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Meta Matters
Today Messy Matters celebrates its 25th anniversary, in internet time. Here are three meta topics to mark the occasion: Typo Bounties, Meta Poll, and a Bonus Puzzle. ... »
Search in the City
To ring in the new year, let me entertain you with some visually appealing but ultimately content-deficient graphs (i.e., infoporn). Hopefully the eye-candy will knock you into a sugar coma deep enough to prevent you from questioning the point of these plots and let you simply enjoy the moment. The topic: top... »
Twelve Years Ago
I got the following email today, sent from myself exactly 12 years ago. A University of Michigan alum was looking for people to join his new startup. I was a little bit tempted by it, but instead just forwarded it to my future self in anticipation of the "prototype" he was pitching... »
Demographic Diversity on the Web
"Men are from Mars, women are from Venus," proclaimed John Gray in his influential, yet controversial, 1992 book of the same title, which highlights differences between the sexes. This summer Irmak Sirer, Jake Hofman and I explored an online version of this issue, examining the extent to which the... »
How To Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding
UPDATE: A revised version of this article now appears at blog.beeminder.com/akrasia. Preface: I love dog food, metaphorically speaking, of course. This article is about forcing oneself to do what one wants to do and I, among other things, want a new Messy Matters article to go out no less often than the... »
