The first day of September 1993 was the beginning of an eternal September, a calendar month whose days stretched to infinity. Prior to this infamous day, there would be an influx of noobs onto Usenet each September. These were the arriving college freshman. They were not legion. They were few enough that they could be corralled and assimilated by Usenet veterans. September 1993, however, was different. It was the day the gates of hell were thrown open and never-ending torrent of demonspawn descended on Usenet — like locusts, they devoured the community.

Scientific American has published an article on savantism, which rattled a few ideas loose in my head. A savant is roughly defined as someone with cognitive deficiencies — usually on the autism spectrum — who displays superior performance in one area. A savant may be unable to speak or dress without assistance, but able to play the piano. Savantism comes in degrees — one can be a savant by being an average piano player, given that they’re functionally disabled in all other activities.

Consider two sentences: The llama was made out of watermelon flavored cactus. Policeman doe terminology star inconvenience recruit. If I asked you to close this web page and then recall both sentences, you’d have an easier time with the first sentence. It has meaning and structure — even if a bit strange. I could make this still harder by adding a third sentence that’s just a jumble of letters.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. —Voltaire I was on Reddit earlier, and an exchange went like this (perfectly illustrating why psychology is not a science): Bob: Psychology isn’t a science. (downvoted) Alice: I’m a neuroscientist and while a lot of psychology isn’t very good, you’re just not looking at the right sort of psychology. The media doesn’t report on the right sort of psychology because it’s hard to understand.

I wrote a couple of days ago about how we can think of humans as agents who take in information from the environment, compress that information, and then store it in long term memory. I argued that interesting knowledge is knowledge which improves our ability to compress other knowledge — interestingness signals something is an upgrade to our compressor module. With that in mind, consider what John Baez recently had to say about developing good research skills.

I’m not much of a romantic. If I wanted to hack romance I’d start with going through all the literature on the mate preferences of chimpanzees, bonobos, and great apes generally. Only after I’d taken in the unfiltered humans-are-big-monkeys view would I turn to something with a more human emphasis. It’d be a few months before I started, you know, dating. When I do listen to other people speak about passionate love — mostly internet people — it’s surreal.

Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and maybe best known for his work on intelligence, was a bit obsessed with the idea that people have certain innate traits. You know the movie Minority Report, where a special police department tries to predict crime before it happens? He sorta tried to invent it — in 1883. He had this idea, see, that you could predict whether or not someone was a criminal based on the structure of their face.

Mathematics is like the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings. Once you’ve loaded a problem into your head, you find yourself mesmerized, unable to turn away. It’s an obsession, a drug. You dig deeper and deeper into the problem, the whole time unaware that the problem is digging back into you. Gauss was wrong. Mathematics isn’t a queen. She’s a python, wrapping and squeezing your mind until you find yourself thinking about the integer cuboid problem while dreaming, on waking, while brushing your teeth, even during sex.

Users with many Facebook friends are less likely to post about politics and gay rights. This sorta replicates what OkCupid discovered a few years back — “People who hold their beliefs lightly are much better liked, even by people who are themselves serious.” So, don’t take anything seriously, and when your girlfriend complains that “you’re never serious,” ask her if her best friend is still single and what is her number again?