kowen

9 ms·

31.
by kowen 17y ago
There was a pretty fascinating talk at TED by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who experienced a massive stroke ("my stroke of insight"). On the one hand she observed her own neurological functions shut down with clinical curiosity, and
32.
by kowen 17y ago
These houses don't prevent collaboration - they can be moved around, windows and doors can be open. The difficulty with open spaces/cubicles is that when you are not collaborating, some people won't think twice before interrupting you. Wh
33.
by kowen 17y ago
I want one! > Won't real estate expenses be far higher than for a generic cubicle farm? Even if they are a bit higher, productivity must soar compared cubicle-land. It's shocking and kind of depressing how many tidbits float across
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by kowen 17y ago
This reminds me of the movie/book 'The Peaceful Warrior' by Dan Miller (... there's never _nothing_ going on! ) There are two distinct 'incubation' type behaviors that I have observed - one is the internal thinking that you describe in thi
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by kowen 17y ago
I can't speak for anyone other than myself, naturally, but I was a very vocal Linux user until I got my first macbook and didn't have to google X-server error messages every time I did an upgrade. Getting various flavors of linux working wa
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by kowen 17y ago
To counter anecdotes with more anecdotes, I went to a code camp a few weeks ago, and there was an overwhelming number of laptops running Microsoft OS's. When I pulled out my mac book pro one guy actually commented on it. I saw one other per
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by kowen 17y ago
My dirty secret is that I haven't remapped Vim's control keys. I make up for it by moving around my searching a lot more than by using hjkl. After the first few months I tried suggesting to people that they should try dvorak, but mostly the
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by kowen 17y ago
I lived and worked in Norway for several years, and each year I received a pre-filled tax return from the government. If I recall correctly, I had three choices: - Send a PIN code by mobile phone which acted as a digital signature to file "
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by kowen 17y ago
You're right - that's the one.
40.
by kowen 17y ago
I've heard great things about language immersion. There is an American actress - can't remember her name - she speaks fluent French. I saw her in a French movie and spent half the movie trying to place her face. It turns out that she went t
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by kowen 17y ago
Interesting! Three of my siblings are bi-lingual Russian/English. At first they mixed things up terribly, but after their Russian grandmother spent a year with them they were suddenly able to completely separate the two. Grandma doesn't spe
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by kowen 17y ago
I studied German for 4 years in school, and am far from fluent. I can painfully pick out details in a newspaper article, and can usually figure out if people are talking about soccer or food or whatever. On the other hand, I'm fluent in F
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by kowen 17y ago
According to The Complete Meat Cookbook , meat has been bred to be a lot more lean in the past decades. I suspect that if we went back to the diet before there was fast-food, people would be eating more flavorful (a.k.a. fatty) meat than l
44.
by kowen 17y ago
Taubes' take on the caloric balance equation (thermodynamic law) is fascinating. Change in energy stores = Energy intake – Energy expenditure According to my biochemistry professor in college, this had one - and only one - interpretation:
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by kowen 17y ago
Git helped us out a lot in that it tracks content, not files. So where one person might do some cleanup that included renaming some files, and another might make some changes to the same files our previous source control system either choke
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by kowen 17y ago
Someone is trying to make up for that, it would seem: "Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail" by Danica McKellar and by the same author: Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's B
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by kowen 17y ago
From what I've read they don't avoid vegetables aside from nightshades.
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by kowen 17y ago
Interesting! When I was eating 5-6 meals a day it was perfectly healthy - all home-cooked, organic, with good (free-range, grass fed) meat. I was exhausted all the time, and hungry every few hours, and was thinking about food all the time.
49.
by kowen 17y ago
I can't remember the percentages that Taubes suggests. Personally, I solve it by replacing carbs with fat - but without actually measuring. I just eat plenty of flavorful food (and drench my veggies in butter). Mark Sisson has written about
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by kowen 17y ago
I believe that in Norway in addition to stiff fines, you will lose your drivers license if you are caught driving 25 km/h above the speed limit, whether you are rich or not.
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by kowen 17y ago
I read Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" 4 months ago, which had me curious enough to experiment. http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scienc... The book is a meta study of the research done on the so-called meta
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by kowen 17y ago
Yes, it seems like some companies have a culture of emergency and heroism in a self-reinforcing loop. It is terrifying to watch an imagined emergency be solved in such a way as to cause a proper emergency.
53.
by kowen 17y ago
I did morning pages (long hand) for a while, and while the process certainly was interesting and helpful, most of it was garbage, trite, uninteresting, and truly boring. Any interesting pieces would have required rewrite/cleanup before bein
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by kowen 17y ago
I was actually going to try it, but I simply do not have a facebook account, and have no intention of getting one. I kind of get that one might want to avoid writing all the authentication stuff, though.
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by kowen 17y ago
Out of curiosity, what would I see when clicking on this link if I had a Facebook account?
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by kowen 17y ago
The first thing that caught my attention was the bit about "U.S. born". In the USA it is illegal to ask about country of origin (as well as age, gender, religious beliefs, marital status). I've heard of hiring managers discarding CVs outrig