In the aftermath of writing his latest novel Spiked, author Jon McGoran found the reality of the moment catching up with the future of his fiction in ways he didn’t expect… and in ways that gave him food for thought. JON McGORAN: One of the things that has drawn me to science fiction since I was […]

Start with cinematic dreams and stellar ambitions, and what do you get from there? For Laura Lam, you get Goldilocks, her new novel. She’s here to tell you how it all came together. LAURA LAM: I love astronaut films. Gravity. Interstellar. The Martian. Armageddon. Ad Astra. The Mars TV show on Netflix that’s OK, not […]

This upcoming week I have almost nothing scheduled, either in the real world or online, which honestly is a first for me in a real long time. I could just take a break, but where’s the fun in that? So: It’s time for the annual Reader Request Week, in which you pick the topics I write about for […]

I’m going to use this intro part of this Big Idea piece to say that the cover of The Down Days, by Ilze Hugo, is probably my favorite book cover of the year. To date! There might be a better one down the line! But I suspect not. And now here’s the author to tell […]

The contrast sensitivity function shows how our sensitivity to contrasts is affected by spatial frequency. You can test it using gratings of alternating light and darker shade. Ian Goodfellow has this neat observation: By looking at this image, you can see how sensitive your own eyes are to contrast at different frequencies (taller apparent peaks=more … Continue reading "A graph that is made by perceiving it"

Spaced repetition is a memory hack. We know that spacing out your study is more effective than cramming, but using an app you can tailor your own spaced repetition schedule, allowing you to efficiently create reliable memories for any material you like. Michael Nielsen, has a nice thread on his use of spaced repetition on … Continue reading "spaced repetition & Darwin’s golden rule"

The Guardian recently published an article saying “People won’t get ‘tired’ of social distancing – and it’s unscientific to suggest otherwise”. “Behavioural fatigue” the piece said, “has no basis in science”. ‘Behavioural fatigue’ became a hot topic because it was part of the UK Government’s justification for delaying the introduction of stricter public health measures. … Continue reading "Do we suffer ‘behavioural fatigue’ for pandemic prevention measures?"

Here in the US, “tax season” is extended into the summer. No one likes dealing with taxes, obviously, but we agree that the social benefits outweigh the costs. I can’t speak to how folks feel in...

Julien’s employer has switched their payroll operations to a hosted solution. The hosted solution has some… interesting features. The fact that it has a “share” button, implying you can share your...

Jim J's co-worker showed him this little snippet in the codebase. foreach (ToolStripMenuItem item in documentMenuItem.DropDownItems) { item.Enabled = item.Enabled ? Document.Status ==...

Content Management Systems always end up suffering, at least a little, from the Inner Platform Effect. There’s the additional problem that, unlike say, a big ol’ enterprise HR system or similar,...

I am old. I’m so old that, when I entered the industry, we didn’t have specializations like “frontend” and “backend” developers. You just had developers, and everybody just sort muddled about. As web...

Let's say you have an audio file, or at least, something you suspect is an audio file. You want to parse through the file, checking the headers and importing the data. If the file is invalid,...

While testing their application, Nicholas found some broken error messages. Specifically, they were the embarassing “printing out JavaScript values” types of errors, so obviously something was broken...

Good idea: having QA developers who can build tooling to automate tests. Testing is tedious, testing needs to be executed repeatedly, and we're not just talking simple unit tests, but in an ideal...