Books Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein. By one of the hosts of Planet Money. Short and interesting, made me want to learn more about the Chinese intellectual and scientific advances from around 600 AD to 1200 AD. Articles Acceptance Parenting by Agnes Callard Why are non-alcoholic drinks so expensive? Vancouver is the anti-asian hate crime capital of the world. It’s also nearly 30% asian....

Focus To what extent can we manufacture focus (asking for a friend :tongue_in_cheek_emoji:) Canonical answers: Develop habits (if you get used to doing the same thing every day out will get easier to do the same thing every day) Organize your physical environment to minimize distraction and promote concentration Minimize your ambition set (i.e. Don’t have to many goals) Take care of your mental and physical needs (sleep, exercise, etc) My strategy:...

Associative and non-associative learning From the MIT Open Course Introduction to Psychology There are two types of learning: associative learning and non-associative learning. Associative learning is when you learn something new about a new kind of stimulus (that is, an extra stimulus). Non-associative learning is when you’re not pairing a stimulus with a behavior. Non-associative learning can be either habituation or sensitization. Habituation is when repeated exposure to a stimulus decreases an organism’s responsiveness to the stimulus....

Articles This Bloomberg article on anti-Asian discrimination in Vancouver The table on the timeline of the Women’s Suffrage page on Wikipedia. It’s mind-boggling how recently women gained the right to vote. This awesome newsletter entry by Ted Gioia on The Deadliest Song in History. Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously Music My Analog Journal. A great YouTube channel that “explore rare grooves around the world on vinyl”. It’s a bunch of hour long sets, filmed looking straight down at the turntable while he spins....

TRUISMS (1978-1983) by JENNY HOLZER A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE CAN GO A LONG WAY A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS A MAN CAN’T KNOW WHAT IT IS TO BE A MOTHER A NAME MEANS A LOT JUST BY ITSELF A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MEANS ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD A RELAXED MAN IS NOT NECESSARILY A BETTER MAN A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS A SINCERE EFFORT IS ALL YOU CAN ASK...

Klara and the sun by Kazuo Ishiguro If Klara is super intelligent, why doesn’t she know basic facts about the sum, solar system, planetary motion, etc? There is clearly some sort of some theology. Is it because the sun is all important to their existence that their creators programmed this strange theology in place of basic science? I realize now after having finished the book what an anthropocentric viewpoint the above comment takes....

Here’s another thing I’ve googled enough times to just put it somewhere I know. First, rename your local branch: ❯ git branch -m master main Then you can check that it worked: ❯ git status On branch main Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'. nothing to commit, working tree clean If you don’t have dependencies that might get screwed up by simply renaming your master branch, you can just navigate to your remote directory and change the name (if you use github, from the repo’s home page, click Settings > Branches and then click the edit button that looks like a little pencil)....

I made a simple flask app that takes a URL as input and returns a table and chart of the most used words on the site. Built with Flask using a Postgres backend. Uses beautiful soup to scrape and process html from given website. Implements a Redis task queue to handle requests. Uses Angular to poll the back end for completion and to display a word frequency chart using JavaScript and D3....

Knowing how to set file permissions is very useful (for a much more thorough primer than I provied here, see this article). Unfortunately, while this is very easy to do, it is even easier to forget the codes used to do so. So here’s how you do it! The easiest (shortest) way to change permissions is using octal syntax. Octal syntax goes like this: chmod <owner><group><others> filename Where <owner>, <group> and <others> stand for the octal numeral pertaining to that user or group....

I wanted to move and rename a bunch of excel files in a folder. This is one way to do it from the command line, copying into a directory in the parent folder. I did it this way to be able to rm -r old_folder after copying my files to the new folder. You could modify it to rename them in place, but I’ve accidentally rm -rfed enough things to get nervous doing it that way....