What fixed my knees?
About two years ago [1] my knees got so bad I couldn't walk more than about ten minutes. This wasn't new to me; in Spring 2009 my knees started hurting a lot after morris dancing, so I stopped doing...
View ArticleMoney vs Talent: Ratios
GiveWell has eight full time employees and has identified good charities with room for around $25M for additional annual funding. [1] Naively this is $3M of giving opportunities per employee, but most...
View ArticleDonating and Tax Breaks
People often put down others as donating "for a tax break". Sure they look generous, but they really just want to save money. But that's not how it works. In the US you can report money you donated,...
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Apartment Prices Over Time
How do Boston apartment prices change month-to-month? When I updated my apartment price map in January I set up a monthly cron job to log apartment prices: $ crontab -l 02 02 18 * * python...
View ArticleAvoiding hyperbolic discounting
Given the choice between $50 now and $100 in a month many people will take the $50 now. This is almost always a bad decision, in that you don't get twice as much value for your money today so later...
View ArticleIt's not fair to settle for "good"
Occasionally people will say things like: "What matters is doing good things, and obsessing over exactly what charity is best isn't what altruism is about.""These people are doing their best to help,...
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Slap-Stomping
Stomping as loud as possible isn't usually the goal at contra dances, but occasionally you want to make a lot of noise briefly. How can you do this without hurting your knees? Normally to stomp you...
View ArticleConsistency in OntoNotes
OntoNotes is the product of humans marking up a large amount of text with linguistic details, to produce examples for computers to learn from. For example, we might have this sentence, transcribed from...
View ArticleThe Argument From Marginal Cases
The argument from marginal cases claims that you can't both think that humans matter morally and that animals don't, because no reasonable set of criteria for moral worth cleanly separates all humans...
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Equal Corners
The 'contra corners' figure is no longer called very often at contra dances, and I think the biggest reason for this change is that it isn't equal-turn. In the 1980s contra dance moved from mostly...
View ArticleAgainst Singular 'Ye'
The perversions the youth wreak upon our our shared language grate on the ear and distract from semantic content. While most of their petty acts of verbal vandalism are limited to the realm of...
View ArticleObama Demands Free Raisins
I have an alert set up for "free raisins", which means that if anyone posts about us online I can read about it. Lately, however, I've been getting some unusual alerts: Obama Feds Shake Down Farmer...
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Consumption Smoothing and Hedonic Adaptation
Because earning capacity increases with age but enjoyment of spending decreases with additional money, standard economic theory predicts people will smooth their spending by borrowing to live beyond...
View ArticleOld-time music for contras?
In the Northeast, contra dance and music have grown and changed together over time. Among contra musicians there's a strong tradition of playing for the dancers, tailoring the music to the specific...
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Text-Only Fallback Browsing
When you download a webpage you go through several steps [1], but your web browser usually has the text you're looking for early in the process. If you're on your phone and a page gets stuck with the...
View ArticleStart a Railroad
Is it 1870? Because you could make money starting a passenger rail company. How? By contracting with Amtrak to move your cars. If you're rich enough to have your own private rail car, Amtrak has the...
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Free Raisins Summer Tour 2013
The Free Raisins are going on tour again! Seven dances in seven nights, 1,975 miles along the fall line: Sunday July 14th in Glen Echo MD with Tom Hinds Monday July 15th in Asheville NC with Kristin...
View ArticleUpcoming Studies on Veg Advocacy
If you care about animals you probably want other people to value them too. What's the most effective way to convince people to go veg? How effective is it? Existing studies of leafletting and online...
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Citric Acid on Watermelon
About a month ago I got some citric acid. Since then I've tried putting it on and in various things. Chocolate was strange, Strawberries were good, but my favorite has definitely been watermelon: (If...
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BIDA Signs
At the BIDA contra dance we put up colorful signs: Reading these signs, you can see what kind of dance community BIDA wants to be: What signs should we add? What signs should we remove? (For example,...
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