BetterExplained
Share your ?Aha?s: links.betterexplained.com
2008-10-10 19:29:31

BetterExplained is about 2 years old, and what ride it’s been. The best part about having a geek diary is interacting with other learning aficionados. My “to read” list grows longer by the week (not that I mind!) and I’ve received some fantastic recommendations.

But that’s all me, me, me.

My friends at slinkset let you make a custom news site to share, vote and comment on articles. I’ve always enjoyed the per-article discussions in the comments here, but they’re constrained to specific topics — why not share any link or topic?

Enter links.betterexplained.com. It’s a repository of links and explanations that gave you that “aha” moment. What can you do?

  • Read good explanations. When I’m learning a new topic I’ll privately save delicious bookmarks. Now, we can share articles that make us go “aha!” with everyone.
  • Learn how to communicate well. When I find an insightful post, I think “That was awesome. How can my articles be like that?”. Usually it’s a combination of style, empathy with the reader, live examples, and useful analogies that make a subject click. Seeing a job well done is a wonderful learning tool. (If you want to learn how to write, read.).
  • Share your explanations. Several readers have asked to contribute articles to the site. Right now, I’m the editing bottleneck and can barely keep up with my own posts — avoid this slowpoke and post your story! Any reader can enjoy your epiphanies and give you feedback.

I’ve put up some of my favorite articles and hope you will do the same (you can contribute anonymously). Happy math, science, business, programming… :)

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BetterExplained
I don’t understand all the dominoes in the financial crisis. In situations like this, it’s helpful to step away and look at general principles: never mind the pieces, what’s the “gravity” that makes them fall? And fall so hard? Leverage. Leverage is debt used for investment purposes, and is extremely important. Why? Debt, when invested, multiplies [...]
BetterExplained is about 2 years old, and what ride it’s been. The best part about having a geek diary is interacting with other learning aficionados. My “to read” list grows longer by the week (not that I mind!) and I’ve received some fantastic recommendations. But that’s all me, me, me. My friends at slinkset let you [...]
Accepting that numbers can do strange, new things is one of the toughest parts of math: There’s numbers between the numbers we count with? (Yes — decimals) There’s a number for nothing at all? (Sure — zero) The number line is two dimensional? (You bet — imaginary numbers) Calculus is a beautiful subject, but challenges some long-held assumptions: Numbers [...]
It’s an obvious fact that circles should have 360 degrees. Right? Wrong. Most of us have no idea why there’s 360 degrees in a circle. We memorize a magic number as the “size of a circle” and set ourselves up for confusion when studying advanced math or physics, with their so called “radians”. “Radians make math [...]
Pi is mysterious. Sure, you “know” it’s about 3.14159 because you read it in some book. But what if you had no textbooks, no computers, and no calculus (egads!) — just your brain and a piece of paper. Could you find pi? Archimedes found pi to 99.9% accuracy 2000 years ago — without decimal [...]
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