Viewing profile — ecmendenhall

I work with a manual QA team who explicitly recruit testers on the autism spectrum. It's a great mission and they've done great work: http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-hires-p…

The Harold McGee article linked on the right mentions that the alkaline ingredients in ramen noodles are slightly different from baking soda: > As for the particular alkaline ingre…

You're probably using the right thesaurus. The default on Apple devices is the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, which is great at conveying little shades of meaning. I'm always …

Ah, right. That makes sense. If only it was mentioned on the download page!

This bug was pretty serious. I'd better be extra careful and install and verify this myself. Oh, good: there's a standalone installer available ( http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1726…

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on an encrypted, backed-up, redundantly distributed hard drive — forever.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on conspiracy theories (in Turkish politics)[1], but it includes a section reviewing academic literature on conspiracy theories and a lot of resources i…

Money might buy "freedom from depression," but I suspect it does so by buying antidepressants and therapy. I think Robert Sapolsky is on to the best explanation of depression: it's…

This is interesting, but I think completion rates (and enrollments, to a degree) are bogus statistics. All the incentives are aligned toward signing up for lots of courses, with or…

Here's another ungated Henrich paper on ultimatum games across societies, if you're interested in the research: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001... His …

> Side note: Wouldn't it be awesome if composer supported composer.sexpr files natively, so that we would no longer have to write JSON? If you, too, think this would be awesome, ch…

I second this. But don't take my word for it. Here is 5.24 (one of my favorites) translated by Long: "Think of the universal substance, of which thou hast a very small portion; and…

Two of my favorite pieces of "other media:" This Flickr photostream by "Moravius," who is some sort of humanitarian aid worker in NK. There are lots of photos from outside Pyongyan…

If you're sufficiently convinced by this, the 538 model, or your favorite electoral vote map, and you are willing to bet your beliefs (and you are in a jurisdiction that has not re…

Here is a short presentation with another perspective on the Cybersyn project which should be of interest to designers and quantitative visualization types: http://compscifi.com/ I…

Technical understanding always determines ambition! You've given me two excellent answers in the last few weeks. (The other was on Aristotle, inter-subjective selection, and N-dime…

Markets generate efficient solutions to enormously complex allocation and optimization problems by aggregating distributed information and sending price signals. What else can they…

I asked this question a while ago on both Quora and Ask MetaFilter, but many of the answers were hung up on the metaphors. ("Don't think of your life as a decision tree" was one po…