Riding defensively (slowing down near any pedestrian and casual biker, assuming that everyone is an idiot and will make a sudden move towards traffic) is simply impractical. It was my initial approach, but very quickly I realized that the resulting stop-go motion takes away from the entire pleasure of biking and defeats the purpose of having a circuit to bike on.

The fact is, you only have about one second to figure out if the person in the danger zone is an idiot (not paying attention), an asshole (having a sense of entitlement to think everyone else will move aside), or just efficient (is well aware of the surrounding and is in control of the path to ensure a collision will not occur). It’s harder than it seems.

In my desire to implement my philosophy of “commonsense right of way” I let the pendulum swing too far. A bruised tail bone and a whimpering jogger on the ground later, I was forced to revisit my approach.

• Assume the other person is deaf. That was effectively the case with the aforementioned jogger who had her music blasting on at full volume. Or purchase a really loud bike horn (is there even such a thing?).
• Watch out for signs of idiocy — a cyclist moving at 3 mph, swerving left and right, a jogger crossing the road in a direction almost parallel with the flow of traffic, a biker slowing down (they usually do rapid 90 degree turns, having gotten bored with riding their bike), people riding these rented tourist bikes

When I was at school, there was this time period when I found physics incredibly fun and interesting, and a time period when I found it painful and dull. Of course, the moments with experiments were by far more engaging than the moments with mathematics and equations, but I’m actually just thinking at the latter part — there were times when the formulas were beautifully simple and the results satisfying, and times when the calculations felt like drudgery, there were a plethora of formulae which I couldn’t intuit, and even the result didn’t “click” with me intuitively.

I attribute a large part of this lack of excitement over physics to excessive focus on algebra and symbolic manipulations. I consider myself fairly good at algebra, but I feel that even I would have benefited more from my physics tuition if I had thought of it less as an exercise pure math and more as a systemization of the physical world. I am not advocating for making physics less conceptual — quite the opposite — I want kids to understand that all things are connected, and that there are really very few rules that govern the world; that there is a kind of beauty to physics. I just don’t want to conflate this with a college dose of pure mathematics.

What is it precisely that I am advocating for?

What if we change the way we teach physics (and, while we’re at it, all exact sciences) to focus not on forcing kids to memorize all the formulas, which end up being derivatives of one another (but we don’t have the tools or the sophistication to know it), but on having them answer questions about the physical world by teaching them the few simple rules and equipping them with the tools to compute the answer, sacrificing the symbols along the way? In other words, I want to teach kids as few formulas as possible, instead showing them how they can transform these formulas numerically and compute the answer.

What I am proposing is no small matter. It means teaching the kids the concept of calculus (but without the heavy algebra behind it), and having them apply it in problems. Yes, they would be able to (numerically) integrate before they learned about exact solutions to quadratic equations, but why is this necessarily something to avoid?

I believe this would work for a number of reasons. First, while in the absence of sophisticated tools, checking the algebra was really the only fair way to evaluate students, these days we can follow the kids’ thought process even without any symbols. It is also satisfying to arrive at a tangible answer as both an apt metaphor for physics as a way to answer questions about the world, and something one can have an intuitive reaction to (“5″ is a much better answer to have an intuitive reaction to than “x^2+1, at 2″). It also decouples physics as an experimental science where theories are put in place and tested, from the mathematics behind the theories that can be daunting and distracting from the main point. And while I believe that symbolic manipulation is a great skill that drastically improves ones cognitive abilities, we still have mathematics that will teach it to the kids. And imagine the “aha” moment that kids will have once they realize that what they have been doing in math, transforming all these expressions, coming up with closed form solutions and exact answers, can enrich everything they have been doing in physics — using numerical calculus in application of a few very simple rules to arrive at the answers to problems.

By the way — it would be a sin to not recommend what I believe to be by far the most engaging, satisfying, and challenging physics textbook I have ever read: Motion Mountain. I wish I had had read it much earlier than I did (at 25). Motion Mountain is epic, in all the possible meanings of this word. Instead of focusing on hard math, it does its best to show me what physics is all about — the side of it that I was never shown in class. Its problems make me think (never recall), and, while you need to have a degree to take full advantage of it, I believe you can reach for it at an early age. In fact, it’s these “layers” that make the book so fascinating.

Go and read it now.

I almost didn’t notice the ridiculousness of this situation.

Our reporters scoured the Web looking for further explanation; however, seeing as there are about thirty-five hundred Facebook groups, each of which claims to be named after the recipe, it is unclear whether the information will see the light of day.

The spokespersons at Coca Cola Co., and Pepsi Co. refused to comment on this speculation.

In Fairfield County, Connecticut, local government officials, prompted by pressure from the wives of several affluent residents, said that, pending the verification of the reports, they would begin drafting legislature aimed at limiting sales of certain combinations of flavors. More drastic measures include the introduction of regulations that prevent young people below the age of 21 from purchasing sodas, or a ban of certain flavors altogether.

IE: Sorry we’re late guys, we didn’t know about the meeting until this morning
Everyone else: Uhmm, we have had this meeting in the same place every week for the past four years
IE: Oh really?
Everyone else: Yes. You know, we’re trying to set some standards so that web developers can write clean code that is interpreted the same way by every browser.
IE: Of course we think it’s a good idea for all browsers to interpret websites the same way IE does.
Everyone else: No, no no no! That would be a very bad idea.
IE: How come?
Everyone else: It’s stupid for one company to set the standard, especially if the standard is not really a standard but a collection of random fuzzy rules that aren’t consistent, are hard to interpret, and consist of hundreds of exceptions.
IE: We don’t buy it. You’re just jealous of our 95% market share.
Everyone else: We are a standards group, we don’t care about your market share. We’ve invited you to these meetings from day one. In fact, didn’t Microsoft push for technology standards in the first place?
IE: Of course, provided that they come from Microsoft.
Everyone else: That’s retarded.
IE: Look, we’re innovating here and you’re just slowing things down. Like when we introduced image effects.
Everyone else: Oh, you mean the Wave effect?

IE: Yeah, isn’t it awesome?
Everyone else: Looks like something from a 1990s website.
IE: Our design group sees nothing wrong with that filter.
Everyone else: Oh, you have a design group now? But, we digress. You’ve got to start complying to some of these standards, complying to both IE and other browsers is a headache for most developers.
IE: What are those standards?
Everyone else: We’ve published them and even sent you a paper copy. What the hell are these proprietary filters doing in your dynamic HTML? filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=20). The notation is awful and does not conform to any of the other style properties.
IE: You’re just pissed because it has Microsoft in its name.
Everyone else: And what about your lenient interpretation of identifiers? Why does Microsoft continue, over and over again, to put so much emphasis on case insensitivity? Every programming language other than… let’s see… BASIC! is case sensitive.
IE: You’ve got to allow mediocre developers to make some money too.
Everyone else: And the conditional comments in HTML? <!–[if lte IE 6]> This is only encouraging people to add IE-specific stuff.
IE: Okay, it seems we won’t be able to convince you guys to embrace innovation. Maybe at least you’ll approve our OOXML standard?
Everyone else: Are you serious? The spec that ignore industry standards like SVG, MathML, XForms and even XML?
IE: There’s no reason a reinvented wheel must be worse.
Everyone else: Oh yeah, how about how within the spec, the same element has multiple conflicting definitions (‘e‘ has eighteen of them!) and some elements are just aliases of one another? It’s almost as the people in your team didn’t even talk to each other when they wrote the spec!
IE: Screw you. We’ll win anyway. We offer the world’s most popular operating system and browser family. Can’t beat us.

There’s something beautiful about one-liners: a perfect narrative compression of the situation, an almost poetic ability to synthesize while retaining information (I compare poetry to lossless data compression: a way to say to much in so few words). They are closely related to the concept of wit: the ability to comment on a situation with insight and humor. Probably the most extreme — and hilarious — example of that relation were “the battles of the wits” that my friends would engage in: a dialogue where each subsequent response built upon the previous but towered over it in wit. Unsurprisingly, the dialogue consisted almost entirely of one-liners.

I thought that with just a little bit of the basics that probably a significant fraction of the population doesn’t have, they will be able to avoid making bad decisions in life, avoid some of the conflicts that stem from ignorance, and maybe even communicate better.

Then I realized the futility of this endeavor — the people who will pick up such a book are most likely the people who already know these things. They are not the people who I need to reach out to — because in a twisted application of selection bias, if you read books with a goal to allow you to make better decisions and communicate better, you probably already know these basics.

There again, I may still write that book.

And can somebody teach me how to use the toilets with the motion-activated flush? About 80% of the time, it either doesn’t flush when it has to, or it flushes some four times before I actually leave the stall. I must be doing something wrong.

I have a big issue with the fact that the question has a tautological premise (since everyone can improve lives, that’s precisely the premise of the majority of charities out there) which gives me no insight into why I should give into this particular charity. The best proof for this is, well, that I forgot which charity this was an ad for…

How about a counter-ad. “If you could ask a meaningless question, would you?”