jefftk

Daniel Drucker pointed me at a fun bug in Google's calculator: the parsec is wrong when you do math on it. As the earth travels around the sun, closer stars appear to shift back and forth against the distant background stars. The closer the star is the bigger this effect...

If someone tells me a cake is vegan plant-based, I'm going to downgrade my expected enjoyment: I've had a lot of bad vegan baked goods. Some bakers are vegan for health reasons, and minimize all the other things that make food worth eating, but even a fully hedonistic vegan baker...

A couple years ago I put together a Secular Solstice Songbook, a compilation of all the songs we've sung at Boston Solstice. Anna Tchetchetkine and I led a session of group singing at LessOnline, following up from an informal one the year before, and I noticed several annoying things with...

DIY testing of air cleaning is practical, and thoughtful experimental design can substitute for high-quality sensors including for evaluating air purifier setups that give >100,000x particle reductions. I've done a lot of DIY testing over the years ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). The goal is generally to understand...

I was in SF this weekend for LessOnline. It's nominally a blogging conference, but in practice it's more of a Rationalist meetup. I was there in my personal capacity, though I did end up having a lot of conversations about biosecurity and may have accidentally done some fundraising. Lots of...

Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum....

I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. As AI systems become increasingly capable substitutes for expert human biologist expertise, the risk that someone could engineer a pathogen to spread widely before detection is going up. We've made great progress and we're now running the world's largest metagenomic...