How this saves my life Originally published in Substack: https://deferocontra258173.substack.com/p/driving-like-a-fish?r=3ouoi0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true Here’s the question: when driving a scooter in a busy Asian city, how is it that I can remain calm when my brain is trying to process an insane amount of data all at once? Now that I’m no longer…
Originally published on Substack. Read and subscribe here. https://deferocontra258173.substack.com/p/the-hidden-richness-of-realityReality is astonishingly rich, but most of us perceive only a tiny fraction of it because our attention is consumed by human habits, goals, and worries. Look closely I snapped this photo at a restaurant in Vietnam. It shows some grilled fish…
Originally published on Substack. Read and subscribe here. https://deferocontra258173.substack.com/p/when-evidence-calms-fear?r=3ouoi0 I was raised in a culture that celebrated intuition and looked down on logic. Logic belonged to engineers and accountants. Intuition belonged to the much more exciting group of people, artists and visionaries. But here’s the thing. Logic, when combined with…
Originally published on Substack. Read and subscribe here. https://deferocontra258173.substack.com/p/how-an-inventor-thinks?r=3ouoi0 Some people walk past little annoyances every day without giving them a second thought. Others can't help trying to fix them. I belong to the second group. The first group ignores or tolerates those little annoyances. The second group might happily…
Originally published on Substack. Read and subscribe here. https://deferocontra258173.substack.com/p/beware-menus-you-cant-read?r=3ouoi0 One evening, I sat down at a large open-air restaurant in Da Lat, Vietnam. I already knew this place catered almost exclusively to locals. No problem, I thought. I'm an adventurous eater. A few days earlier I'd used Google Translate to…
The people of Earth endured a global cataclysm VERY recently in geologic time. Many did not survive. But hang on. It gets even more interesting. It's likely that this violent event wiped out pockets of civilization that were even more advanced than our own, just in a different way. (No…