For example, one of my notes about quantum physics got some love on reddit, and another one of my notes about skill acquisition was inspired by my extended stay in Tahoe.

Men either have less freedom or more freedom when it comes to dress than women do. True, anybody can dress however they want, adorning themselves with all sorts of shapes and colors that fit their imagination, but to dress stylishly, one has to consider the existing, acceptable stylish genres for their gender.

For men in a cosmopolitan city, there are anywhere from 2-4 genres of attire that, when followed fully, lead to something that could be considered a stylish ensemble. For example, in Austin, TX, there are three genres to choose from. There is the hipster adorned with a willfully eclectic mix of styles, retro or ironic sunglasses, and unusual, but of-the-moment colors (at one point, it was purple, and recently it was maroon). There is the uniform that could be called "white liberal" from those who shop at Whole Foods, who like the hipness of hipsters, but don't like how loud they are, and at the moment, tend to wear shoes sold by Toms, the company that donates a pair of shoes for every one you buy. Thirdly, there is the stylish dress of the more traditionally employed, such as those working in finance, who tend to pick a blur of styles from the hipsters and white liberals, but from 5-10 years ago, while throwing in flairs of attitude and class, such as maintaining a popped collar, or still wearing Lacoste shirts.

If a man doesn't dress in a genre associated with his demographic, he can only create a facsimile of style. He can have matching colors, have forms that fit well, and pay for a coherent haircut, but if he doesn't fit within those above three genres, something will always seems off or incomplete about his ensemble.

Women also have genres to choose from. Two of the genres for men mentioned above also exist for women: the hipster and the white liberal. However, the number of genres for women are not on the order of 2-4, but on the order of 12-16. And since women spend more effort outdoing each other in fashion, appearing unique has larger currency for them. For a woman to appear stylish, she really has two options: to either choose from a pre-made genre for her demographic (whether it's a platinum-blonde inspired from The O.C. or a bangs-bedecked cutie-pie à la Zooey Deschanel), or she can create her own genre and ensemble, as long as it adheres to general principles of aesthetics.

One of the worst historical misconceptions among mainstream Americans has to do with Vietnam. Vietnam appears in the public imagination as a singular blemish, the one time when America wasn't living to its true nature. The truth is that most wars before Vietnam were "Vietnams." Most wars before Vietnam were led by an aggressive elite against significant public opposition. Anti-war critics in those wars were jailed and/or intimidated with McCarthyism-like tactics. As a result, these wars were conducted under false pretenses, with the public being force-fed glossy narratives.

"Nearly all wars" includes the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and even World War I. There appears to be only one war beyond reproach, and that's World War II. But such a singularly slam-dunk-of-a-war situation is rare, and it probably only seems beyond reproach because of how much of a boon it was for the United States economy and its supremacy.

2013 is the first year of the 2000s that feels like a departure from a turn-of-the-millenium mindset. It even feels like the first real year of the decade.

Part of this has to do with the fact that nobody could ever settle on an appropriate way to call the first decade of 2000 (are they the "aughts"?). Another reason is because of 9/11, which made it so that the late aughts could never escape the echoes of 9/11 (thanks to the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq.) And just as Obama got elected, which was supposed to be a palate cleanser, the Great Recession happened, which anchored the next 4 years to the aughts as well.

But 2013, unlike 2012, feels like a break-away from the early 2000 years. It's the first real year of the new tens. Any talk of apocalypse seems ridiculous now. When 2012 came and went without a Mayan apocalypse, it hammered the final nail in the coffin for millennial Armageddon scenarios. Even predictions about an impending Singularity, which reached a zenith of attention in 1999, no longer seem "ten years away," but rather something that maybe will happen in 2065 or 2089. (Or will it even happen?)

When you re-encounter someone who you've spent a long time away from, their face always seem more compressed than normal. In our imaginations, the facial memory of our loved ones becomes elongated and exploded, as features disappear, and salient ones remain, like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Their real face is tighter and more whole. The first impression from a long time apart, as you see them through the windshield of their car when they pick you up from the airport, is an eerie feeling. Perhaps Picasso was onto something with his depiction of jigsaw faces.

I noticed two kinds of people at Stanford: those who got there naturally, and those who got there artificially. To get there artificially means to have set getting to a good school as a goal, striving for it, doing meta-learning and psyching up, and very deliberately architecting your high school years toward getting there.

To get there naturally means to have worked hard in high school, yes, but without much personal strain. You did community service because you liked it, not because you wanted a line on your college apps. You worked hard for As but without sacrificing having fun and "being a kid." If anything, getting As was part of a fun social activity for your cohort in the AP and gifted classes.

Likewise, there are the successful who are the apparent result of their ambition. Think Hillary Clinton. Yes, they have some talents that are naturally suited to the positions they have attained, but the much greater source for their high station and accolades is their diligence and determination.

And then, there are the successful who are the apparent result of their natural talents. Think Joseph Campbell, who could've written more books, garnered millions in speaking gigs, but was content to stay at Sarah Lawrence College for what seems like at eternity. His successes are a more authentic expression of his being, and more likely to have been garnered with joy.

History is ultimately about the cannabalization of the Top 10 wealthiest by the next 90 wealthiest. The rest is just footnotes. This is the essential pattern that emerges from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The American Revolution was just a war between the New Rich (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, et. al) and a few British landowners. The Civil War was just a war between the New Northern Rich and the few slaveholding landowners who owned most of the South. Continuing with this pattern, the Great Recession of 2008 was just a war between Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers (with Goldman Sachs winning, gloriously).

Cash is inherently bubble-producing. "Nothing makes money like money," as the saying goes, and so as the rich become the ultra-rich, they eventually create a tumor. The situation is unsustainable, and when the bubble pops, the second layer of wealthy individuals are ready to reclaim the seized territory or government handouts.

The rest of history is simply about the minimal goods that the rich can give the poor to keep the system in tact.

The idea behind user-generated reviews is that with a large enough sample size, you will eventually reach the truth about the quality of a product or establishment. However, what isn't often noticed are the strange ways that the accuracy varies depending on the sample size.

For example, a friend of mine in San Francisco complains that all the Yelp reviews for restaurants in a certain neighborhood are always 4 stars. Not 3.5 and not 4.5, but just 4. The reason being is that every establishment there has hundreds of reviews and at that sample size, you're actually just getting an over-representation of the legion of vocal supporters of their favorite local establishment.

But four hours away, in South Lake Tahoe, there is the opposite problem. Since there are only a few reviews for most establishments, they're all the random stinkers from patrons who were burned by their experience.

The ideal sample size for reviews, then, is actually somewhere in the middle. If you have too many reviews, a biased sub-group will be over-represented, and if you have too few, there will be too much noise that doesn't get smoothed out.

So much of the excitement about futurism is in answering age-old grand questions about life, such as, "Are we alone?" However, there's really four types of alien life-forms that we could encounter, most of which aren't that exciting.

At the most basic level, there's things like pulsing bacterium, oxidizing froth, and plants. Pretty much discovering life that is immobile or semi-immobile is nearly equivalent to discovering a planet with interesting chemicals on it, which happens every so often. Encountering this would simply tell us that automata is easier to evolve than we thought. This discovery would be as interesting as discovering multi-cellular organisms on Earth that don't need oxygen. That discovery barely registered a blip in the news.

The next level of interestingness would be the discovery of living things like camels, reindeer, or fish. These are independently moving, non-vegetable-style animals, i.e. the kinds of things that could become pets. That would be interesting to some extent, but after the initial excitement, they would spark as much curiosity for humans as the presence of strange marine life. There are at least 750,000 undiscovered species in our oceans, and that number is likely to remain that way for a long time. At this point, we could say, "We're not alone," but try asking a solitary sailor on a boat far into the ocean if they feel alone. They likely wouldn't get any solace knowing there are strange creatures swimming beneath them.

The next level would be aliens that are sentient and advanced enough to have a culture. Perhaps they don't have any skills for space travel, so they're definitely less intelligent than we are. At this point, "Are we alone?" An answer to that could be similar to the discovery of the New World by Europeans. During that era, the world must have seemed as large to humans as our universe seems to us today, and so to discover a whole new continent with previously unknown living people and culture must have been mind-blowing. And yet, it's difficult to find stories about just how earth-shattering this was to the scientific community or even ordinary people.

Finally, the forth level would be sentient aliens that have already dominated space travel. In which case, they would have discovered us first, or they already have. That may provide us with the similarly wondrous scenes from science-fiction movies like Contact. But this outcome is not the likely scenario for discovering aliens. It's ten times more likely that we'd discover a new world of savages, a hundred times more likely we'd discover a new ocean of marine life, and a thousand times more likely we'd simply discover exotic bacteria.

One of the caveats about accelerating change is that we may reach physical limits to how fast we can make computers. That at some point, all the processors work on an electron scale, and can't be reduced any further, or that solving the overheating problem of CPUs may become intractable.

But there is another limit that could factor in: human demand. All technology is created to ultimately serve human consumption. Without human demand, there is no further development.

For example, at some point, we won't need anything after HD or Retina displays. The human eye won't appreciate any further refinements. Already we're seeing the disinterest in CPU speed on computers. In the 1990s, even casual computer consumers cared about how many MHz were in their machine. Now, the number of people that know how many GHz or cores their laptop has is a small minority. Instead, innovation is being driven by the miniaturization of CPUs. But at some point, we will have the thinnest possible phone. Already, some people complain that the iPhone 5 is too thin, and therefore too easily slips out of their hands. After thin-ness, what's next?

That hasn't stopped CPU innovation, though, because there has been this massive expanse of cloud computing and web servers. Consumer demand is still affecting CPU innovation, but it's proxy via demands from businesses like Google and Facebook that are servicing consumers.

At one point, it was video game consoles that were pushing the envelope of processing power. But after the Playstation 3, there isn't much more that the gamer needs. Theoretically, the Playstation 4 or Playstation 5 will have as much graphical processing power as is used in rendering a 3D-animated Pixar film, but video gamers are drifting in the other direction, toward casual games on their iPhones, or are content with less graphically intense games on the Wii. So there is a step in the opposite direction, to make less intensive CPUs at a cheaper cost.

There's also a limited number of hours of attention a human has. While as a power consumer may own a laptop, smart phone, and a tablet, their time is divided between all three. Can they add another device? Perhaps they will have backup smart phones, and tablets, and eReaders, but again, that will just reduce the amount of time they spend on each device. Each device's significance will diminished by the introduction of another. Only so much entertainment can be consumed per day. Only so many words can be typed per day.

There is a pattern though, where we sometimes think, "No more innovation will happen." For example, there is the famous (though false) quote from the Commissioner of the US patent office who said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Or there's another famous (though false) quote from Bill Gates, that "640K of memory should be enough for anybody." And just when we were perhaps getting to a point of boredom in 2009, Avatar came out in theaters, and 3D became the next big envelope pusher. We thought, "Alas, the Playstation 4 would need to be at least twice as fast to handle all the 3D games!" But since then, consumers have become lukewarm to 3D. So already, we're seeing a turning back from new technology.

In Paul Graham's essay "How to Get Startup Ideas," he suggests that you can't concoct a good start-up idea. He likens such at-will brainstorming to the way a sitcom writer would invent a fake start-up idea for a character playing the role of a techie. The sitcom writer's strategy is to simply marry two concepts--let's say, "social networks" and "pet owners"--and voila, instant sitcom-ready start-up idea.

The alternative way that Paul encourages is to instead prepare yourself for discovery. Prepare to be inspired. This is potentially unappealing, he concedes, because it implies that it could take an order of six months to a year to come up with a good start-up idea, as opposed to coming up with one in the next few days.

But there is a middle way: Research to Development. This is in distinction to Research and Development, which is often a big-budget department at a large company whose employees are instructed to just work on academic ideas in the faint hope of one day maybe gleaning a product from it. In Research to Development, you work on drafts of ideas, pulling threads and following hunches, and your second or third effort eventually materializes into something that is a marketable and complete product.

This is something Apple has done. Their "research" is always toward imaginary products that they are eager to build businesses around. Steve Jobs, for example, really believed that touch interfaces were the way forward, and yet nobody at the time believed the technology was ready for that (fingers were too fat, the responsiveness of the screens too slow, and the screen surfaces too thick.) But these assumptions all got obliterated by simply researching and developing toward Jobs' vision. I'm sure the developers themselves were surprised to discover that that they had in fact innovated their way toward a feasible touch screen, but Apple kept this a secret, thus making the first iPhone release announcement a bit of a magic show.

So the strategy for someone looking for a start-up idea is to pick a technology or market they're interested in, and explore with the intent of ultimately piecing together a product idea. If you're a tech person, that would mean experimenting with APIs and gadgets, seeing what is possible. For a non-tech person, this would mean immersing yourself in an interesting market, talking to customers and makers.

There is indeed a deliberate act involved, something Graham is trying to minimize, but it's one-degree removed from the actual creation of a start-up idea. The deliberate act is in picking a market or technology and pushing yourself to dig deeper. And then, let the concrete idea emerge on its own.

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I don't have as stacked a resume as Paul Graham's, but R-to-D is how I came up with Nebulous Notes and 3D Porch. With Nebulous Notes, I saw that the Dropbox API was open for mobile developers, and since I love Dropbox and needed a new app idea, I started tinkering with it. Eventually I saw how simple it was to edit text files with the API, and so I made a quick first release, becoming one of the first Dropbox-enabled iOS apps. My initial goal was to actually make a file picker kit (similar to filepicker.io), but I didn't realize how much of a nerd I was going to become with just plain-text files. After two years, the app has since mushroomed into a full-fledged text editor now, and it funds a sizeable portion of my indie app developer lifestyle.

With 3D Porch, I followed a similar process. I pushed myself to go to Best Buy and familiarize myself with all the latest 3D gadgets that were around, simply because I knew there was a market there (and because I thought it was fun.) I then bought a 3D camera, and after playing with it, I immediately thought of making a 3D-version of YouTube. I started building this out, picking up Ruby on Rails in the process, and realized it was actually too hard to do 3D video. So I pivoted and came up with the idea for a 3D-version of imgur. While 3D Porch still has yet to make a huge profit, it became the number 1 3D photo-sharing site nearly overnight, was picked up by CNN, and has developed a cult following.

Now that every section of the Earth has been explored, where are the next adventures? Perhaps the beginning of post-modernism occurred not at the end of World War II, but when Antartica was discovered. Or maybe that's why all the world wars happened, because that's when land became truly scarce, and there was nothing left to colonize; the great nations started getting anxious. There was nothing left to explore. Well, there was the moon, but we gathered nothing from there. So perhaps we're at the end of all linear explorations. In a linear exploration model, each new discovery accumulates and adds to the previous exploration.

Instead now, we have cyclical explorations. We explore things that have already been treaded on, but have been forgotten for a handful of generations. Sometimes, in our own feverish excitement, we believe we're explorers. For example, the psychoactive pioneers of Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna are really just re-discovering old shamanistic practices that have been lost for generations. The radical 1960s were in many ways a recapitulation of the Transcendentalists of Emerson's era or of prior anarchists.

All exploration is local now. You are a pioneer if you are the first of your tribe to do something, to forge out into the woods, and come back with the good news. In many ways, this has been the dominant model of exploration. The Native Americans, for example, didn't have any illusions about whether the lands they discovered had prior human contact. What mattered to them was that they found new territory and game for their people.

I often travel, with a sense of adventure, with the wind behind my back and the excited encouragement of my peers. And when I arrive, I find that the land has already been discovered, and all epiphanies I was expecting to get have already been treaded on, over and over again, to the nausea of the locals. I could then simply stop traveling, but then I would have no stories to tell.

One of the paradoxes of self-improvement, is that many methods require the undoing of the motivation that spawned the method in the first place. For example, let's say you want to improve your social skills. You may try for years with different techniques, such as positive affirmations or social comportment practice, but find that nothing seems to work. In some ways, you may find the effort to be counter-productive as it could re-enforce your social anxieties.

You may then, out of desperation, come up with a novel solution: accept your social skills. The result is that you are more at peace with yourself, which improves your self-confidence, and therefore your social skills. At the same time, though, your motivation to improve your socials skills is weakened, which could theoretically reduce your motivation to accept your social skills (since you were accepting yourself to improve your social skills.)

It seems that most self-improvement solutions involve changing the hand that changes, like that Escher lithograph of a hand drawing a hand. Most solutions involve re-configuring the same motivating forces that made you seek the self-improvement in the first place. If it wasn't recursive, though, it would just be called "improvement" and belong in a different section of the bookstore, like public speaking or legal self-representation. And if it wasn't so challenging, people would just will themselves to be different, and there would be no reason for self-improvement literature.

Perhaps it's time to think beyond opposition in politics. Yes, a spirited debate is good, but opposition and counterpoint for counterpoint's sake may be immensely unproductive. I often see policy debates that shouldn't be debates. The debate exists simply because there has to be an opposition. Opposition is the immediate way to build a base of support. Opposition is the obvious journalistic narrative. And opposition is an easy niche to fill in the media landscape.

Opposition is useful in a debate between two people, because the back-and-forth distills the policy to an optimal outcome. But when played out over the democratic masses, what you really get is a gradient of positions spread out among the populace. This is due to the default apathy of the public and the various levels of informedness that people accept before taking a position.

Opposition has a way of becoming self-fulfilling. For example, United States Republicans were in favor of the universal health insurance mandate when it wasn't President Obama's idea. And so they ginned up support in opposition and eventually came to believe their own spin. Which makes the following statement controversial in our current way of thinking: "Healthcare reform should have been conducted with minimal or no opposition."

China's "harmonization" philosophy is the logical extreme of curtailing opposition. In China, freedom of speech has been reduced in order to achieve more desirable political outcomes. However, the quality of the desired outcome is corrupt without a free and open discussion. So the question is then, can you strike a balance between harmony and democracy?

In the future, there may be cases where instant copies can be made of humans, whether for the sake of teleportation or as a necessary by-product of mind-uploading. For example, if you're teleported and every one of your molecules gets re-created in a remote location, there may be a one-minute waiting period for consistency checks to make sure that the copy created is an exact replica. After that one minute, the original version may get destroyed.

This leads to all sorts of philosophical problems, but it is much easier to wade through these scenarios by looking at practical considerations. Even if you are copied, your property wouldn't be copied. You would still have one set of bank accounts, one main email account, and from the government's perspective, only one vote.

Wills would have to be created at the site of every copying to ensure the transfer of property. For example, if teleportation required an extra 30-minute grace period, after the 1-minute consistency-check period mentioned above, your copy (c-version) could die in that 30 minutes, and their property would have to be passed onto you, the discarded version (d-version).

It might seem that such a will would be standard, but you might not trust yourself, and decide to forgo a will to discourage the d-version killing the c-version for their property.

Or there could be exotic wills that give d's and c's joint custody over their property.