And other questions — Does Borella have a mayor? Does the Mayor of Colombo oversea Avissawella also? Will the UNP win Colombo Central this time [2023 Local Elections]? Friends have asked me these questions in the last few weeks. You may know the answers. …

Solving a Hard Problem — On my prediction methodology, why life is easy in Toyland, how the real world is difficult and never perfect, the type of bias we like, why some biases are impossible to correct, and magic. Even if you learn nothing about the table, you might learn something about the ruler… Life is easy in Toyland The…

How to predict and what to expect — On what 36 months can tell us, things that “follow a little later”, two flavours of error, statistical earthquakes, Black July and Black Swans that flap their wings in only one direction, when all bets are off, and my predictions for 2023. “This year [2023], we anticipate 1.55 million tourist…

And the good things about bad things — On regretting regret, why history books and ancient buildings are fake, and how to make a firm friend of a former foe… I used to think that regret (or the desire for the past to have been different) was a bad thing. For one thing, desire leads to suffering. For…

On Better UI Design — Two apologies in advance. This is article primarily about UI Design; it is not really about how to renew your passport. Sorry for the click-baity title. I’m not a UI Designer, nor is this article a comprehensive primer on UI design. Instead, I discuss just one aspect of good UI…

Aphorisms — Disclaimers This is not meant to be expert advise on fitness or health. I am not qualified to do that. 2. All aphorisms are wrong. It’s just that some are useful. Hopefully, some of these are useful. 3. My goal in contrasting Yoga to the gym is to highlight that the…

A 3D Metaphor for Information — TLDR: TLDR’s are a bad idea. Metaphor We consume information in different ways: From watching news videos, to reading books, to sitting through a 4-hour opera. I like to think of the “volume” of information that we consume as the product of three separate dimensions: Intensity, Variety and “Meaningful” Time. Intensity By…

A Simple, Unbiased Algorithm for Delimiting Polling Division Suppose we want to divide the Colombo Electoral District into 16 polling divisions. We could start with dividing the region into two sub divisions with roughly equal populations, each with 8 seats. How precisely do we do the division? We could make…