wilder

Inference Review is quite simply the most undeservedly under the radar journal online. And I hope it is not alway so.

"What keeps this going is that each VC thinks they're better than average. Most of them are wrong."

Only some have this belief and only some of those are wrong, but it isn't what 'keeps VCs going' generally. That would be the high pay and our prestige culture.

As to the point about interest rates, you may be correct, but for the conclusion to follow we need an account of why capital makes yield chasing more aggressive in the private vs public markets. With public markets on all-time highs, cost of capital there doesn't look historically expensive. I suspect that you are correct about rates distorting the private market but for different reasons.

Source: am a vc, am professionally obligated to speak with vcs.

"Different brain regions including external frontal cortex, cerebellar hemisphere, entorhinal cortex/hippocampus and choroid plexus contain fungal material, which is absent in brain tissue from control individuals. Analysis of brain sections from ten additional AD patients reveals that all are infected with fungi."

I am an Everlane fan (wearing one of their tees right now, actually), but I find their low/no-markup marketing message to be a turn-off.

For example, the shirt I'm wearing is $22, but they claim a comparable shirt costs $50. The reality is it feels like a $22 t-shirt. I know what to expect from a $50 t-shirt — almost always a $20 shirt with a $30 logo. Occasionally a $50+ t-shirt has something special going on (usually in the thickness/stitching), but the Everlane shirts are standard quality with a cut that fits me well. And the "comparable value" inflation of the women's clothing seems even worse.

The style is enough; would rather not be told I'm getting a special deal that I don't think I'm getting.

Thanks for posting — after reading Pierre Cartier's article in the Inference Review it is exactly the tour of Recoltes & Clef that I was hoping would appear in time. I had no idea whatsoever that it already existed.

I appreciate the vividness of your minestrone, pho and chocolate examples, but I can't seem to do what you describe. I can't imagine smells or tastes -- both are as foreign as the visual modality (though much less missed). When I read the example I hear the words "imagine the smell of soup" I simply hear (in my head) my voice say the word 'soup', then, when asked to elaborate 'minestrone - pho' -- more words. I can sit with my eyes closed for the rest of the afternoon but the thoughts go no deeper, or I can silently direct my attention at the memory of the last auditory image, or repeat 'pho' in my head, or say something like 'curly noodles, light broth, deep green basil' and list off favorite attributes of pho, but it's low bandwidth audio and not cumulative in the way my dreamed pictorial representations are.

With respect to music, I can occasionally imagine a few concertos most of the way through in rich detail, but more often just in detailed fragments. I don't seem to have much control over how it sounds, what it is (usually Beethoven or BWV 1004), or when I can do it. I listen to a hundred contemporary songs for every one classical and I can't so much as summon the tunes or lyrics of any of them. Truth be told I don't listen to much music as I find it impossible to think while doing so, as if it's all on the same metaphorical channel.

edit: on the tiger, I'm not expecting the person to solve the speckled hen problem. People with stable mental images can count the stripes off the picture, none should simply "know" how many are there. Some believe (until confronted with such a challenge) they think in fuller, richer pictures than they actually do.

It's frustrating when people suggest I can visualize and just don't know it. The way one thinks is the most first-personally obvious thing in the world, and I've been sore about the way I do it since I was in elementary school wanting to imagine strawberries to count with.

Despite the literature I never accuse visualizers of the reverse (ie that you only think you have mental images), but when I do challenge incredulous friends about their phenomenology some discover it's actually much less pictoral than they'd believed: eg, "imagine a tiger, how many stripes?" or "imagine an ant crawling across a checkered picnic table toward a jar of grape jelly, what color square is it on now? what about now?" or "imagine a 3x3 word matrix whose rows read 'too', 'aid', 'ole' -- read the column words straight off without sounding out or going letter by letter". Granted, others can do these with an ease that amazes me.

"Can you draw a stick human figure? Did it pop into your head when I mentioned stick human figure? There you go, you just visualized it."

Yes I can draw a stick figure. I'm not an idiot, and nothing pops into my head other than the sound of the word and some xkcd affect.

Meanwhile, it astounds me that a single picture can pop into your head: how do you know what position to put the stick figure in -- akimbo, Thinker? Imagine a flower -- ok, which, a rose or a marigold? Do you decide or does it just happen? How many different flowers can you visualize, and how quickly? Do they appear embedded in soil or just floating free? How many different varieties can you see at once? What prevents you from seeing more?

Re: dyslexia -- I drew this link too, as I have very mild dyslexia. My father is profoundly dyslexic but claims vivid imagery.

FYI, the phenomenon you describe is an afterimage and happens to everybody (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage). You are correct that the visual cortex is involved in both phenomena but they are quite different. An after-image is still an "upstream" image on your retina, whereas a mental image is not. Whether the former can be used to increase facility with the latter I do not know. I haven't seen scientific evidence that imagery can be trained at all.

Despite all that it doesn't sound like a terrible place to start.

It has been intermittently amazing to me that I not only get by but am even considered intelligent without what seems (to me) an absolute gift and superpower that most people possess.

The rest of the time it's just obvious that there are tradeoffs, or that it's behaviorally insignificant unless one is off the chart positive on some modality. Would still give anything to picture though.

Sounds wonderful. The odd thing is that I can imagine what it would be like to have the sort of visual imagination that would be helpful in calculus.

Unfortunately it turns out that imagined imagination is worthless for calculus.

I have never been able to consciously visualize (meaning: think in visual mental images). All of my conscious thought is in the auditory mode, though I know what it would be like to visualize as it happens occasionally in a dream. I have always wished more than anything to have such experiences while fully conscious (to see my mother's face and so on).

There has been a fairly longstanding debate in philosophy and psychology about whether visual mental images even exist, yet when I discuss the issue with friends none of them can believe or understand that I lack imagery.

I've read a fair amount without encountering real evidence that the capacity can be developed. I've certainly spent time trying, but possibly in the wrong way.

A good place to start on the "mental imagery as simulation" literature is Kosslyn, e.g. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic561942.files/2009...

For an accessible window on the debate: http://www.edge.org/video/what-shape-are-a-german-shepherds-... and http://www.edge.org/discourse/shepardears.html

Curious to lean whether HN harbors any non-visualizers.

I had not seen the tweet injection as I tend to read less popular stuff. Having just looked at a nytimes article, would have to agree that it's quite abrasive.

I'm a big fan of this snapping, page down scroll style. It moves as fast as I can scan yet never halts in position that renders one (or two) entries unintelligible. Should I want to get to a totally different set of stories I can swipe left.

This app is phenomenal. Other readers (e.g. Flipboard) make too many sacrifices at the altar of design. I enjoy playing with them at first but the information density just isn't high enough for me. Prismatic gets the density right without being overly utilitarian.

I only started using the web version this week so I can't speak to the intelligence component yet.

With his time. Always interpreted student questions charitably and took them seriously. Not something all professors do.

Took a course of his at Berkeley. A fantastic and generous man.

Who I'd be submitting my business idea to in confidence is not a detail.

Does anyone know the mechanics of how the ads are pushed to the Kindle? Does Amazon observe user behavior and content of the ad supported Kindles in ways they didn't with the Kindle 3?

I had the exact same thought.