And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby A few weeks ago I read The Great Gatsby for the first time. It was a pretty good book. I don’t have much experience reading Fitzgerald, and the style of his era – as well as the upper class focus – is a bit different from what I normally read. I enjoyed the story, but the only thing that really stuck with me was the quote above. It is not central to the book, but I find it particularly profound and relevant today. ...

During a recent recording of OHAC, we talked about yearly themes. In short, yearly themes are meant to be broader versions of resolutions. They are not necessarily defined by explicit goals, but rather a frame of mind, or a general approach to the upcoming year. We talk about it in that episode, and there are links to episodes of the podcast Cortex with more information about the idea of yearly themes. My theme is the *Year of Focus*. Now that I have more freetime on my hands, I want to use it to help improve my attention span and make significant progress on projects I put off while in college. The first step in this, before it was even official, was the reading binge I’ve written about a few times now. ...

The Super Bowl ended not too long ago. It was an incredibly boring game (especially when compared to last year’s shootout extravaganza.). In a way, that is fitting. I spend a good chunk of time about 7 months out of the year watching baseball. Once baseball is over in early November, I transition to college and professional football. It is less frequent than baseball, but fills the sports-shaped void in my heart well enough. ...

This weekend I went whale watching for the first time. It was a fantastic experience. I went with Offshore Blue Adventures, which I’d probably consider the premier experience for anybody who wants to see whales and dolphins up close. They use an inflatable boat, similar to what the Coast Guard or Navy SEALs would use. The benefits of small boats on the ocean is that they ride large swells very easily; the benefits of small boats when whale and dolphin watching is that you can get closer without scaring off the animals. ...

A couple years ago, I watched Split. It was a very engaging movie. I walked away quite thrilled by the psychology of the entire situation. One of the people I saw the movie with mentioned it was a spiritual successor to a movie made about fifteen years prior, Unbreakable. It wasn’t clear there was any connection, other than the main character of Unbreakable having a short cameo at the very end of Split. Beyond this brief mention, the movies largely left my mind and I don’t recall talking with anyone else who saw Split. ...

Last year, I finally began compiling a list of books I have read over the years. While I am sure it is incomplete; the approximate dates I’ve given are inaccurate as I go further back; I have not included many of the young adult (or younger) books I read; and I didn’t individually list books that are in a series, it has still been informative for me to have this list and remember how much I’ve liked getting through a book over the years. Around this past Thanksgiving, I started on a reading rampage like I haven’t seen in myself for years. I finished three books throughout the month of December, and have finished two thus far in January. I should easily have a third finished before February rolls around. ...

I was on one of my favorite subreddits today, /r/learnmath (of course I sort by New), and a question came up that ultimately came down to understanding order of operations. These always frustrate me because they stem from a poor understanding of how the order of operations work; furthermore, any problem involving order of operations can be fixed and cleared up with an additional set of parentheses. Consider this math problem below – the type I see making its way around Facebook. ...

College was a reading blight for me. I had other things to do, classes pulling my attention, and a pretty damaged ability to focus due to the introduction of a smartphone in my life. I was on-and-off reading books for fun, and felt pretty bad for accumulating books that I just was not getting to. When I was an intern the past summer, I was hoping to change that. Yet I only made it through one book. Now that I’m in my real adult life, and settled in a bit, I’ve finally boarded the reading train yet again, and it is fantastic. It kicked off with reading Neuromancer by William Gibson over the course of a couple weeks. It was touch-and-go for a while there, but I made it through and very much enjoyed it. The past few fiction books I’ve read were sci-fi or technology thrillers of some variety. But I wanted to get back to where I was in high school and early college: able and willing to read just about any book I came across, even if it wasn’t very good. So, I recalled a recommendation an acquaintance gave to me, Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. It is classified as a science fiction novel, but really is just a post-apocalyptic novel taking place in modern day, after a particularly deadly strand of swine flu wiped out most of the world. I read the book in only two days. ...

At work the other day, we had a bit of a break to celebrated the month’s birthdays. During this time – my coworkers sitting around a large table, munching on pie and ice cream – a conversation broke out. How many holes are there in a paper towel roll: 1 or 2? Of course, there is the joke that if you claim 1, then there is only one hole of consequence in the human body: that which leads from your mouth to the escape of your digestive system. At that point you’re just talking out of your ass. ...

I’ve been curious how cultural trends adjust our feelings toward various habits people have. The biggest change to me has been that of the hipster blogger, sitting in a coffee shop with their MacBook, doing some personal photo-journalism for the benefit of mankind. I think the common notion of what, and who, a writer is has changed dramatically. No longer is it necessarily someone cramped up in an attic, papers everywhere, a drink at hand; it can be anyone with just about any device. I’m sure there are people out there who write posts from their phone – I know I’ve at least edited a few posts from mine. ...