By devin, 22 January, 2017

I'm a Christian and a feminist. Membership in both groups is a key part of my identity. If you talk to someone with a simplistic understanding of these groups, though, they might be surprised that it's possible to be a member of both groups!

The problem is that we aren't very good at differentiating subgroups that happen to share the same label. We lump Catholics, Pentecostals, and Unitarians into one group called "Christians". We even lump Canadian Christians and American Christians into one group!

By devin, 8 January, 2017

I think the single greatest challenge so far in my life as a Christian has been compartmemtalization. And I imagine others may have the same challenge, so I'm going to blog about it. To really do the topic justice, though, I need to first talk about Fruedian, behavioural, and cognitive psychology.

Originally the field of psychology was dominated by Freudian theories, which were vast and attempted to explain why high society women might become hysterical. Each of his theories had a few important traits:

By devin, 13 November, 2016

There are so many people online saying "there is no pay gap", or "there is a pay gap". Often it's really hard to get clarity on an apples-to-apples comparison showing data that demonstrates the pay gap. 

Here's a link to a study showing a pay gap in the first year after college. This ignores the problem of lost wages because of maternity leave, and also differences in negotiation (which is debatable - apparently some studies have shown that women who negotiate salary are penalized). If there's good research on that, send me a message!

By devin, 27 July, 2016

Tmux is a great application with a few super-cool uses. You can get really deep into configuring it, but I tend to use the default options so that I can install it and start using it on any machine and get a similar experience. Here are a few of my favourite uses:

Persistent ssh sessions

This is far and away the best use of tmux. I typically use mosh to make sure my ssh sessions don't crash.

By devin, 30 March, 2016

It's taken a long time to get from planning to reality, but https://metamaps.cc now has a working import/export feature!

If you aren't familiar with Metamaps, and/or would like an invite code, feel free to reach me on Twitter.

Now, how can you get your grubby paws on some mind map data?

By devin, 11 February, 2016

People should cite Wikipedia when they use it for information.

People are afraid of citing Wikipedia because their professors in university or high school said it "wasn't academic". Then they went on to talk about academic dishonesty and plagiarism, probably in the same breath.

By devin, 17 January, 2016

I have a surprising number of friends who want to do away with capitalism entirely. The hope is to create a new economic order, with the aim of achieving some or all of these goals (among others):

By devin, 14 January, 2016

I have solid faith based on rational skepticism and the axiom that 'God exists'

Atheists have the same; solid faith based on rational skepticism and the axiom that "God does not exist"

I'm fine when I read a study about religious belief leading to less altruistic behaviour, because I've already incorporated that into my worldview

I'm constantly impressed by those who have more faith than me - they do good and make good decisions! I know my rationalism is not the whole story, much as Richard Dawkins and I both wish it were

By devin, 14 January, 2016

"Malthusianism is a school of ideas derived from the political/economic thought of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus . . . which describes how unchecked population growth is exponential while the growth of the food supply was expected to be arithmetical. Malthus believed there were two types of "checks" that could then reduce the population, returning it to a more sustainable level.

By devin, 10 January, 2016

This is a script to allow quick gitlab merge requests on the cli.

If you create a new branch, commit it, and then run gitlab-mr my new merge request, then a merge request will be created on the appropriate project from the current branch into the develop branch, with title "my new merge request".

There are additional command line options to specify a markdown description, using cat and Ctrl+D to enter the input.