My father used to work for a crane and shipping company… … and so I thought I knew a thing or two about cranes. I grew up around them, and as a young man, I worked for several summers as an “yard hand” (that is, the guy who helped string…
Gratefully, the wildfires are out … … It’s been a wild summer of fire in California. As you recall from the Challenge of November 14, 2018 I posed the SRS Challenge “How many wildfires have there been in California over the past 20…
You’d think that searching to solve a problem would be second nature to me by now. And yet, I didn’t do a search last week that I really should have done. Last Monday the front passenger window on my car went down, and got st…
Ooops. I wrote the Thanksgiving SRS Challenge before answering the previous one (about California fire data). I’ll answer that one later this week to catch up. But today, let’s talk about Thanksgiving. A painting by Je…
I love pumpkin pie. I like it so much that I baked two pumpkin pies yesterday for Thanksgiving. Well… truthfully, one is for Thanksgiving, and one is for my birthday celebration, which always gets tangled up with the Thanksgiving festiviti…
–> As you probably have heard… … California is suffering from an especially dramatic, draining, and difficult wildfire season. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether or not this is more fire than usual, o…
One of my goals in writing this blog… … is to develop some skills that are useful in general. You know, real skills for real problems. In medicine, new treatments and therapies come to market every so often, and many peop…
Let’s consider a real question… As you know, new therapies come onto the market every so often. Those therapies have risks and benefits. How do you evaluate these things? What do you do to actually do the research you need to evaluat…
A list of items is a useful thing to have. When you’re learning something new, having a list of examples of that thing gives you something to learn from. It’s a natural way to try and get your mind around a given topic. We do this all …
The frequency illusion… … aka the Baader-Meinhof effect, happens when you learn something new, and then suddenly start to see it everywhere. This happens when you finally decide to buy a new car and after weeks of agonizing, you finally …
I often find myself in the position of looking… … for a list of things. It’s a natural way to try and get your mind around a given topic–if I can give you a list of items in that category, you’ll get a sense of how that category of thin…
My goal was simple… … I just wanted a movie that’s a scan of the flight path. Why? Because as I was looking out the window, I saw beautiful things, extraordinary things, and I wanted to be able to stop the plane a…
I hate to do this to you… … because the answer to last week’s Challenge is fun.. but I’m doing a tour of upstate New York this week. I’m teaching at Cornell today and the University of Rochester tomorrow. “Far above Cayu…
Estimation is an art… … that deserves practice. And by practice, I mean that you very deliberately look at your mistakes and learn from them. In an earlier post about Fermi Estimation, I showed how I estimated Enrico Fermi’s h…
Last week I flew from San Francisco to Austin, Texas… … as usual, I had a window seat to I could see the landscape slowly rolling past the window. In my opinion, this is one of the most wonderful things you can do: look out the window at…