Posts from ‘December, 2008’

Any recent visitor to Wikipedia will notice the banner with a plea from Jimmy Wales for more money to run the Wikimedia Foundation. However, a look at Wikimedia’s financial statements reveals they are doing just fine. Wales is asking for $6 million. Last year, Wikimedia raised over $5 million in contributions and donations. Their expenses [...]

There are three types of gifts: Things, Experiences, and Sentiments (obviously gifts can combine two of these types). The primary purpose of a gift is to signal that the giver paid some cost, in cash, time, or consideration, to give the gift. It’s a signal of friendship or appreciation. There are 4 ways to spend [...]

The Washington Post has an article today about some people trying to get Obama to spend stimulus money on "green-collar jobs," defined in the article as new wind grids, solar farms, or clean-water projects, as opposed to traditional highway funding. I think this is a bad idea. Congestion is a huge pollutant. Our nation’s highways [...]

I’m back home after ending my first semester at Claremont McKenna College. I was pretty unhappy on the drive home, but when I put the whole thing in perspective I think I had a great semester. You wish you could have had it. Positives: Social scientists and economists recently have made breakthroughs into learning what [...]

Homer, The Iliad Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America The Federalist Papers Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Work Week Sophocles, Oedipus Ian McEwan, Atonement David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and other essays Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil [...]

Malcolm Gladwell has a long article in New Yorker about problems schools face predicting which people will be good at teaching. In summary, teachers are the most important factor affecting student learning, more important than class size, or a "good" school vs a "bad" school. Schools can’t predict which teachers will be good, but the [...]

Assuming you have enough qualifications to start at the entry level: Writer Basketball/other sport coach Musician Traditional career to CEO Academic Entrepreneur Finance Writing, music, and entrepreneurship are scalable at every level – pay is tied to output and demand, there’s no billable “per hour” component. Beginning careerists, academics, Wall Street lifers and coaches are [...]

Why is the chair of this Senate committee speaking in a British accent? What does it say about how Americans view British people?

Here are amazing pictures of the Hajj, the religious ceremony all Muslims are expected to undergo. Here is an explanation of the reconfiguring of Jamarat Bridge, or, how to solve the logistical problem of getting 3 million people to throw rocks at three pillars without any of them getting trampled. How to talk to girls, [...]

Sometimes you’ll be unhappy because things aren’t working out socially. No one ever calls/invites you to do things, you feel excluded, you don’t know who you’re going to live with next year, you’re eating alone all the time and you wish you could do things with other people more often. I would know because I’ve [...]