I've decided to post these in weekly batches. This is the second of five. I'm posting these here because Blogspot's comment apparatus sucks and also because no one will comment otherwise.

8. Have a Calling Card

If you take nothing else away from this post, take this: business cards need not be about business. You can have something with the form factor and general function of a business card, but broaden its scope well past business purposes.

9. Burnout is a Kind of Depression

The trick is, burnout looks like this, too. You take some action that's generally meant to be a good idea - working or doing research or seeing friends or travelling, say - and it fails to be fun or productive or garner you recognition... 

You end up with a kind of depression in miniature, or if you're especially unlucky, this kicks off - or worsens! - a depressive spiral. Burnout leads to more burnout.

10. How to Taste Chocolate

I think that both approaches are limited - talking about obvious food flavors alone misses some of the stranger and more wonderful things that a chocolate can put you in mind of, but if you write down something about how the chocolate makes you think of a bustling marketplace that's not going to help someone else know what it's like to eat the chocolate or whether they'll like it.

In that spirit, I go for a kind of Graham-Schmidt or PCA decomposition when I produce words about a chocolate I'm tasting.

11. What's the Type of an Ontological Mismatch?

For a more pressing question, what are we to do with an unwitnessed ontology mismatch? By this I mean to spotlight the fact that it's not just the ambient thingspace T that we care about, but rather something like ΔT - that is, probability distributions over T - as given by the actual occurrence of possible things from thingspace in the world that whatever's using each of the two ontologies live in. If two ontologies clash in a thingspace and there's no actual thing around to inhabit the disagreement, does the clash make a sound?

12. E-Prime

What's more, as a mathematician, sometimes I really do get to say things including that one thing is identical to another (equality), or that every instance of type A is also an instance of type B (subset containment), and mean it, and have a strong justification for meaning it. (Math is a kind of magic in that way, among others.)

13. In Defense of Boring Doom: A Pessimist's Case for Better Pessimism

These numerous roads to ruin need not even overlap - they don't - and many existing proposals with longer time horizons fall into the trap of pushing probability mass around from one road to another, rather than on reducing it entirely.

14. Vulpes tindalosi: A Naturalist's Guide

Unlike the common red fox, the Tindalosian fox requires significant quantities of methylxanthines in its diet, most notably caffeine...

The Tindalosian fox shares a descriptor with the better-known and more dangerous Tindalosian hound, which has been known to prey on it, and it can be similarly accidentally attracted by human activities - in this case, by a sufficient density of complex mathematical activity performed by humans or other sapients.