Blog
Who Actually Reports Crypto to the IRS — and What the Data Reveals
A deep dive into IRS data on cryptocurrency tax reporting — who reports, who doesn't, why crypto sellers look different from stock investors, and what computer science has to do with it.
Combinations Are Just Permutations That Forgot Their Order
How dropping the order requirement connects permutations to subsets, and why binary strings, grid paths, and choosing teams are all the same problem
Beauty Is Already Running Your Life — You Just Don't Notice
How the science of beauty quietly shapes what you eat, where you live, what you buy, and who you trust — a capstone connecting ten posts of neuroaesthetics to daily life
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