With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

Science

More detailed Big 5 test

Courtesy of Steve Hsu, I found a more detailed online Big 5 personality assessment. This one takes much longer, but it has subdomain scores that can help people delve more deeply into their personality, and stave off objections that "I'm not really like that". The Out

Steve Hsu: Information Processing

Steve Hsu is a physics professor at the University of Oregon. I stumbled across some fun things on his blog. Among my favorites: * Learning how to fight [Our interests converge already] * Thinking in terms of probability distributions [the most important skill in science and engineering, and life] * Psychometrics works [I&

First Impressions

A fun open access paper about personality judgments based on seeing just a picture of someone. One of the authors is Samuel Gosling, whose work lies behind the online Big 5 personality test I recommend to the curious. You can learn a lot just by looking at someone, and in

Lamarck's Revenge

DNA was a major revolution in biology, and rightfully so. However, just because you won the war doesn't mean all your opponents are dead. h/t Jerry Pournelle

Come back Nick Naylor, all is forgiven

A piece of contrarian science that could have come straight from the protagonist of Thank You For Smoking, The Scientific Scandal of Anti-smoking. The results of the Whitehall study cited in the article are that you don't see much difference in life expectancy between smokers who quit and

Regular expressions are like Tabasco®

John D Cook posts a link about the overuse of regular expressions. I like the article, but.... I am pretty interested in regular expressions, because I have often had a need for this kind of thing but I laughed at the analogy because I am from Arizona. Overuse of Tabasco

The Way of the Pilgrim

Way of the Pilgrim By Gordon R. Dickson $4.50; 439 pages I came across Way of the Pilgrim by means of Jerry Pournelle's There Will Be War series. Chapter 2 of Way of the Pilgrim appears in Volume IV: Day of the Tyrant. I thought the story