When I started this blog, I promised myself I'd stick to substantive topics. 'Going meta' smacks of self-indulgence, and risks being a bore. But if there's a time for meta, it's the end of the year (holing up for the…

As readers of this blog have surely noticed, I prefer to discuss theories rather than tell stories. Systems-thinking comes naturally to me; narratives, not as much. I'm ambivalent about this. (Ambi-valent — having both positive and negative feelings.) On the…

(Educational profit, that is.) I've written a lot about religion over the past year. In one of my more methodological posts, I argued that religion is not about beliefs. The beliefs may be crazy, loud, or otherwise salient, but they're…

IQ tests measure what's known as g. This stands for general factor or general intelligence, but (depending on how you look at it) it's actually a rather specific type of intelligence: the ability to reason about abstract concepts. It's a facility with words, numbers,…

A few musings on software, biological systems, functional programming, and the rituals of writing to a database. The billion natural shocks that flesh is heir to Over the course of a lifetime, the entropy of a human body increases more or…

I'm a software engineer by trade, so I spend a lot of my day working with code. When I step back and take the 50,000 foot aerial view of my job, I realize that programming is basically an exercise in…

(Originally published at Ribbonfarm.) In their natural habitats, social species organize into characteristic groups. Gazelles form herds, wolves form packs, and ants form colonies. Humans, in the same way, form tribes. Of course, we’re pretty far removed from our natural…

Below are the Google image search results for each of the four types of musical groups -- choirs, acappella groups, boy bands, and pop stars -- representing four points along the axis from collectivism to individualism.

As you look at the images, pay attention to the size and uniformity of each group as well as their postures, costumes, hairstyles, and facial expressions.

Just came across a short blog post by Andrew Brown at the Guardian that articulates, quite brilliantly, some of the themes I've been working on here. Money quotes (emphasis mine): Religion can't really be about doctrine and heresy... because these…

shibboleth, n. a word, sound, or custom that a person is unable to pronounce or perform correctly. It is used to identify foreigners or those who do not belong to a particular class or group of people. It's as close…