There is a surprisingly large degree of variation between knowing something and knowing something. Unfortunately, the english verb “to know” doesn’t have enough dimensionsality to express all this variation. Knowing is simple awareness. While knowing is something deeper. A couple terms I enjoy that express the degrees in this variation: qualia is kind of an experiential knowledge. I can tell you that a particular strawberry is sweet, but qualia is tasting that sweetness for yourself....

I’m a sucker for Patriots/Tom Brady/Bill Belichick content. They’re one of the greatest sports dynasties in recent memory. Their quarterback/coach tandem was one of the most successful of all time. And their coach is principled and disciplined man with a hard-shelled and opaque exterior. What’s not to love. So of course I’ve been watching the new docu-series on Disney+ about the team. With first-hand interviews from Tom Brady and many players in the league, it’s a great inside look into what made the Patriots tick....

When temperatures drop in the winter, every conversation inevitably begins with the weather. “It’s cold out.” My default response to this is some flavor of “you’ve never experienced real cold”1. At first, this response seems like harmless banter. But, I had a realization as I was playing a recent round of replay-the-conversation-in-your-head-while-taking-a-shower. My default response suuuuucks. Rule for good conversation: Accept the premise. A conversation is a bit like improv (an improv-ersation2 if you will)....

Music that unlocks an emotion. Music has a unique capability to bottle up a feeling and store it for replay later. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever had certain songs trigger memories to come flying back to you. Whenever The Weekend’s “In the Night” plays, I remember the joy and warmth I felt on that car-ride after I proposed to my now wife. Whenever I hear David Crowder Band’s “How He Loves”, I remember the intense revalations I felt worshipping on a mountainside in Mexico....

Lots of blog-related changes with the new year. My hosting subscription with Bluehost was due for renewal. But I couldn’t stomach the non-promotional annual price + all the nickle-and-dime addons. So I looked into alternatives and discovered a much cheaper hosting set up. Saved 95% of my yearly costs. Migrating was kind of a pain, but I learned a lot about cloud and the infrastructure of the internet in the process (bit of an exaggeration…it was mostly just DNS stuff)....

Lee looked at him and the brown eyes under their rounded upper lids seemed to open and deepen until they weren’t foreign any more, but man’s eyes, warm with understanding. Lee chuckled. “It’s more than a convenience,” he said. “It’s even more than self-protection. Mostly we have to use it to be understood at all.” Samuel showed no sign of having observed any change. “I can understand the first two,” he said thoughtfully, “but the third escapes me....

I haven’t listened to Biden’s inauguration address yet, although I’ve heard good things. It got me thinking about other memorable addresses by presidents. I don’t know how heralded Washington’s Farewell Address is by the presidential-address-ranking-community, but the allusions in Hamilton have certainly hooked me into wanting to explore it. Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors....

Finding books worth the time is hard. There are a lot of books and not a lot of time. This recent book looked provocative. The book looks similar to The Mundanity of Excellence – a paper on the stratification of high-performers that I re-read almost once a year. So an entire book on it might be worth the time. Then I read one of the featured blurbs. “Geoff Colvin has written a fascinating study of great achievers from Mozart to Tiger Woods, and he has brilliantly highlighted the fact that great effort equals great success....

Perception and the Representative Design of Psychological Experiments I’ve been reading a bit of Egon Brunswick’s work lately. A psychologist from the 1940s-50s. Some really solid ideas about perception. This particular book touches upon a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about lately. Perception. Statistics. Communication. It hits it all. Here he is on perception. In view of all this, one is reminded of Thurstone’s remark that perception is based on insufficient evidence, or of William James’s saying that perception is of probable things....

To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter – Vladimir Bukovsky’s autobiography about his life in the Soviet Union. A little longer than I might otherwise have liked, but the nuggets of wisdom in his life’s story and the reality of what he went through made it worth it for me. His dealings with a government that values ideology above all else were particularly eye-opening. Here he is on the essence of the struggle in the Soviet Union....