Ideas

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, 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

"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, 2 November, 2015

I've been in China for two months now, and I enjoy programming so I've checked probably 5-6 projects out of github at this point.

During this time, I've had troubles accessing https://gist.github.com. This always struck me as weird, but I didn't think too much of it.

By devin, 28 October, 2015

Spreadsheets are amazing. They are arguably a Turing-complete programming language (only stretching the definition slightly). There are definitely as many spreadsheets as people in the world, and I'd even guess there are over a trillion actively used spreadsheets out there somewhere.