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If your goal is to become a sculptor, it’s worth your while to try chiseling a wheel out of stone. Just for practice, you know. Reinventing the wheel isn’t always a bad thing. It gives you a lot of insight and skill in an area you’re starting out in. I believe [...]

When mastering any discipline, you’re bound to run into the Plateau Effect from time to time. For awhile, your mastery increases steadily through training or studying, but then you begin to experience diminishing returns. The slope of mastery versus time evens out, until you reach the plateau point, when it seems like further [...]

Continuing the discussion about the limits of computation, which I started with the recent article on The Halting Problem, let me tell you about one of the most fascinating number sequences ever discovered, the sequence of Busy Beaver Numbers.
As you know, every computer program is ultimately stored as just a finite sequence of 0’s and [...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately playing Katamari Damacy for the Playstation 2. If you aren’t familiar with this game, it’s the most original concept ever. You push around this magical adhesive ball called a katamari (Japanese: “cluster” or “lump”) and roll stuff up with it. Anything smaller than the [...]

When people ask me, “What math should I study so I can (fill in the blank)”, the answer I give them isn’t quite what they expect. The best answer to this question is: whichever mathematics you think is the most fun and interesting. This answer doesn’t depend at all on what (blank) [...]

I’m currently right at the half-way point through my latest 30 day challenge, a second 30 day workout challenge. It’s really heightened my understanding of progressive training: starting small and gradually increasing the difficulty. The idea is simple: if you want to be able to lift a huge weight, something way out of your league, [...]

I just returned from an exotic African safari (editor’s note: this is fiction), and I’d like to share with you the details of a new species I discovered, the Balancing Beetle. These critters vary widely in size, with the smallest being almost microscopic, and the largest rivaling even the big jungle cats. They come in [...]

So you wanna upgrade the old noggin, increase your thought power, turbo charge your CPU? Then go out and do things. Do things you’ve never done before. Do things you’ve never even imagined. Stuff that will shock and amaze your friends because it’s so novel and unexpected from you. This, my friend, is how you [...]

Lately, I’ve been working on training self-discipline. I’ve been doing this through the use of 30-day challenges. I’m on day 26 of a 30-day challenge to write a blog post every day. I’m on day 8 of a 30-day challenge to work out every day. I’ve been trying to get up at 8:00 am every [...]