Ideas
59 posts · all topics
[book] How Emotions Are Made
An intriguing scientific case for why emotions are not real
[book] A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
Notes on A Short History of Chinese Philosophy by Feng Youlan — key ideas from Confucianism, Daoism, and beyond.
[book] 2030: Today's Biggest Trends by Mauro Guillén
Review of 2030 by Mauro Guillen on demographic megatrends, aging populations, emerging markets, and technology disruption ahead.
Personalized Nutrition Summit 2019
Summary of the 2019 Personalized Nutrition Summit covering genomics-based diet startups, microbiome testing, and nutrition tech devices.
Overselling the microbiome
Here’s the cover of a magazine I saw yesterday in the grocery store checkout lane: I thought about submitting it to Jonathan Eisen's list of Overselling the Microbiome…
Fact-checking should be a business
From Vulture.com : By tradition and by default, books aren’t verified to anything near the standard of a magazine piece. I am continually amazed at how often mainstream,…
Data is not a substitute for strategy
When I was in grad school, my data sciences class assigned us this incredibly complex optimization problem where we were supposed to recommend the best place to locate…
What potato starch really did to my gut
As suspected, there was a glitch in my latest uBiome results . Apparently a server hiccupped, so the scientists there recomputed my sample and sure enough, the new…
The bare minimum
Minimalism is wonderful. Why clutter your life with stuff you don’t need? Here, from t he golden sayings of Epictetus are words from the original Stoic himself: Take…
[book] The Rise of Superman
The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler is mostly about extreme sports — the people behind really crazy activities like kayaking…
Notes on Seth Roberts Memorial Symposium
I had a long-planned family reunion in Maine the week of the Ancestral Health Symposium in Berkeley this month, so it was just not possible for me to…
Keep this in mind when viewing the news
An excellent piece by a former AP reporter, discussing how news organizations report about Israel , but I find this point to be true about nearly all news…
College degree expiration dates
My daughter is thinking about the essays on the Common Application the long standardized form that most colleges now require as part of their admissions process. These essays,…
On Covetousness
The Ten Commandments are supposed to be a summary, directly from God, of the most basic moral code. Most of them are obvious “biggies”: Kill, Steal, Adultery, disobey…
Do you believe in evolution?
Keith Blanchard makes an excellent point. Writing in The Week under the title "Why you should stop believing in evolution”, he says: So if someone asks, "Do you…
Personalized genetic analysis
The biggest problem with all the great new self-measuring tools is the torrent of data they produce. You could devote your life to analyzing your results and not…
What else driverless cars will change
When, in the near future, robots can reliably move people and stuff, our lives will change in more ways than just the obvious “Now I don’t have to…
Y-Combinator Sam Altman's Future Predictions
From this week's Econtalk podcast Sam Altman, president of startup accelerator Y Combinator, mentions three interesting startup investment trends: wearables (it's inevitable that we'll all have computing devices…
Everyone an Emperor
Kevin Kelly asked via Twitter for people to offer, in 100 words, their vision for the future. Today he published the first 23 responses . I don’t have…
[book] War! What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris
As with his seminal “ Why the West Rules ”, Stanford Professor Ian Morris’ new book makes you repeat “Aha!” as he explains the big picture of history…
[book] Proust and the Squid
View on Amazon I can’t remember who recommended this book to me, but as you’ll see by the end of this post, I feel compelled to write down…
Seth liked people who think for themselves
Some people have an influence that is difficult to see in the usual standards of pageviews, book sales, citations. Seth Roberts , I think, was one of those…
[podcast] The Second Machine Age
My favorite podcast, Econtalk, is always worth a listen. Here are my takeaways from this week’s interview with Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT and co-author of The Second Machine…
Track my speech
You can take the Wisconsin boy out of Wisconsin but you can’t take Wisconsin out of the boy. This New York Times dialect quiz guesses which part of…
More rational optimism
I can’t help being an optimist about technology and the future. Some of my favorite books are : The Rational Optimist- How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.) . Or Ramez…
The argument for regulating information
When Nobel Peace prizewinner Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned by Chinese authorities, his captors were unafraid that he alone, a single individual without guns, an army, or even military…
Sustainable online education
Anant Agarwal, the president of EdX, MIT and Harvard’s massive open online course (MOOC)provider thinks the future of education doesn’t need have to maximize revenue: “It’s not at…
Why they failed: Zeo, Green Goose, 100Plus
Zeo was, for many of us, our favorite QS company : great, consumer-oriented low-cost hardware that measured something useful (sleep) to give insights we couldn't have had otherwise.…
The Clover of Brewing Machines
Five years ago, the Clover Coffee Equipment company was hand-assembling high-tech, excellent automatic coffee-making machines for the super high-end market. At tens of thousands of dollars each, they…
The future of college
View on Amazon College is such a critical part of modern life that sometimes we forget the difference between “college” and “education”. Now that my children are closing…
A humbling look at the future of Los Angeles
In 1988, the Los Angeles Times Magazine interviewed dozens of experts and published their predictions for what the city would be like in 2013. Many of their predictions…
The inevitability of human enhancement
I watched a TED talk by Juan Enriquez ( Will our kids be a different species?) that wasn’t particularly informative if you’re up to date on biology, but…
Let's call it Burma
The United States government (as well as the UK and most other European democracies) officially refers to it as “Burma” , a perfectly fine name for the country.…
Worse than a robot
I’m back in the US for a few days, a good time to order items that I can’t get in China, and that means borrowing the address of…
Hard to know for sure
I keep running into this problem of the limitations of knowledge. Today, a professor friend of mine reminded me how the one thing you take away from earning…
The coming wave of sensors
I want my mobile device to have a ton more sensors. The iPhone’s GPS, compass, gyroscope, and accelerometer are just the beginning. How about some additional built-ins like:…
Unexpected future history
Most -- maybe all -- of the interesting changes that happen in history are completely unexpected. Well, maybe not completely , and there will always be people after…
Alvin Toffler predicts China's impact on the future
CNReview summarizes the China implications from Alvin Toffler's 40 predictions for the next 40 years . Prediction No. 2 Nation-state power around the globe will be increasingly ‘multi-polar’…
Kindle Singles and the future of publishing
The print publishing industry thinks a lot has changed in the past 20 years, but they haven't seen anything yet. The transformation from print to all-digital publishing will…
Politics as entertainment
I know very little about Iran, other than the headlines I read in the mainstream US press. I bet you don't know much more than I do, though…
Digital socialism = capitalism.
In the Jun 2009 issue of Wired, Kevin Kelly uses the loaded term "socialism" to describe how the fragmentation of everything is giving us access to more choice…
The many faces of me
I’m a blog social media hobbiest. I do this for fun, not for a living. But as more people come on line, both friends and work-related colleagues, and…
Where are the Spragues?
I often run into people who, upon hearing my last name, ask if I’m related to so-and-so other Sprague they know. Usually the answer is no. Our family…
Worst economy since the Great Depression
From the Jan 13th issue of Time Magazine: The slump is the longest, if not the deepest, since the Great Depression. Traumatized by layoffs that have cost more…
Steven Pinker on Personal Genomics
The Jan 11th edition of the New York Times Magazine has a cover story by my favorite thinker describing his experiences with genome testing, and he finds the…
It’s Twitter’s Turn
Every great new social phenomenon has a "fad" phase , where zillions of people join in because, well, because zillions of others are joining. A few years ago…
My blog graphically
from: http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.richardsprague.com What do the colors mean? blue : for links (the A tag) red : for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags) green : for the DIV…
Anniversary Cards are for men
How come there are more anniversary cards addressed “to wife” than “to husband”? At the Hallmark store yesterday I counted 25 cards designed for men shopping for their…
The reading habits of George W. Bush
I’m skeptical whenever mainstream consensus settles on an opinion about somebody or something, especially when it’s a subject that lends itself to very little first-hand, direct, up-close experience.…
Obama’s slave ancestors
The country is justifiably excited at the thought of a first lady in the White House who is the descendent of a slave . Michelle Obama’s great-great grandfather,…
Fooled by Randomness [book]
View on Amazon In many ways this is better than Taleb’s more popular book, The Black Swan, which I’ve already noted is one of my favorite books of…
What’s in my genes? Results from 23andme
My DNA test results arrived much sooner than I expected. They tell you six to eight weeks, but it was more like two or three. The company that…
Taleb thoughts on the financial crisis
I already told you that The Black Swan is among the best idea books I have ever read, and I find it even more interesting when I look…
October 1973: worst month in American history
When I hear people talk about gloom and doom and how the world is coming to an end, I remind them to look back to 1973 and count…
Our historical blind spots
It seems to me that each of us has a blind spot in our understanding of recent history that makes us unable to fully appreciate many of the…
Life keeps getting better
Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas write a nice summary (in The American magazine) of how much things are improving . They show how, when…
The appeal of downtown
The latest New Republic repeats an idea I first saw in the Atlantic Monthly in March : the cool people are moving out of the suburbs and back…
Tea and Taiko at Sponge
Want to expose your kids to a foreign language while they're very young -- the best time for their young brains to soak up the sounds and grammar…
Blue State Blue Streak
When I'm online, whether sending emails or posting content, I know that my kids may be reading, so just as in real life I think it's important to…