Take Better Notes, By Hand

March 30, 2026

Researching a topic is hard, because not only are you trying to puzzle together the causes and effects of a given problem or historical series of events, you're also looking out carefully for leads and new threads to pull. Falling down rabbit holes is common—and encouraged—but eventually you need to pull yourself back out and collect your thoughts. What's more, if you're reading books you don't own, you'll need some way to record the interesting bits to recall later.

Of course, there are a lot of different ways to take notes and organize your thoughts. I've settled on this four-part system, here organized from least important to most important:

Pinboard: for links to PDFs & webpages + full-text search.
Books.app: the iOS/macOS app for importing PDFs & organizing them into Collections.
Book Tracker: an app that's great for saving long quotes via OCR.
Good, old-fashioned paper notebooks.

You Have Access To Almost Any Book

March 20, 2026

I read a fair bit of non-fiction that spans a number of different genres. But the trouble with non-fiction is that it never answers a question without raising further questions. Non-fiction comes replete with footnotes: a ponzi-scheme for the curious mind.

Of course, this leads very quickly to a fundamental problem. The deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more likely you are to find that the cited works are academic, rather than consumer texts. Reading non-fiction, especially when it comes to history or science, you very quickly leave the realm of what you can easily find on a bookstore shelf. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes these academic books are relatively cheap, other times it's stamped with a textbook-level price tag or the book is simply out of print.

The Internet Archive exists of course, and if the book is really old then that's a good place to start. However, it will never be the full solution.

Load-Bearing Walls

March 10, 2026

We like to believe that we can predict the future. We believe it because it's true, at least in part. Physical systems obey known physical laws and so even fairly complex systems can be understood and predicted with stunning accuracy. Every branch of science makes predictions. Planes fly, servers compute, and dams generate power all through the strength we have to predict the future, if only in the short term. In our human world, we see pollsters predict elections with better-than-random odds, doctors performing research and intervention at global scales, and even disease propagating at predictable rates.

It's stunning just how good we are at this in the modern world. We're so good at predicting the future that much of the financial world relies on it as a hedge against the unforeseen. Short term catastrophe is easier to bear when you can predict that good times can and will return.

Yet there is, of course, much we cannot predict and two main reasons why.

An Age Of Promethean Ambitions

March 3, 2026

In a recent post, I wrote the following:

[Without] the context of history, we're blind to the reality that we live in a world… deeply connected and familiar to the worlds of the past.

Perhaps it is just my brain seeing patterns where they don't exist, but this sentence really describes for me a truth about the world that helps me better understand our time and place. Take, for example, the questions of A.I. and the Longevity movement.

Words Are A Leaky Abstraction

February 16, 2026

Something about hearing the phrase "Claude's Soul Document" got me thinking again about a problem I've long pondered. Software folks, like myself, have a long and proud history of taking words that exist and coopting them, manipulating the meaning of those words into feeble shadows of their former selfs. Tech people and tech companies do this on accident and on purpose, both because it can be useful to reduce a human concept to something simpler to quantify and because its easier to market and sell. Machine Learning, an academic term, becomes Artificial Intelligence and the word "Intelligence" is defined down in order to be achievable.

But before we get too far down the Current Events rabbit hole, let's take a step back.

Personally, I love it when Computer Science research accidentally stumbles on human truths, like this gem from an IEEE paper in 1995:

On The Lies Depression Tells

February 5, 2026

I'm no stranger to depressive episodes, though thankfully mine are sparse and usually brief: sometimes a day or two, though on rare occasions perhaps a week or more. I'm thankful mine have never progressed into anything serious. That said, I'd like to discuss something that's become somewhat of a theme in my conversations lately about depression, and something I hope you, the reader, might find useful when combatting this Great and Terrible Beast yourself.

To begin, I'd like to draw a distinction between depression and melancholy. There's a beauty to melancholy¹ that there simply isn't with depression. One begets yearning, the other smothers everything in its path. I love melancholy, I really do, enough that sometimes I work to keep it going a little longer. Melancholy is a mourning wistfulness, the loss of something dearly loved, a cousin of grief and dour predilections.

Depression is a plastic bag, thrown over your head to choke off every breath of air until you succumb to its will. It's insidious, and it lies to you.

The Long View Of History

January 23, 2026

History as a subject is often viewed by students and the public at large as a domain without a use, a pedantic study of dates and names with some vague mission to remember the past—a memorial to ages past but neither a forward-looking or useful endeavor. The study of history produces teachers of history and nothing more. And while the study of history does not produce new widgets or novel computer advances, and nor does it deepen our understanding of materials science or physics.

The humanities, in which history and studies of language and culture are a part, are not there to improve our understanding of nature or develop technology, they exist to improve the minds (both cultural and individual) of the people we are.

History doesn't improve our world, it improves us. It gives us context for the world we live in and it helps us understand the reason why things are as they are and learn from the people before us.

Blogging, Writing, Musing, And Thinking

January 14, 2026

Yesterday I stumbled on this quote from a blog post by JA Westenberg:

Michel de Montaigne arguably invented the essay in the 1570s, sitting in a tower in his French château, writing about whatever interested him: cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, how to talk to people who are dying. He called these writings essais, meaning "attempts" or "tries." The form was explicitly provisional. Montaigne was trying out ideas, seeing where they led, acknowledging uncertainty as a fundamental feature rather than a bug to be eliminated.

It's hard to convey the sense of both profound agreement and giddy joy I had reading that because, not only is the wider post about something I love (i.e. blogging), or because I learned something new about the history of writing (which is always fun), but because that quote describes something that I've been doing myself for the past two years and wanted an excuse to talk about!

Maintaining A Music Library, Ten Years On

October 29, 2025

It took me by surprise to learn that this post was now a decade old:

Last week I decided to leave Spotify. I've been using the service for almost 2 years now, and overall I've really liked it... It's hard to explain why [I'm leaving], but I guess I feel apprehensive about Spotify being in control of how and where I listen to music in ways I haven't been before.

I remember the inciting incident so viscerally. I wanted to AirPlay a song to my TV, but that device wasn't "approved by Spotify". It's an MP3 and I couldn't jam out to it because of the policies of some company. I was so angry, so I left. Without a viable alternative, I started buying albums in the iTunes Store like it was 2007 all over again.

Empirical Partial Derivatives

October 23, 2025

Mathematics and Science are inextricably linked. As the renowned twentieth-century physicist Eugene Wigner wrote, mathematics is "unreasonably successful" in the natural sciences. By this he meant that it seems our entire world is seemingly beholden to the workings of mathematical laws.

Our most fundamental theories are complex systems of dense mathematical formulations that predict the behavior of the world around us so precisely that we’re able to peer into the earliest moments, right after the Big Bang itself and understand the workings of even the most extreme bending of space and time around black holes. Students of physics and the related sciences study these formulations and the mathematics they rely on for years, relentlessly working to gain mastery—and if they’re lucky—some intuition for the behaviors of complex, dynamical systems.

Yet, perhaps this relationship between math and science goes even deeper. Perhaps modern science and the scientific method itself do more than rely on mathematics. Perhaps—in no metaphorical sense—they are mathematics made manifest.