Aether Mug

You've probably heard the recommendation to drink around 2 liters of water daily.

Language has arbitrary boundaries built into it that we don't even notice, despite using them every day in every form of communication we partake in.

I often write about general and abstract concepts and "thinking tools", but I would hate it if people thought they are idle philosophy.

When I was 14, I met a girl who couldn't breathe if someone covered her navel.

A couple of years ago, I decided to turn off YouTube's viewing history function on my account, the one that records my past searches and the videos I watched.

This post is part of the List of Introspective Descriptions.

TL;DR: see the last paragraph.

I When the story of Matsuri Takahashi's karoshi ("fatal overwork") suicide became public, around 2017, it hit me harder than I would have thought.

April 2015: Matsuri Takahashi, fresh out of the most prestigious university in Japan, begins her first job at Dentsu, a major advertising company.

You can spawn whole new mathematical worlds by shifting the axioms of a theory even a little bit.

Act 1 - Hair INT.

One year ago this week, a quiet, LED-laden server in a cool data center not too far from you blinked and started serving my very first blog post, "Designing for Emergence," to the internet.

The farther away a situation is from us socially, like a different industry or culture or community, the more puzzling and irrational and crazy—and sometimes evil—it looks.

How much work can a simple framing do?

About the Pain Sometimes other bloggers read Aether Mug and are kind enough to tell me that they like it, that they've read several posts, and that they'll be reading the next one.

I often find myself having to take an elevator in a sparsely-populated wing of a medical research facility.

The Muddy Middle Ground In a recent Plankton Valhalla essay, I made the bold claim that recursion—things influencing their own future through their behavior—is at the core of everything we can know and reason about.

Marco's note: This post is a contribution by Marie Cosgrove-Davies to Aether Mug's List of Introspective Descriptions.

There is a lot of talk, nowadays, about mental models and thinking frameworks, yet these concepts are both vastly underrated and poorly understood.

This post is a presentation of Visual Koans, a little web app I made to experiment with an unusual kind of creativity-boosting "meditation", for lack of a better term.

In September I published a piece titled You Don't Have Time to Read Books That Won't Change Your Life, where I talked about Damned Good Books, i.e. those that change your life.

Yesterday I published a new Plankton Valhalla essay titled Recursion, Tidy Stars, and Water Lilies, and it marks a little milestone for me.

Retelling What It's Like Inside the Dome I've always found the ending of the 1998 motion picture The Truman Show to be wonderful in the literal sense of the word: it leads to some deep and interesting questions.

It feels like we have to work hard to earn joy, yet it seems elusive, like trying to catch a fish darting among coral reefs.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part.

When you are born, you begin without a single good framing to understand the world, except perhaps some innate ones that clarify the role of your parents for you.

This is a living blog post.

Circe warns Odysseus: You will come first of all to the Sirens, who are enchanters of all mankind and whoever comes their way; and that man who unsuspecting approaches them, and listens to the Sirens singing, has no prospect of coming home and delighting…

My friend M., who is almost as forgetful as myself, accidentally bought the same self-help book twice, so I got a free copy.

Sept 6, 2024 edit: added one sentence to clarify the role of reading for pleasure.

Last year a researcher from a Japanese lab asked me if he could borrow my aphantasic brain for an experiment.

The other day I felt the sudden and urgent need of boarding a blimp.

A couple of years ago I decided to get into badminton.

This isn't a blog about Japanese, but there are some aspects of that language that are just too interesting keep to myself.

Today Nautilus published a new article I wrote about aphantasia, following my previous feature piece for them on the same subject (note: they are both paywalled).

I originally published this on February 17, 2023 on Plankton Valhalla.

As a kid I would sometimes play real-time strategy (RTS) video games with my friends.

... for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conce…

When I was in junior high school, every child in Italy had a "school diary" to keep track of homework, deadlines, and teachers' notes.

I If your pants keep sliding down as you walk, you tighten your belt.

Of all the problems in physics, one of the thorniest over the course of centuries was figuring out what in the world this thing we call "light" is.

I "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is part of a short story collection, and that makes it a short story.

What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive.

Last month I wrote a post about some unique quirks of the Japanese language.

Sometimes you hit against a wall.

Near the end of his life, Arthur C.

Main intended audience of this post: people interested in UX and information management.

Why is it so hard to convey your feelings?

When I tell people around the world that I've been living in Japan for over a decade, many look both impressed and mystified at once.

In Are Your Lights On?