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One Useless Fact: An Origin Story

During covid lockdown – when my engineering teammates were confined to their homes, just trying to deal with long stretches of boredom and depression – the preambulatory chitchat of agile standups took on greater importance. So I took it upon myself to always have a few well-researched miscellany in my back pocket. When I left my job, I decided to continue sharing useless facts with my teammates.

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Illusions of Explanatory Depth (IOED)

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In 1993, everyone seemed to know of a pool cleaner who could also build a web site. That’s no longer the case. Now, there are too many sub-disciplines within software engineering for a single person to know how to design, build, test, and deploy a secure application from scratch. Most software engineers know this, but some are convinced they know more than they do – a completely normal phoneomenon known as the illusion of explanatory depth.

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If Anthony Bourdain built CI pipelines, they would contain exactly Zero bullshit

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Inferred competence is the act of correlating performance of a highly complex range of tasks from a single performance of one (or a few) tasks. When Anthony Bourdain wanted to hire a cook, he’d invite the candidate into his kitchen, and issue a single command: Make me an omelette. A thoughtful CI pipeline tries to duplicate that same simplicity.

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E Pluribus Unum: 13 Republican and Democratic States in Charts

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Contrary to the absurd belief that republicans are rugged individualists, born in log cabins they built with their own bare hands red states like Texas frequently receive WAY MORE from the federal government than they give. Put another way, red states, on average, enjoy the redistributed wealth produced in places exactly like New York and New Jersey. This blog post lays it out in a series of charts.

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Feats of “Dad Strength”

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Dad strength is the kind of physical strength that’s useful when stuff goes wrong and people are depending on you — in clutch situations. Every dad ought to meet or exceed his own minimal definition of strong, but I think these strength benchmarks are generally applicable because they scale to any weight.

My Mother

When I was a boy, I remember the amazing bedtime stories my mom would tell me about ancient times in Korea, about monks and wisemen and sorcerers. She was a remarkable storyteller and teacher. Half the time, I wasn’t sure if she was just making stuff up. I tried testing her by asking her to retell stories (to identify inconsistencies) but I don’t think I actually cared about keeping score. The stories were that good. She taught me how to grow vegetables, how to use an abacus, how to roller skate, how to write cursive letters, how to draw a face, how to invent games from string. She did this without the internet.

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Sphex Ichneumoneus

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Sphex is the colloquial name of a particular kind of digger wasp. Daniel Dennett effectively uses this wasp’s burrowing routine to show how, even basic examinations of animal behavior can lead us right to the doorstep of causal determinism: the belief that everything (ie: particle systems, wasp brains, human courtship rituals, the universe) can be explained as states of affairs, resulting from some previous state(s) of affairs in a purely mechanistic fashion. When a causally deterministic outlook is applied to questions of agency, free will, and consciousness, the implications pile up fast. Some interesting explorations of this issue can be found in popular shows like Devs [FX] and West World [HBO].