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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 that for an Autodidact, [...]

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 investment just [...]

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 [...]

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 katamari gets stuck [...]

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) is. It doesn’t [...]

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, [...]