Figure it out Aug 28, 2025
I work with a contractor who was delivering numerical data and asking for feedback from my group.  We use the data in a very precise way, but his data only had three digits after the decimal point.  So naturally we requested more digits.  His response was that the software he used to generate the data was only capable of outputting data with three digits after the decimal point.  This software, by the way, was written by his company.  It's not overly complex software, and it was likely written by a person who sits right next to him at work.  But he was adamant that this ask was simply unachievable. 

Not all problems are solvable, and most of the rest of them are hard.  But with the amount of money we pay this guy and the level of intelligence he brings to the table (now questionable), I would've liked to have said one simple thing:  Figure.  It.  Out.  FIGURE IT OUT.  Find a way to solve this problem.  You're smart.  You have resources at your disposal.  You've done all this other complex work.  Figure it out.  Open your code editor and change the format string of the print statement from %3.3f to %3.6f.  Every single other person working on this program and in this entire industry knows this and knows how to do it.  Do it.  "Not possible" is not an option, especially at this level, and especially with this task.  Figure it out.
On AI Aug 11, 2025
Artificial intelligence is everywhere now, for better or worse.  It's interesting to watch how it polarizes people; you're either an AI evangelist or a luddite.  I tend to try to avoid the latest fad, which is why I completely avoided bitcoin and NFTs.  But after some hesitation, I've found some AI tools to be insanely useful.  It all depends on what you're trying to do and how you want to do it.  To paraphrase something I read somewhere, technology is supposed to make our jobs easier so we have more time for creativity, not make creativity easier so we have more time for our jobs.  The use cases I've heard for AI, aside from writing (and grading) school papers, include writing emails, summarizing documents, and drafting performance plans.  These all seem like mediocre ways to use a powerful technology, but whatever.  What I've found is that an AI tool functions well as an improved search engine.  When I'm working on some hard coding problem, I've always kept a browser tab open to look up questions about syntax, errors, or whatnot.  A search engine would inevitably point me to one of a handful of message boards where someone else had asked the same question months, years, or decades ago.  So my task became:  Filter through search results to find the most relevant (while discarding the irrelevant) to cobble together a solution to my problem.  AI can simply do this part for me.  And it can write code.  It still requires a human to organize that code into something workable, and it requires a human to ask the questions in the first place.  But a big chunk of the tedious middle part can be avoided entirely with AI. 

I think most of the hate for AI comes (rightly) from the force-fed nature of it.  There's AI in search engines, shopping websites, browsers, documents, apps, operating systems, phones, home appliances, a toilet, etc.  Every website on the planet now has an AI-powered "assistant."  It's often more difficult to avoid AI than to just begrudgingly use it.  And that's the problem most people have:  There's no choice in the matter.  Tech companies are shoving this concept down our throats, and it all comes off as very Microsoft Clippy-esque -- that super annoying "assistant" in Microsoft Office programs that would try to guess what you doing (wrongly) and try to offer assistance (poorly), really only serving as a thing that got in the way of what you were actually trying to do.  People mostly want freedom to do things as they wish, to express themselves in whatever nonoptimal, convoluted means they see fit.  Technology that gets in the way of creativity is not only not helpful, it's detrimental. 

But also, people hate AI because it sucks.  If you look carefully (or not that carefully), you see it used everywhere -- to create movies, commercials, viral videos, art, etc.  And that's mostly fine, aside from how bad it is at times.  The problem is that humanity already isn't good at determining what's true and what's not, what's fake and what's real.  And as these tools improve, and as more and more people gain access to them, it's concerning to imagine the world we'll be living in with ubiquitous AI-generated viral media available constantly, instantly, and universally. #technology
CTE brain May 3, 2025
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a brain disease achieved by getting hit on the head a lot, and it's usually found in football players and boxers.  Some of the symptoms include impulsive behavior and aggression. 

It's a real thing, and I don't mean to make light of it.  But there's a pattern of behavior I've noticed in certain public figures in recent years that suggests something similar is happening to otherwise healthy people.  There was the football player Antonio Brown who walked off the field (i.e. quit) mid-game in a pretty dramatic fashion (though that might've actually been CTE).  There was the Dilbert creator Scott Adams who used to post benign little things on his blog and Twitter, but who has since devolved into a racist and an extreme fear-mongerer.  There's also Jordan Peterson, who achieved notoriety with a fairly benign self-help book, but who has since become an aggressively annoying Twitter personality.  Add to this list JK Rowling, who earned a billion dollars as a young adult author, but whose entire public life now consists of degrading transgender people for some reason.  And then there's Elon Musk, who used to be an awkward nerd but has since become a Nazi.  Also, Donald Trump. 

You could claim these people are just doing things for attention.  Or maybe that's how these people have always been, and social media has simply allowed them to be more visible about it.  But I think it's something else.  It might be that, similar to CTE, social media has altered peoples' brain to make them act more impulsive and aggressive.  Or it might be drugs (Elon) or supplements (Adams -- men that old shouldn't have abs).  I don't know what it is, but I don't like it, and I think social media should be abolished and people should have to obtain a license to use the internet. #psychology
Autism spectrum May 3, 2025
This is probably wrong, but if autism truly is a spectrum, it would sort of make sense that everyone is on this spectrum, similar to the spectrum of gender or sexuality.  You can't be on or off the spectrum; you're on it.  If this is the case, most people are on the low end of the spectrum, i.e. not very autistic.  The people we think of as "having autism" are on the high end.  That leaves a whole bunch of people in the middle, which would maybe help explain people with difficulty making eye contact, sensory sensitivities, and things like that.  In other words, I think we're all a little autistic. #psychology
Mirror bacteria May 3, 2025
This People I (Mostly) Admire podcast episode introduced me to the concept of mirror bacteria (or mirror life) which is the idea that biology uses molecules of a specific chirality, i.e. molecular formations that are either right-handed or left-handed.  The same chemical can exist in either form, but all biology tends to use molecules of a specific handedness, e.g. proteins are exclusively composed of left-handed amino acids.  There's a scary idea out there that if left-handed bacteria suddenly evolved or were created in a lab, the human immune system would be unable to defend itself because it evolved to recognize right-handed bacteria only. #science
More than five senses May 3, 2025
The traditional "five senses" we learned in grade school (via Aristotle) -- sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing -- are associated with specific sensor organs on the human body:  eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue.  But it's widely established now that there are more than five senses.  Temperature can be sensed by the skin or tongue, but it's different than simply sense of touch.  Balance and body orientation are sensed by the inner ear.  You can sense when you're moving versus stationary.  I would add a couple weird ones to the list:  You can often sense when someone is standing close to you, or if they're looking at you. #science
Finding concerts Apr 16, 2025
I'm always kind of surprised how difficult it is to find concerts I might be interested in, and how bad the search engines are at performing this seemingly simple task.  When I go to a website of a concert venue or ticket seller, I can scroll through their list of upcoming events, but it's a total mishmash of every style of music from every generation.  And when I make the unfortunate decision to buy a ticket for a concert I want to attend, I get automatically signed up to receive emails from the ticket seller that say, "Hey, since you're going to a concert, would you be interested in going to a completely unrelated concert simply for the pleasure of experiencing the sensation of live music?"  Like, no.  If I go to death metal concert, I'm not interested in going to a techno concert simply because both things fit neatly into the box of "live music."  That's not how that works, that's not how anything works, and I feel like this issue should've been resolved in like 2002.  How can I not simply select "live music" from a drop-down box, then further select "music that contains a guitar" vs. "music that involves a DJ"?  These are not overlapping Venn diagrams, and I shouldn't have to tell the likes of TicketMaster how to serve me the content I actually want to pay money for.  Use those ticket fees for something good, you dorks. #music
Pumping gas Apr 9, 2025
I moved from one of the few states that don't let you pump your own gas, to one of the many states that do.  I have a lot of strong opinions about a lot of different things, and this is refreshingly not one of them.  I don't know why, I just really don't care whether I pump my own gas or not.  This opinion occupies exactly zero processor cycles in my brain.  And this is quite different than pretty much every other person on earth, who feels extremely strongly about one side or the other.  I guess it's kind of gross to touch a gas pump that thousands of other people touch, while standing outside in the heat or cold, breathing in poisonous gasoline fumes.  But I don't have to interact with anyone, which is nice.  Two sides, essentially equal; opinion weakly held.
Athletic quarterbacks Jan 2, 2025
Athletic quarterbacks (quarterbacks who can run and scramble as opposed to passing from the pocket) are all the rage in the NFL these days, both because they're fun to watch but also because they're successful.  But watching mobile quarterbacks in college football makes it pretty obvious that having that strength is also a weakness.  In high school and college football, defenses are undisciplined enough to allow some backyard football to happen quite a bit.  So a quarterback who can move around and dodge defenders can look like a superstar.  But as soon as a competent defense is involved, a scrambling quarterback is more likely a liability (notable exceptions abound in the current state of the NFL).  Mobile quarterbacks get accustomed to using their athleticism to get out of sticky situations, instead of developing proper decision-making skills, learning how to read a defense, and being content with throwing the ball away when that's the smart play.  The very thing that makes athletic quarterbacks successful in college is the same thing that makes them fail in the NFL. #sports
College football talent differential Jan 2, 2025
One of the weird and cool things about college football is that there's an insanely wide talent gap between the best and the worst players, as well as the best and the worst teams.  That's partly why the Heisman Trophy is sometimes relevant -- occasionally there's a player who is just hands-down better than everyone else.  This unfortunately makes some games meaningless, such as all the "cupcake" games at the beginning of the season where a blue-blood team like Alabama or Texas plays an unknown like Tennessee ... State Tech, or Louisiana ... Monroe Community College.  Technically these teams are all at the same "level" but realistically there's no way in hell a blue-blood will lose those games. 

In the NFL, the talent gap is much less pronounced.  "Any given Sunday" means that pretty much any team can beat pretty much any other team on any given Sunday.  The NFL is much more uniform, almost predictable.  Sure, a great player can have a great game at times.  But more often than not, a good offense will find a way to beat a good defense, and a good defense will find a way to stop a good offense.  Players are more consistent, and coaching is more intelligent.  Talent is distributed fairly evenly around the entire league. 

In college football, great players are essentially unstoppable, even in a game between two good teams.  This is because the talent isn't spread evenly across the league or even across a single team.  A single amazing player can consistently beat a team of pretty good players simply because there's a measurable difference in talent.  Being taller, faster, or stronger is still a differentiator at the college level.  This difference is smoothed out a bit in the NFL, which is why it's still fun to watch college football. #sports