The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

Sometimes it seems odd how comparatively safe driving is. When you're barrelling along the freeway at 65 miles an hour, you don't a...

Ha!

Over the years, I've increasingly come to the conclusion that the advice to 'try harder' is largely useless. If you, like me, ...

"Boy throws rocks at cars, gets hit by crossbow" Ha! "The San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper says his injuries are not life...

The world sometimes seems like a very tragic place. The ones that always get to me are displays of crazy levels of bravery in the pursuit ...

The bad news is that the world is full of assholes, and sometimes they get together to form fraternities . The good news is that my priors...

...but are nonetheless fascinating once you consider them. What would it be like to walk around the earth if it were shaped like a cube? ...

From a Reddit post on things that people have learned. There's a lot of boilerplate (not necessarily bad boilerplate, but boilerplate...

is this . Gold! As you can see, it's clearly working.

Evolution has equipped humans with powerful urges to select mates based on traits linked to genetic fitness. It's amazing how deep these...

"Some guy on the net thinks I suck, and he should know - he's got his own blog!" - Working Day

I was at a rock concert the other day, and it was in one of those theatres with seats the whole way through, and only a small area for the m...

-Triple Heart Bypass:  0 Kroner. -13 years of primary and secondary schooling: 0 Kroner -Undergraduate university degree: 0 Kroner -Ta...

...is this  commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. If you haven't read much of his stuff, it's pieces like this that reinfor...

The worst assumptions are those that you don't even realise you're making. The Economist  recently had an article discussing how m...

Tim Blair notes that Sydney's cyclists are taking an ambivalent attitude towards the new bike lines around the city: Up to a quarter o...

The expression 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' is one of the best summaries of free market economics. It was popularised...

Having to perform in a packed auditorium with the audience constantly clapping slightly faster than the beat, as they inevitably do, forever...

I recently came across, quite by chance, a book called 'The Art of the Start' by Guy Kawasaki. Apparently it's about startups or...

The number of stray dogs walking around. The more there are, (and the more emaciated such dogs look), the poorer the society. By this...

I never understood why so many people want to buy cards that have messages already written in them. I know I'm in the small minority o...

Something I only recently found out. In the early Simpsons episodes, the scenes featuring the character 'McBain' were written so a...

Murray Gleeson , former Chief Justice of the Australian High Court, was once reported as saying something that I thought was such a good sum...

Among the myriad ways you can divide up the world to try to understand human behaviour, I think it's interesting to note the different a...

Thinking too much like an economist can sometimes get in the way of satisfying cathartic feelings of anger. For instance, I ordered 4 USB ...

Do you wonder how end up with a society where you can get massive rioting for 4 days throughout the capital city? The latest BBC reports p...

For the third day in a row, thugs and hoodlums have been rioting and destroying London . Because some guy got shot by police. Or something. ...

Rationalists like myself tend to believe that they arrived at their beliefs by reason alone. And this is indeed the hope - if, like the Marx...

Congress, April 2011 ; "Moody's Corp and Standard and Poor's triggered the worst financial crisis in decades when they were fo...

There is no such thing as a riskless bond. Never was, never will be. But if there were, it would not be issued by the United States Treasu...

It is my rough experience that when people say 'Nice Shirt/Tie/Jumper', at least half the time what they actually mean is 'That ...

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." ( source ) Ha!  I'm guessing Google Adsense, even were I to have it, ...

Economists typically have an ambiguous attitude towards monopolies. When the monopoly arises because one company is providing the single mos...

Everyone always picks boring songs for their first dance at a wedding. If I were getting married, you know what I'd pick? Mike Oldfiel...

I am periodically given cause to reflect on the bizarre attitudes that quite a lot of science and computer science types have towards financ...

File this in the category of 'Things that lots of people have figured out before me, but I still thought of independently'. I'...