I’m constantly thinking of how to make my next book as accessible as possible. How do I write something so people want to read more, want to change their lives. Usually I write ideas by hand on paper, a mode that feels like there’s less between me and what I write. Then I transfer it to my files by typing it into the computer. I also write here as a[…] Keep reading →

I’ve thought of several book ideas lately. Since I can only work on one at a time and don’t want to distract myself, though I’ll keep up the sidcha of posting daily here, I’ll post some titles, sketches, and outlines here when I think of them. I welcome feedback. Draft ideas Title: How Not to Fly: How to make your most harmful activity feel repugnant and easy to quit Chapters[…] Keep reading →

Below shows the results if you search Amazon for “Top 2025 Christmas gifts.” I will bet over 95 percent of them will be in landfills, bottoms of drawers never to be used again, or some equivalent by the end of January. I’m pretty live-and-let-live about what makes people happy (though not when it hurts someone else without consent), but I couldn’t find one item there whose existence made the world[…] Keep reading →

Everyone seems to pick sides. Everyone who expresses an opinion seems to support one or the other but not both. I probably missed something or offended someone in what I write below. If so, I don’t mind being told my mistakes so I can learn. There are plenty of ways to look at the situation, and you may have heard more than I have, but I hear people describing the[…] Keep reading →

Saturday I posted about a joke I did in a college math class. That math class did witness a great joke, but not by me, and it may only make sense to people who have done advanced math. The professor was going to prove that a certain group, which is a precise mathematical concept, had a certain property. The group is the set of symmetries of an icosahedron. The property[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Lesson Plan: The Story of the Third Wave, directed by Philip Neel and David Jeffery: If you’ve followed my pursuit to learn about the pattern of how people are induced to act against their values by culture around them—also known as corruption—you’ll recognize the subject of this movie. It’s about high school history teacher Ron Jones, who in 1967, when his students asked how Germans could[…] Keep reading →

Last week I was working at the library. I ran out of scrap paper. They have a bunch. On the other side of a sheet was something they provide every day: the New York Times crossword puzzle. It was a couple days old when I got it, hence it being scrap. I was about to use the back side, which was the side I wanted. I scanned a few clues[…] Keep reading →

The winter solstice is in one month. During the summer if I need to charge, I can go to the roof any time from around 8am to 8pm, weather permitting. This time of year, the sun only rises high enough to charge from about 9am to maybe 3pm. It’s cold. It’s windier so I can’t leave the panels alone because if the wind catches them, they blow like a sail.[…] Keep reading →

I walked past this fire truck the other day. It was bright daylight, not nighttime, like when I took this picture. I saw a guy standing about where the “18” is on the truck’s bumper, facing toward the truck, doing something with some stuff on the bumper, keeping it hidden, looking at himself in the reflection on the chrome on the grill. He was focused on what he was doing[…] Keep reading →