Miles B Huff

Miles is a software developer with degrees in linguistics and cognitive science. He has a vast array of interests, and writes notes about them frequently. Every so often, he writes something he feels would be of some value or interest to the Internet. When he does, he posts it here. DISCLAIMER: Please realize that this is not a formal medium, and Miles makes no claims as to the ongoing veracity or rigorousness of his posts here. Many are simply ideas or conjectures, and in that vein they may not be perfect reflections of Miles's actual takes on things. Regardless, Miles hopes that these notes may be of some use or interest to someone out there on the web.

How to be a social butterfly

March 4, 2024•367 words

Be friendly, confident, and outgoing, and get really good at smalltalk. Figure out what sorts of topics work well for you, and use them as appropriate to keep the conversation going. The opening's often the hardest for me, since I try to make it somewhat seamless. It's easier in some situations than others. Like, standing in a line or being on a bus, those are pretty easy. Strangers on the street (or at grocery stores) are trickier, since I feel like I need some kind of hook first (example: ...

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How much of knowledge is just language?

March 1, 2024•828 words

How much of knowledge is just language? We know from some cognitive and psycho-linguistics experiments that the way language encodes things can actually change what we remember, and how we remember it. One mentioned in Guy Deutscher's book, "Through the Language Glass", is (should my memory serve me right) an experiment done at the end of the 19th century with a tribe that lacked a word for "blue", instead using "green" to cover both hues (a phenomenon often referred-to as "grue"). When shown...

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Psychological concerns of our modern world

February 9, 2024•410 words

Human faces become more-attractive to us the more we see them. This feature presumably evolved to make us get along better with our tribesmen, and to find an acceptable mate with fewer options. But in the modern world, where we see so many strangers, everyone looks comparatively uglier than in days of yore, barring ofc modern fashion and makeup. This causes issues in the dating world. People swipe left on tons of people whom they would have found quite attractive had they seen them many time...

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Responses to video about monosyllabicizing English

December 19, 2023•2,008 words

About This is a collection of some rather detailled comments I left on the following YouTube video: I Removed Most of the Syllables from English and It's 30% Faster Now On the issues with the linguistics in the video 2023-12-18 This is a curation of three replies I made. The two long comments were replies to an individual asking why I thought the video bordered on being incorrect. The last quote block here was part of the first long comment. A couple contextual sentences were ommitted to ...

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Academic Conjectures

December 15, 2023•573 words

This is a list of what I feel (or at least felt at the time) to be interesting novel questions for Science. Most (or all) of these are questions I cannot, myself, answer; accordingly, I have recorded them here so that others might be inspired to research what I cannot. Psychology Is a person's brain (and gut), when started on SSRIs in childhood and discontinuing after the age of 25, wired with the expectation of having extra serotonin, such that discontinuing the SSRI will lead to an actual...

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Insights on Metabolic Syndrome

December 14, 2023•1,490 words

I've learned some really groundbreaking things about the body recently, and put two-and-two together to realize: the human body can't really process fructose; like, it really doesn't know what to do with it. And fructose alone (such as in high-fructose corn syrup) seems to have good explanatory power for America's ongoing obesity epidemic. The tl;dr of this, is linking the Personal Fat Threshold theory to knowledge of how fructose is metabolized. If you already know about both of these, lig...

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Miles's Overnight Porridge

November 23, 2023•1,350 words

Idea: At night, put sprouted rolled barley, salted roasted peanuts, veggies/mushrooms/fruits, RO-filtered or distilled water, a dollup of skýr, and some salt into a bowl; stir; cover with a plate. Leave overnight on the counter. In the morning, press the plate against the bowl, and allow any excess water to filter out into the sink. Mix EVOO, Creole seasoning, lecithin, and cheese into the porridge. Add salt only to taste. Why: Barley was chosen as a balance between wheat and oats: Ba...

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Miles's Honey Matcha Latte

August 17, 2023•989 words

Ingredients 10oz Hot water 2oz Cold water 1tsp Matcha powder Salt 1/2 cup Whole milk powder Raw honey Ceylon cinnamon powder Instructions: Get a 20oz coffee mug Add 1/8 tsp cinnamon powder (can go up to 1/4 tsp if you want) Add hot water (10oz/1.25cups) Add a dash of salt Stir with frother Add cold water (2oz/0.25cups) Add 1tsp of matcha powder (can do 2tsp if you want) Stir with frother Add 1/2 cup of whole milk powder Stir with frother Add 1-2tsps of honey Stir with frother (Optional) Sp...

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