Blog
Counting Gets Interesting When Things Start Repeating
Why counting "at least one" is harder than it looks, how overcounting sneaks in, and what anagrams reveal about arranging things that aren't all unique
Every App You Use Is Really Just a Conversation
How the patterns behind modern apps — request/response, async, routing, threads — map to restaurants, kitchens, and apartment buildings.
Regular Languages Stay Regular No Matter What You Do to Them
How to build DFAs for specific patterns, why flipping accept states gives you the complement, and how running two machines in parallel proves closure under union
Patterns Look Different When a Machine Has to Actually Check Them
How regular expressions formally describe patterns, and how DFAs — the simplest possible machines — actually verify them, one character at a time
What Can Computers Actually Solve, and How Do We Know?
An intro to the theory of computation — decision problems, formal languages, and regular expressions explained through the lens of what machines can and cannot do
Why a Forgery Looks Ugly the Moment You Learn It's Fake
How origin, history, and hidden essences shape our pleasure from art, food, and people — and why you can't enjoy a Nazi's favorite painting once you know it's a fake
What Makes a Face Beautiful and How Much of It Is Biology?
Cross-cultural studies, infant preferences, and the uncomfortable history of measuring facial attractiveness — plus why babies and isolated tribes agree on beauty more than you'd expect
Why a Picture of a Brain Makes You Believe Bad Science
The voodoo correlations problem, why beauty probably isn't located in one brain region, and what the aesthetic triad actually tells us about how we experience art
Your Brain Rewards You for Seeing What Artists Want You to See
How peak shift, Bayesian perception, and perceptual grouping explain why art works — and why artists have been exploiting your visual system for centuries
Is Art an Instinct or Did We Just Make It Up?
Why art resists every definition, how duct-taped bananas end up in museums, and the evolutionary debate over whether creating art is built into our DNA
Four Theories That Try to Explain Why You Like What You Like
Mere exposure, arousal dynamics, prototype theory, and fluency — how psychologists have tried to crack the code of aesthetic preference, and where each theory breaks down
How Do You Actually Study Beauty in a Lab?
What happens when researchers try to measure something as subjective as beauty — and why the gap between what we feel and what we can test matters