takes a few minutes, if you have perfect knowledge and pursue the [...]

There are great teachers out there, but there are also lousy ones. Practically every kid who goes through the school system eventually experiences being Smarter Than The Teacher. In high school, I once got a calculus textbook confiscated because the principal felt it was a distraction during algebra class. It can feel frustrating, especially in [...]

Designed in ancient times, algebra is one of the world’s longest standing sciences. Mankind was doing quadratic equations back when they thought the seasons and the weather were caused by quirks of the gods. Here are some general ways to be better at this arcane discipline. Equations Mean Things You probably already know this, but [...]

The red pill-blue pill concept was introduced by the Wachowski Brothers in their 1991 blockbuster The Matrix. Following a series of surreal misadventures, the main character is confronted with the choice to take a Red Pill and “see how deep the rabbit-hole goes”, or take a Blue Pill and wake up thinking it was all [...]

I was interested in a lot of crazy stuff as a child. There was a time when I was obsessed with locks and keys, another when I was passionately interested in piano. For years I worshiped Super Mario, even though the family didn’t have a Nintendo– I guess if we’d had one I would’ve grown [...]

Writers of math books should realize: no matter how many irrelevant pictures you plaster on every page, people are still going to think your math textbook is an arcane tome of black magic. You might as well make it look like a tome of spells, at least that way it’s cool. No, I don’t need [...]

There are two types of knowing: emotional knowledge and intellectual knowledge. The two can overlap, but the overlap is surprisingly small. We know something intellectually when we’ve read it or heard it or been taught it from a reputable source. Knowing something intellectually, you can answer questions about it on a quiz. You have an [...]