Modern life is full of things that are not difficult to understand on a level of fundamentals, but become increasingly complex in layers of jargon in their modern manifestation. You can reduce some action such as buying a car to an exchange of a value store (money) for an item …
read moreSearch Engine Stupidity, Part 3
In this article, I will discuss some practical solutions for getting around using search engines.
Build a library
Having your own curated collection of useful resources is a fast and easy way to bypass search engines. For a given topic (e.g. gardening), you can find out what the most …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 77
Many things are "still going", but around me I can many traditions getting knocked away one after another. 1 Here are a handful of things in no particular order:
- shopping malls
- professional sports
- cafes, coffee shops
- public school, including "school traditions"
- holidays
- "work/home balance"
Growing up, these things were …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 76
Today I did some research on the current state of some places in the USA I've been to. Through sites like YouTube you are still able to view many videos of "eyewitness accounts"—people with cameras showing what they see. Likewise, there are the popular big news companies with more …
read moreSearch Engine Stupidity, Part 1
Search engines use terms ("search terms") to give you relevant information. Sometimes, this is pretty straightforward. For example,
weather CITYwill conveniently give you a weekly weather forecast for the place you searched in all major search engines.Using Search Engines to find this sort of straightforward, homogenous data is …
read moreSearch Engine Stupidity, Part 2
An Internet friend pointed out to me that my blog was rather anti-SEO—that is, very unoptimized for search engines. Indeed, this is true. Search engines more easily index and point people towards certain sorts of content. Many popular websites, which may not be of particularly high quality, try to …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 75
Today's entry is about knowledge. Specifically, I want to discuss the nature of reading information in places like books and websites and how the activity of reading relates to acting in the world.
Collectively as a society in the USA (I mostly know California), there is great value placed on …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 74
In expressing my views on things like the Federal Reserve or the United Nations, I've been given labels like "cynical" or "pessimistic". I don't think that this is a fair characterization in the sense that I don't wake up thinking about how much the world sucks or how nothing I …
read moreCorona Virus Diary, Part 73
Corona Virus Diary, Part 72
From our own experience, we can give testimony to what we have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt. For things we do not experience direclty, we are relaying the messages of others. People who knowingly distort truth—e.g. to conform to some narrative they are paid to tell—we …
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