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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 [...]

In the cult classic “Fight Club”, Brad Pitt plays as Tyler Durden, a charismatic anarcho-primitivist who frees lots of men from the lethargic oppression of consumer society. Encouraging men to pick fights with one another, Tyler dismantles deep-held patterns of social interaction, short-circuiting the autopilot mechanisms by which those men used to lead their [...]

With the conclusion of a long year of classes and work, my girlfriend and I decided to go celebrate amid the dazzling lights and sounds of Las Vegas. Our plane took off the very Friday afternoon of finals week, and we were in for a week of fun and excitement. We booked four hotels in [...]

Growing up in a Christian family, I was exposed to a lot of Christian literature. Very little of it really struck a chord with me. But one author really stood out and had a profound influence on me. Merlin R Carothers, the pastor with the most unique philosophy in the world. This is a man [...]

“Infinity!” “Infinity plus 1!” “Infinity plus a hundred!” “Infinity times ten!” “Infinity times infinity!” Remember playing this game as a child? Trying to compete to name the biggest infinity? What happens when pure research mathematicians play this game?
A few quarters back, standing outside an auditorium before giving a calculus final exam, some of my students [...]

Everyone knows, you should be yourself, let your true core self shine through. And everyone also knows, that sometimes you have to “fake it ’til you make it”. Wait a second, these ideas directly contradict eachother! Many people sincerely preach one, and many people just as sincerely preach the other. You want to develop yourself, [...]

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The sexiest, most badass script in the known universe? The Chinese characters. Devised thousands of years ago by ancient Chinese scholars. Revised, studied, worshipped, all while the Roman characters were wrapped in uninvented slumber. I’m going to talk about a book, James Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji”, which helps English speakers learn the Japanese variation [...]

Imagine if you could reprogram your mind, behavior and personality like a computer. That’s what the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is all about, and “Frogs into Princes” is required reading for anyone who wishes to become a master of NLP.
Despite the name, “Frogs into Princes” is actually written primarily for psychotherapists. It can be read [...]

A friend introduced me to the book “The Power of Now”, by Eckhart Tolle.  Here we have a book about living in the now, in the moment. About developing one’s “presence”. If I had to summarize the whole book in one line, it would be this: almost everyone lives their lives in an unconscious trance, [...]

There are certain things that everyone passionately loves, or violently hates. The epic tragedy, The Silmarillion, is one of those things. You probably already know whether or not you like the book itself, just based on your personality, so I won’t bother endorsing it or bashing it. Instead I’d like to talk about some the [...]