Viewing profile — jacobolus

> overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education People benefit greatly from external human feedback, but 1:1 tutoring (with a good tutor) is roug…

This will possibly help region-central cities keep a small proportion of the jobs that have moved to the biggest national/international cities. It's not going to help rural village…

He made a previous video about washboarding: https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/6/2/why-roads-get-wa...

Larry Sanger's "life's work" is trying to destroy or undermine Wikipedia. He needs to give it up. He was involved in the project for a very brief time. He immediately despised the …

The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, co…

It's a cute little optimization puzzle they made for people to solve, with lawn mowing as a graphical hook to make the problem more approachable and fun. Similarly, my kids have a …

You can have high information density and still not have words running into each-other. Taking all of the space out from around text and information graphics makes them less legibl…

Yes, it's "number of prescriptions" (but not "number of people prescribed" or "number of doses"). One person could be prescribed an antibiotic (or multiple) several times a year. I…

The "hornworm" caterpillars leave amazing poops behind. They look like (not so) little green grenades. Their moths are important pollinators of some nice native flowers.

Strunk and White promote all sorts of prescriptivist nonsense, taking arbitrary personal preferences and elevating them to sacred rules (including many which they themselves consta…

As you say, the current profoundly corrupt Supreme Court majority will make up whatever justification they need to get the outcome they want, case by case, and don't believe in the…

I think the worldwide disruption of the pandemic melted people's brains, and the recent surge in the anti-vax movement is a symptom. Along the lines of: if all this bad stuff happe…

The owner of a book doesn't owe anything to a random future person who picks it up from their estate sale or whatever. Vanishingly few books are irreplaceable enough to need to be …

The basic problem is that to get to the objects you mention here is at least 3 or 4 years of full-time study away from the kind of math people learn for a typical college degree in…

The big problem I have with Axler's presentation of the SVD is that it's backwards. It leads with a bunch of completely dry and technical minutiae written formally, loads students …

That's all well and good, but you also shouldn't excuse authors for not providing context, motivation, or explanation under the theory that the students should really be figuring o…