I've recently been trying to be a responsible adult and be more cognizant of my finances, which means that I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos on the subject. Back in high school, when I was more optimistic than I am now, I told myself that I would never get into debt. I figured I…
I've never been a fan of tipping. Partly because of the inconvenience of it, and partly because of the awkwardness of it. The inconvenience is fairly straight-forward: at restaurants and other such venues, you must temporarily turn into Rain Man in order to perform the necessary calculations to determine the proper tip amount. If you…
People often smugly use the term "common sense" to belittle people and make themselves feel better. "Ha! That's common sense, that person is an idiot for not knowing it!" But perhaps some tidbits of knowledge aren't as common as some people think. Everyone probably has a set of things that they think should be "common…
If you haven't seen A Beautiful Mind, then you may think the term "Game Theory" sounds like some geeky over-interpretation of video game strategies, but it is in fact a complex mathematical discipline that has a wide-ranging array of real-life applications. While many adults might not think a "game" is a very serious term, in the…
If you dabble in photography, have you ever thought any of these things to yourself: "My aperture is wide open, but I still can't get an artsy blurry background, what gives?" "I'm shooting a landscape in low light and don't want to bump up my ISO, how much can I widen my aperture but still…
Over the holidays I helped my dad make some BBQ using his new smoker, and it turned out really well! Smoking a pork shoulder isn't too terribly difficult, the tricky part is getting the smoker set up so that the temperature is stable, getting the rub on the meat right, and then just being patient…
A friend and I were reminiscing about college one time, and of course since we were both engineers the topic quickly got to what was the worst we had ever done on a test. He joked that whenever he or his friends got close to a 50% on a test they would reassure each other…
So often in life we are forced to learn things without really understanding why. It's the classic "wax on, wax off" mantra from The Karate Kid; you spend some amount of time learning or doing something that doesn't seem to have any relevance, and then one day your teacher shows you how important it is. Now, in…