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Until I saw 'chip', I thought this is about flashbulb memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbulb_memory) and made a mental note to myself not to 'take' the test under any circumstances.

in case you're not joking, that involves disassembling the graphemes (the letters).

for one thing it's very economical spatially, something you'll quickly appreciate if you ever do any work (e.g. concept-mapping) where it's nice to be able to see and keep track of like 200 items on the screen at the same time. (a more homespun example is if you'd like to put a large number of meaningful words into one row (like your browser's bookmark bar))

also, it can be read horizontally AND vertically without needing to disassemble the graphemes or rotating your head 90 degrees. good luck doing that with english!

> (When my parents’ ragged copy of the 1964 edition succumbed to water damage a few years ago, my mother delivered the news as if a relative had died.)

I'm willing to bet my life that the author has taken liberties with this "delivered the news as if a relative had died" part. I bet if there still exist actual record (say an email) of the delivery that it would be something he wouldn't want us to see. It's a small lie, sure, but it's so unpleasant. In an article whose supposed topic is honesty no less.

With me it's gotten to a point where I will pay for FedEx 2nd day air just to avoid FedEx Ground. My worst experience is this

https://www.fedex.com/apps/fedextrack/?tracknumbers=01384025...

It took ten days (counting from the 1st delivery attempt), and as far as I can tell five separate delivery exceptions (with the same address that I've used for any other delivery service, including FedEx 2nd day air), for them to finally deliver it. And guess what happened when I finally opened the package? The phone that is supposed to be in the package is gone (this is a pixel XL phone ordered from Google Store; fortunately Google is very responsible with this and in fact when I explained the situation to them they immediately acknowledged it to be a problem they are aware of)

This. It's far more likely to be doxxing attempts.

I was contacted by an undergraduate asking for grad school advice. Five minutes later there were several emails in the inbox from Facebook with exactly that content. I don't normally receive anything at that address (everyone I know emails me at a different address). How do you expect me to give you advice when you pull this shit on me?

As someone who spent way too much time obsessing over this stuff, this is awesome and very promising.

One reason I'm not happy with traditional spreadsheets is that there's no non-hackish way to implement "tagging" (as in, hashtagging) a given row. You can create a "tag" column for storing "tag strings" (all the tags that have been applied to this row, delimited by say comma) and then filter by instr or some regex, but it's inconvenient.

Haven't fully checked out the features of TreeSheets yet but I imagine it would be quite suited for this purpose? Is it possible to do a search for all the rows whose 'tag' column's value includes as a member (not: contains as a substring) a particular tag?

take restaurant choice for example. yes there's a range of options, but some of the fields instead of saying "go to restaurant A" say something like: "let google pick a random number X between 1 and 50. google "restaurant near Penn Station" and go to the Xth result."

multiple times this procedure led me to dine at fine-dining establishments that i would never consider going into with the clothes i have on (the experience almost always ended up better than i imagined). a nice thing about randomizing is that you become psychologically dissociated from your actions. when things go bad you don't blame yourself and take that to reflect on yourself ("well, i was just following orders"). when things go well you just feel thankful.

it's not just trust. a minority person (by which i mean to include all and only the less powerful in society, which has a heavy overlap with racial and ethnic minorities) can seem completely non-threatening, but still won't receive the kind of treatment he gets because the other party cannot muster the mental energe to do it as they finds it hard to imagine such treatment "leading to" anything.

say you're going to live in NYC for 3 years and will eat out pretty much every other night. you can do your online research and decide yourself each time. or you can randomize. can one really be certain that, in the long run, after 3 years, the overall outcome from letting the coin decide will definitely be worse than deciding yourself? i strongly doubt it. the time spent making each of those decisions will definitely pile up, though.

i've been doing it for almost four years now, and it's amazing to see how wrong and how frequently wrong your preconceptions and expectations can be.

you don't need an app to do that though. a spreadsheet is perfect for that purpose (and telling Google Assistant to 'flip a coin' or 'give me a random number between 1 and 20') and gives unlimited flexibility and less reliance on developer to implement features you want. not a lot of people appreciate this, but sometimes trying to accomplish a task with the general-purpose tools you have at hand can lead you to discover solutions so good it is in fact superior to any dedicated tool.

i actually did some pretty extensive research on this. there's very few high-quality apps in this area. the only software i found to be genuinely effective is this very obscure program called sprintworks (windows only). dunno how it works but so far i haven't been able to figure out a way to bypass the block.

to my mind, an effective blocker is extremely important and far superior to using willpower to resist your bad side. the fact is that when gratification is impossible or really difficult, you don't need to spend any willpower at all, you can just count on your other bad side, i.e. your 'lazy' self, to kill off the social media impulse. when a little person inside you says "go check out facebook!", previously you yourself have to step in and say "no, f* off*!" but now you can just sit back and watch with quite amusement as another little person (your lazy self) steps up and say "nah man, it's too much trouble" —— and bam! the impulse is gone.

the ego depetion theory in psychology may have turned out to be less empirically well-founded than people think, but personally i found it to be very useful. avoid using willpower as much as possible. instead, cleverly design your environment and play the little bad people inside your against one another to your advantage.