In Favor of Electronic Cigarettes
Smoking kills 6 million people per year, cutting lives short by 13 years on average. While it's less common in the US than it was, cigarette consumption is still 40% [1] of peak (1960s) usage. Because...
View ArticleRent Control
Why is rent control bad for renters? It makes it hard to move. Say you change jobs and now work in a different part of the city, or your kids move out, or you'd like to move in with a partner....
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Mark New Comments
Online discussion spaces tend to use either linear or threaded comments. With linear comments there's just one long series of responses while with threads each comment is attached to the one it's...
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Old Furniture
We're in the process of childproofing our house, trying to get a head start before Lily can crawl, and there are so many things to get into. We have some things on open shelves that are just begging...
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Defusing an Email Storm
You send a message to your coworker Avery, but then you start getting back messages from other people: "did you mean to send this to everyone@?" The messages pile up, people replying-all to ask what's...
View ArticleBaby Sleep
Our five-month-old, Lily, had been waking up more and more often during the night and wouldn't fall back asleep without comforting. It was getting worse and worse until she was waking up after nearly...
View ArticlePersistent Idealism
When I talk to people about earning to give, it's common to hear worries about "backsliding". Yes, you say you're going to go make a lot of money and donate it, but once you're surrounded by rich...
View Article32-bit Chroot on CentOS
Let's say you want to build some 32-bit binaries for distribution but only have a 64-bit OS. You could try to set your build system up to make 32-bit builds, but if your build system is as complicated...
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Conservation of Expected Jury Probability
The New York Times has a calculator to explain how getting on a jury works. They have a slider at the top indicating how likely each of the two lawyers think you are to side with them, and as you...
View ArticleBaby Time Inequality
The distribution of baby time is unequal in a way that seems amenable to pareto improvement. There are lots of young adults without children who would like baby cuddles, and there are lots of new...
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Walkability via Census
If you want to know how walkable various parts of the country are, and you only have (1) the census and (2) walk scores for DC, what could you do? Well, you could look for census variables that...
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Is Gain Like A Balloon?
Sometimes people have a mental model of gain as being like a balloon: It may help to imagine inflating a balloon around the mic as you increase the gain, since the input gain also affects how large an...
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Simple Songs For Brass
I'm trying to find songs that would work well for an unusual casual brass ensemble: One person who actually learned to play trumpet, but hasn't played much in a while. They can read well, but their...
View ArticleContra Dance Mandolin: Chords II
Three years ago I wrote about percussive mandolin playing. Since then I've gotten a bit better and added a few things to my playing. After someone commented on my previous post and reminded me I'd...
View ArticlePrediction and Fairness
If you're going to lend me money, you want to know how likely I am to pay you back. If you're competing with a whole bunch of other lenders for my business, then you want to charge me as little as...
View ArticleAudio from Video
How does it change the laws around video recording if you can extract some audio information from a video signal? Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can...
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Contra Weekend Heatmap
I made another heatmap: dance weekends. I took the data from the weekend and festival survey I ran a few months ago, went over it again to pull down a few more band names that have been posted in the...
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Contra Heatmap
Where is there contra dancing? Let's make a map! (interactive zoomable version) Why are these blurry areas instead of points? Because people are generally willing to travel some distance to go contra...
View ArticleAdding Up Small Benefits
If you could give everyone in the world one extra second, would that be more or less helpful than dividing those seconds among fewer people? For example, with the same number of seconds you could give...
View ArticleThe Economics of Touring
The Free Raisins just finished our third tour, so I thought I'd look at what costs and how it compared to our first tour back in 2012. We travelled 3k+ miles and played 11 dances in 11 nights, one of...
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