Enfascination is the transmission of wonder. The goal of this blog is to connect the mundane daily practice of science with the experiences of wonder and humility that make it worth doing.
Freshness date: September 25, 2023.
Understanding Taylor Swift with Python
Your face's facets
Definitions that rhyme
"Why can't I work with this person?": Your collaborator's secret manual
Simple heuristic for breaking pills in half
All the SATOR squares in English, with code
What's the thing in your life that you've looked at more than anything else?
How to order a coffee in the minefield of preexisting categories
The crises of a quantitative social scientist
Calvino excerpt: the wisdoms of knowing and not knowing
Almost-puns: the highest art
Visualizing the 4th dimension in 1936 (Jean Painlevé documentary — 10 min)
Critiques of the Ostrom scholarship
The simplest demo that big data breaks p-value stats
Cancel culture and free speech are compatible, in 3 pages.
The mind-expanding Internet; the like-minder finder
The Future: Michio Kaku's accurate 2020 from 1997
Changing how you think is like changing your nutrition in a way
More on the lasting impact of cybernetics on society
The sorry state of my optimism about humanity's distant future
Our world is strange enough for these tops and dice to be
New paper out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Low profile search for the cheapest, shortest domain on the Internet
Now hiring graduate students and postdocs at UC Davis
How to win against Donald Trump in court
Toothbrushes are up to 95% less effective after 3 months and hugging your children regularly can raise their risk of anxiety, alcoholism, or depression by up to 95%
A secure Bitcoin is a manipulable Bitcoin by definition
The decentralization fetishists and the democracy fetishists
Good ol' Popper
Subjective utility paradox in a classic gift economy cycle with loss aversion
Metaphors are bad for science, except when they transform it
New work using a video game to explain how human cultural differences emerge
Small-scale democracy: How to head a headless organization
In case there's doubt that Charles Bukowski's Post Office is about himself
Why Carl Sagan wasn't an astronaut
Bringing big data to the science of community: Minecraft Edition
H. G. Wells on science and humility
A recent history of astrology
New work on positive and negative social influence in social media: how your words come back to haunt you
Instagram Demo: Your friends are more popular than you
Change your baby's astrological sign with physics!
"It was found that pairing abstract art pieces with randomly generated pseudoprofound titles enhanced the perception of profoundness"
New in Journal of Computational Social Science: "Cognitive mechanisms for human flocking dynamics"
Appearance on two podcasts with Steaming Piles of Science
Book: The Common Sense of Science (1978) by Jacob Bronowski
A strong identity is no defense against hypocrisy (a good offense is a bad defense)
Do you lose things? Here's the magical way to find them.
Tom Lehrer song ripping on quantitative social science
Philip K. Dick's vanity was his best protection from his vanity
Hey look, Andrew Gelman didn't rip me a new one!
1920's infoviz, when "Flapperism" was the culmination of Western civilization
in Cognitive Science: Synergistic Information Processing Encrypts Strategic Reasoning in Poker
Words with doubles give me troubles
Satie's doodles
Waiting in the cold: the cognitive upper limits on the formation of spontaneous order.
Many have tried, none have succeeded: "Pavlov's cat" isn't funny.
Ramon y Cajal's Advice to a young investigator
My most sticky line from Stephenson's Diamond Age
Generous and terrifying: the best late homework policy of all time
How to create a Google For Puppies homepage
Quantifying the relative influence of prejudices in scientific bias, for Ioannidis
Pandas in 2018
Good mental hygiene demands constant vigilance, meta-vigilance, and meta-meta-vigilance
List of Google Scholar advanced search operators
typographically heavy handed web design
A simple way to drive to get more efficiency out of cruise control
How do we practice large-scale social engineering when, historically, most of it is evil?
"What's a pee-dant?"
My great grandma's face tattoos
New paper out from my time at Disney: Blind moderation with human computation
Modern economic ideology has overwritten sharing as the basis of human history
A house in a part of the Netherlands that's in a part of Belgium in the Netherlands.
Black and white emoji fonts
all the emoji in a line
Yeah, I'm not sure that that's the takeaway
Behavioral economics in the smallest nutshell
Searle has good ideas and original ideas, but his good ones aren't original, and his original ones aren't good.
White hat p-hacking, a primer
Words with dundant or fluous fixes
Journey through rope
Is it scientific or lazy to lose ten bikes to theft?
Books read in 2016
Two GIFs about peer review, and an embarrassing story ...
The cooperative lives of the Swiss
The beauty of unyielding disappointment, in science and beyond
Michael Lacour has rebranded himself as Michael Jules at www.michaeljules.xyz
Zeno's Arrow Keys: Geometric text navigation sequences in vim
Vision of 2001 from the pages of a 1901 weekly
Books read in 2015 (way late)
"The unexpected humanity of robot soccer" with Patrick House in Nautilus Magazine
My mug on thewaltdisneycompany.com
Is there any legitimate pleasure or importance in self-denial?
Four-leaf clovers are lucky
Bless me
My ideal gig
Secretly deep or secretly trivial?
Who is science_of_craft and why is he on my Minecraft server?
My work in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine
Seth's Backwards Guide to Doing Science
Stop, look, and listen: A tour of the world's red crosswalks
Research confidence and being dangerous with a gun.
Interdisciplinary researchers need to care about clear, honest, interesting writing
Natural selection, statistical mechanics, and the idea of germs were all inspired by social science
Machine learning's boosting as a model of scientific community
Generosity of spirit is the generosity of taking
The DSM literally makes everyone crazy
Language and science as abstraction layers
Practical eliminativist materialism
Two great quotes for how greedy we are for the feeling that we understand
"Are you feeling the Bern now?"
How would science be different if humans were different?
The unexpected importance of publishing unreplicable research
First days at Dartmouth College
Extra info about my appearance on BBC Radio 4
Bern, Switzerland hires ex biker gang to scare trash sinners straight
Paper on Go experts in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics
Burning plane falling out of the sky
Cat ladders of Zürich's District 6
Individually wrapped M&Ms
My talk at Computational Social Science 2015 (IC2S22015 in Helsinki)
Ancient exchange institutions
Unplanned downtime last week
Gondry video in reverse
Louisiana's "daiquiri exemption" and other drinks while driving.
Economic game theory's "folk theorem" is not empirically relevant
Use Shakespeare criticism to inspire language processing research in cognitive science
Some people know how to kill
Some people know how to live
Cultural arbitrariness is not the thing that is at the root of how race doesn't exist.
Prediction: Tomorrow's games and new media will be public health hazards.
The law of welfare royalty
Scott's "Art of not being governed," in a nutshell
Egg yolks as design feature
Back by one forward by two: Does planning for norm failure encourage it?
The scientist as dataset — specifically a high-rez, 4-D facial capture dataset
The intriguing weaknesses of deep learning and deep neural networks
The best skeptics are gullible
Sailing west down the Panama Canal will get you into which ocean?
Common-knowledge arbitrage
Do social preferences break "I split you chose"?
Regex crossword puzzle
Design for magical spherical dice (3D printed)
"No wang-wang zone"
Xeno's paradox
Words whose acronyms take longer to pronounce
Don't let Airbnb, Uber, or Peers redefine sharing
Irony is the flatulence of truth
Auspicious and inconsequential
Chrome extension: Facebook deconditioner
Is it possible to forge your own signature?
The selling out diaries: Surprising sources of pressure
My first autogenerated recommendation letter
Betable.com on the ethics of developing addictive social games
How we create culture from noise
Exclamation point on a flag?
Translation with rotation. An American railroad man sold Marx on Iroquois culture.
Are existential crises heavier when you don't exist?
The empirics of identity: Over what timescale does self-concept develop?
What polished bronze can teach us about crowdsourcing
Na na na na na na na, Na na na na na nah…
The market distribution of the ball, a thought experiment.
Hayek's "discovery" is the precognition of economics
A list of things I wanted to know in July 2013
My dissertation
One year free my ass: Webfaction trumps AWS/JumpBox
Enfascination live again
Is it immoral to not read the newspaper?
Breaking the economist's monopoly on the Tragedy of the Commons.
The birthplace of Western civilization was killed during the birth of Western civilization.
Dissertation written
Six chapters done. Four to go.
One chapter done, nine to go
Enfascination 2013
Militant atheism is oppressive atheism. c.f. Portugal
The fall of cybernetics in anthropology, with citations
Never too smart to be very wrong
Ouroboros and the failures of complex systems
Undrugs: Sugar pill may work even when you know it's sugar pill
Rock-Paper-Scissors ms. on Smithsonian, NBC, and Science Daily blogs.
Enfascination 2012 number 2 at the Complex Systems Summer School in Santa Fe, NM
Enfascination 2012 audio
The Reesee Cup and other bits of the southern Indiana dialect
Nerd post: Installing R packages remotely and without priviliges, thereby salvaging xgrid
"Seth Frey the Sandwich Guy"
Come Fall 2013, I'm working for Disney Research in Zurich
Seeing the Earth, in the sky, from Earth
"In the days of the frost seek a minor sun"
My Awe Talk: Inventors who were killed by their own inventions
In PLOS ONE: Cyclic dynamics driven by iterated reasoning
What big titty b****** taught me about institution design
Postdoc ergo propter doc
Oops --- server downtime
The real Makkie
Percentile listings for ten Go and Chess Federations and their systems
Fun 3-minute video of my research
Enfascination 2012
Difficulties replicating Kashtan & Alon (2005)
Incubation ranges for different food-borne illnesses
Grad school can make you smarter?
Islands that don't exist
More posts, going further back
Ground rules
Blogging helps me write, and writing and rewriting help me think, so articles will change without warning as I rework them. I don’t publish your comments, but I do read them. Opinions are my own.