Tanuj

In the introduction to his “Kill Math” project — actually a quite benign, if broadly ambitious, attempt to reimagine mathematical notation in more intuitive and visual terms — Victor declares that “the power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbol... See more

My first recommendation would be fiction. Reading fiction is important to understand the cross-sectional variation in humanity, to understand how difficult generalizations can be, to just get a sense of how different social pieces fit together, and to get a sense of different historical eras – and plus, reading fiction is often just plain flat-out ... See more

This idea of hovering, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, and not everything ties up into a neat bow, and you're really not on a journey here. You're here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don't know what it is, and maybe I don't know what it is!

We love our physical books — a kind of machine — in ways few others love their machines, their software. We have relationships with these simple, hand-powered contraptions that can span decades. And so of course we want our experience with a book — digital or otherwise — to feel not only great but trustworthy. Print has had hundreds of years to ach... See more

It seems very unlikely that 200 trillion, trillion stars have been made for us. In a way, it feels like the cruelest joke in existence has been played on us. We became self-aware only to realize this story is not about us.

Especially on the web, we are used to a a kind of a document metaphor that, the web is just built for, which is a kind of a vertically scrolling infinite page. Infinite canvases are essentially like a different document format. This idea of that there are two dimensions, or almost three. You know, you can move left, you can move right, you can move... See more

Now imagine: how many programs and services make us wait more than 100ms? I’d say more or less all of them, starting with almost every website, with a few exceptions. You don’t think about “requesting” Google when you type your search query and it auto-completes after each letter. But you do think about rebooting your computer. Or booting up your t... See more