People of the 1st kind will say that the cup on the left is clearly better. The presence of the handle makes it more usable and versatile in certain situations:

1. you can comfortably hold it filled with hot tea without burning your hands;

2. if you spill it, there is less chance of getting your hands wet;

3. as you only need 2-3 fingers to hold it, you can hold another object with the same hand (like a pen, a notebook or a phone).

And it still leaves roughly 95% of the cup’s circumference to hold it in exactly the same way as the one on the right, for example to warm your hands.

People of the 2nd kind will say that the cup on the right is perfectly fine, and that the handle is a useless overhyped feature. They would provide a counter-argument for every advantage from the list above:

1. if the tea is too hot for your hands then you shouldn’t drink it anyway;

2. just don’t fill your cup to the edges so that it doesn’t spill;

3. people invented bags for carrying pens, notebooks and phones.

This divide is what fuels endless battles on the internet between haters and lovers of different products that are claimed to be user friendly. Quite often such battles do make sense when that user-friendliness comes at the expense of either premium price or reduced functionality, which is something that people of the 1st kind could rightfully complain about. Some of these people might even be unaware that there is a better way, but as soon as you show them – they will agree.

But sometimes you can encounter people of the 2nd kind, who genuinely don’t see the value in good user experience, caring solely about functionality. Even when a more user-friendly or inclusive solution requires absolutely zero compromises, they won’t see the point.

This reminds me of the line by Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory (S3E13) about Windows 7: 🙂
“Windows 7 is much more user-friendly than Windows Vista. I don’t like that.“

Why FRUXTRATION

I definitely belong to the 1st kind – I care deeply about good user experience and I notice lots of details around me that could be improved. I think that growing up in post-soviet Ukraine in the 90-th contributed significantly to my craving for user-friendly products and services. I’ve touched upon this in my other article.

To channel my frustration with suboptimal user experiences and to bring together people who care, I’ve created a new Reddit community – r/fruxtration.

fruxtration [fɹʌksˈtɹeɪ.ʃən] – from the combination of two English terms:

• frustration – resistance to the fulfillment of an individual's will or goal;

• ux – common abbreviation for user experience.

This decision was a combined result of 3 factors:

1. made me realise that I care about user experience (of both myself and others) way more than an average person;

2. Olena Bomko brought my attention to the rising popularity of Reddit in the world of social media and marketing;

3. I’ve heard the introduction of the book Tribes by , talking about the power of communities with shared values.

As the list of my topics for this blog has been growing, I was getting convinced more and more that my criticism of bad designs doesn’t really fit in there. So I needed a separate place for my UX rants, and I realised that Reddit is a perfect place for that. Instead of documenting in my blog all the frustrating design details that I notice, I can create something bigger and hopefully more influential.

There are plenty of resources on the internet about UX design, explaining the philosophy of good design, its fundamental rules and best practices. Yet applying them in any specific case is not that simple, since there is always an infinite number of ways to implement every single detail. That’s why having clear examples of what not to do within those guidelines helps to dramatically reduce the number of options that one would consider. Talking about bad examples can be useful no less than talking about good examples.

What is the PURPOSE

My vision for this community includes the following three goals:

1. expose and document poorly designed features of products and services that ruin someone’s experience;

2. motivate people in charge to fix those issues and to not repeat them in the future;

3. educate future designers and builders on what mistakes to avoid, by showing the real-world examples of frustration they may cause.

Especially now, when the AI-race is putting so much emphasis on being faster and more efficient, the balance between quantity and quality is tipping in favour of quantity (see my other article on AI degrading quality). I want this community to keep reminding the corporate world that there are humans on the other end, whose feelings and experiences matter no less than crude numbers from the performance reports.

How is it DIFFERENT

There are several existing communities that to some extent overlap with r/fruxtration in their primary topic, but none of them matches its exact purpose. Below I’m listing the 4 biggest subreddits (including their average weekly visitors):

• r/mildlyinfuriating (10M)

• r/CrappyDesign (556K)

• r/assholedesign (190K)

• r/BadDesigns (38K)

As you can see from the screenshots of these communities, their whole vibe is more about ranting and making fun of bad designs rather than providing constructive criticism. In the case of r/mildlyinfuriating the scope goes even beyond just designs, including any kinds of experiences that feel obnoxious, as illustrated by this flow-chart1 from one of the communities. Regardless of the specifics, their primary goal is entertainment.

The RULES

To ensure that posts are constructive and serve the primary purpose of r/fruxtration, there are several rules to be followed when publishing a post. The main goal is not to entertain but to be clear.

1. Concise TITLE

Title is the first part of a post that a user sees, both on Reddit and in previews outside of the platform. Considering that it can’t be changed after posting, it is crucial to get the title right. It should be concise enough (less than 15 words), and specify exactly what it is about – not the emotion, but what has caused that emotion.

Whenever it is about a specific place, product or brand, its [name] should be mentioned in square brackets at the beginning of the title.

Here are a few examples of good titles:

• Potentially confusing water level in the espresso machine

• [BOSCH] Round touch-screen makes this microwave a nightmare to use

• [GTT] English interface incomplete and useless

• [Substack] Acceptance of cookies reloads the whole page

This allows anyone to immediately understand if the topic or the brand described in the post are worth of their attention.

2. Details in the BODY

The body of the post is where the whole story behind the issue should be included – the more the better. This is where you can express your frustration to the fullest, mentioning every detail that has contributed to the bad user experience. As long as it’s relatable and makes it clear how a specific feature of the design had resulted in a specific bad user experience, it’s useful.

The only two things to keep in mind are:

• mention the relevant details that would prevent confusion with another product or service;

• don’t be rude against individual people, since the point of posting is to criticize the design and its implementation, not the designers themselves. We never know the exact reason and motivation behind.

3. IMAGES & VIDEO for illustration

A picture is worth a thousand words. If you’re able to provide a set of pictures, screenshots or a video, clearly demonstrating the issue or some of its parts, please include them in the post. It greatly reduces ambiguity of the description and makes it more relatable.

Keep in mind that currently Reddit only allows a single video or multiple images in one post, but not a combination of the two. Therefore, decide in advance whether the issue is better illustrated by a single video or by several photos/screenshots.

The DESIGN

To differentiate from the comic style of the other subreddits, I’ve used minimalistic styling for r/fruxtration, sharing the base theme color with this blog.

The logo features two letters (UX – for user experience) with a skewed underline, resembling a frustrated face 😕

I’ve also asked opinion from other designers in the r/logodesign community, whose feedback was mostly positive and consistent with my intention to keep its meaning simple and not too obvious. Hopefully it does the job.

The STATS

It has now been 1 month since r/fruxtration went live, during which it has grown to 80 members and generated 4K views. These are still quite small numbers, but I hope it’s just the beginning of an exponentially growing curve.

So far these have been generated almost exclusively by my own posts about things that I personally am frustrated about. I’m sure I can continue like this for another month.

Once the critical mass is reached and enough like-minded people join the community, I expect that the majority of its content and discussions will be driven by other people, who care about user experience no less than me. The shared goal of this community is to keep focus on good experience for humans.

If you’re one of those people, please JOIN r/fruxtration TODAY!

JOIN ON REDDIT

It has been part of me from the very young age. I remember my father being annoyed with me as a kid, when I was painting the fence too slowly, making sure that every square millimeter was covered with paint; or as a teenager, when I was doing the body-work of our old BMW, spending the whole day on just one line to go perfectly straight through the doors and the fender. During my PhD I would often have a sleepless night before a meeting, spending hours on my slides, making sure that everything is aligned, the key words are emphasized and the colours match.

So to an external observer this would qualify as perfectionism. And the common wisdom about perfectionism is that it’s a bad thing. It’s usually linked to procrastination and has been reflected in several well-known expressions:

• “Perfection is the enemy of progress“ – Winston Churchill

• “Perfect is the enemy of good“ – Voltaire

While I do acknowledge the objective fact that perfectionism prevents you from getting things done, I don’t see it as black-and-white. In this article I want to argue that the opposite of perfection is no better than perfection itself, and my main point is the following:

Anatomy of content creation

My father is an artist, and I remember this wooden sculpture of a dolphin that he was teaching me how to make, when I was around 7 years old. I’d spend the whole day doing it, and it wasn’t nearly as good as my father’s version.

The whole process had very distinct stages, each taking a different fraction of time:

1. draw a sketch in 1:1 scale (5%)

2. transfer it to a piece of wood using carbon paper (1%)

3. cut the contour out using a saw (4%)

4. carve away the rest, creating the proper 3D shape (80%)

5. smoothen the surface with sanding paper (7%)

6. polish the surface and let it dry (3%).

At every stage you can tell that it’s a dolphin, yet every new step adds finer details, making it look closer to the final result. What is particularly important is that the last bit of sanding and polishing took about 10% of the time, while the most labour-intensive part of carving the wood took 80%.

A similar distribution of time and effort I’ve seen in pretty much any type of content creation, being it photography, video editing, blog writing or designing a presentation. A big chunk of effort goes into creating the main rough part, and then a smaller chunk goes into polishing it – similar to what the Pareto principle1 postulates.

Importance of perfection

I don’t see perfection as an absolute measure. I see it as a level relative to one’s abilities. For instance, when I was editing the first skating video2 for my YouTube channel it took me about 4 hours. It was the first time using a new software, where I had to learn new concepts, new techniques, new shortcuts, all while reading documentation and watching video tutorials.

My fifth video still took me a few hours to make. Despite having the previous experience that should make it faster, the level of quality I wanted to reach had now gone up as well. Instead of simply stitching together several videos with some background music I now played with slow motion and speed-ups, colour grading, video stabilization. In my later videos I would add another camera with a different angle and frame rate, make it in tune with the music, add some graphics.

This progression was possible only because I’ve set the bar high enough relative to my baseline, pushing myself to learn something new each time. Just because I could finish in 30 minutes what used to take me 4 hours didn’t mean doing less work. It meant doing the same amount of work to get even better result, pushing my baseline higher every time.

What is important to note here is that the result was never really perfect in absolute terms. Even if I worked on a video for 10 hours there would still be something I knew could be done better. The point is to set the bar somewhere above the baseline every time. This is what gradually pushes the baseline up, closer and closer to absolute perfection.

Reference of perfection

To just get the feeling of where your baseline stands, you need a reference of perfection. And this cannot come from a tutorial, “X for Dummies“ book or from your teacher. It has to come from observing other creators, seeing what you like and what you don’t like, reading reviews about the work of others, deciding whether you agree with them or not. All this builds your own taste and ultimately – sets your own bar for perfection.

In the world of video-editing my perfection references came from movies, professional sports videos and creative ads – they’ve defined my taste and expectation of what a really good video is supposed to look like.

Same with photography, programming or even presentations – my definitions of perfection came from people whose work I liked, not just from practical textbooks or tutorials.

Lazy road to mediocrity

This algorithm of gradual improvement through repeated work has been disrupted by AI tools in pretty much every category of content creation. It can now write text, generate photorealistic pictures, edit videos, write code and create slides – all in a matter of seconds. This allows you to skip the huge chunk of work that used to go into creation of something. The question is:

It’s very tempting to let AI quickly do its job and move on, seeing its output as a finished product. And that’s what most people do, because most people are lazy. The problem is that your work becomes as far from perfection as everyone else’s, or in other words – mediocre. And that’s the trap you should try to avoid.

I think the best way to illustrate this is by comparing the quality vs effort distribution between a bare human and a human with AI.

Without AI you continuously work on your project, gradually making it better and better. This process is naturally slow and smooth, which allows you to keep going until you reach your level of perfection.

With AI you get a result of decent quality right away, which makes it harder to keep going towards the same level of perfection. Another hour of your work seems to add too little value on top of what AI produced in seconds, so it’s harder to justify the extra effort.

Don’t skip the polish

I want to argue that the extra effort is worth it, potentially even more than before. While AI raised the bar of mediocre quality, it also made it accessible to pretty much everyone. But one thing hasn’t changed – to stand out, you still have to be better than the majority of others.

It’s up to you whether you want to do it the old way – on your own, or the new way – with the help of AI. Either way your quality level must be above the new level of mediocrity.

I have two examples that illustrate this quality gap quite vividly today (February 2026).

1. Video subtitles

In the past, when real humans were manually typing subtitles, their quality was definitely higher than it is now. The only common error would be a typo, which a simple spell-checker could easily fix. AI-based transcribers, on the other hand, can generate loads of subtitles very quickly, making the process way more efficient. But AI often makes mistakes that a human would never make, like confusing words that sound the same but mean different things (two/too/to, they/there/they’re), using wrong punctuation that changes meaning or even misspelling your own name. Especially rare names and foreign words are often turned to something completely different simply because it sounds more familiar in English.

Without any automation you would spend maybe 30 minutes on subtitles for a 10-minute video, manually typing the text, adding line breaks, adjusting timestamps. With automation you can now get subtitles that are 97% as good in just a few seconds. So you‘ve saved yourself 30 minutes of work thanks to this great technology. What do you do with that free time now?

Well, you could spend 6 minutes rewatching your video at 2X speed and fixing the remaining 3% that contain mistakes. That would make these subtitles as perfect as in the old days, while still being 5 times faster. Or you can just leave them at this mediocre 97% level and move on to another video. The vast majority of creators clearly choose the 2nd option.

Automatic transcription has dramatically increased the amount of generated subtitles – pretty much every video now has one. But it decreased the level of quality in those subtitles, making it practically impossible to find a single video that wouldn’t have at least one spelling mistake. And it’s not the AI’s fault. It’s the creator’s fault, who chose quantity over quality.

I assure you that people watching videos with captions do notice those 3% with spelling mistakes. And while 3% is numerically insignificant compared to 100% of all the transcribed words, it is infinitely huge compared to 0% of mistakes that a perfect transcription would have.

2. Infographics

Many people have suddenly started adding infographics to their writing as a visual illustration of their ideas. Normally designing an infographic would take some 10-20 minutes at least, while now you can simply ask AI to generate a visual representation of what you’ve already written. And the quality of such infographics is often absolutely terrible.

The whole point of an infographic is to make your message more clear and easier to understand. It uses visual features like position, colour, shape and size to represent hierarchy, connections, sequences and dependencies in a way that words do not allow.

Have a look at this example of an AI-generated infographic. From far away it looks like something decent, but if you look closer, you’ll notice some trivial spelling mistakes that a human would never make.

Just a few that I’ve spotted: INFRASTRCTURE, IHOU, STAKEEDERS, STAKEDERS, REATIONSHIP, ROUTIINES, LIVING LIVING

Besides, an infographic generated from text by definition cannot add anything new to it. It simply summarises what’s already in the text, it doesn’t complement it in any way. This defies the purpose of making the infographic in the first place, let alone when it contains mistakes.

Like typing subtitles, it takes time to draw individual boxes, fill them with text, arrange and connect them in a meaningful way. So AI does save a lot of effort by generating it all in a few seconds. But should you really not spend a few extra minutes to correct the spelling mistakes? I think you should.

In fact, if just typing the words with correct spelling is too much effort for you, then it’s probably a bad infographic to begin with, because an infographic must be primarily visual, not textual.

A tool, not a worker

This brings me to my last point – you should see AI as a tool that you use, not as a worker that does your job. In any piece of content that you create, AI should speed up some portion of your work, but not deliver the finished result as a whole. You still have to do the polishing yourself.

In this respect I want to emphasize the aspect of AI tools that is often overlooked – does its workflow provide enough areas for you to intervene? This can be a sophisticated user interface in the tool itself, tight integration with external products or simply an output format that can be opened in another software, where you can do the polishing. If all you get is the finished result ready for consumers, it’s probably not the right tool.

For instance, I’ve seen people using Gamma3 to generate presentations from large documents in seconds. And like with subtitles or infographics, from far away it looks like a decent slide deck. But if you look closer, you notice details that go against basic rules of composition and layout: boxes of different dimensions not aligned, line breaks in random places, lines too thin and so on. Its interface is designed to create content as quickly as possible, leaving very limited control over its appearance.

Other established apps like Apple Keynote, Microsoft Powerpoint or Google Slides have these very basic controls as the foundation – positions and margins of text boxes, width and colour of lines. Gamma would have been a perfect tool if it had those controls hidden in some Advanced controls tab, but it doesn’t. So sometimes the most viral AI tool that everyone’s using might be exactly the one to stay away from. I personally can only use it for internal prototyping and testing ideas, but not for a real presentation facing the outside world. That’s just not the level of perfection I’m comfortable with.

To be fair, Gamma does have the “Export to Powerpoint” option, which in principle allows you to do the polishing there. But I find the user interface of Powerpoint unnecessarily over-complicated and not user-friendly at all, so only after Keynote appears in the list of Export options will I seriously consider it as part of my workflow.

It’s even worse with infographics from the earlier example. A human-made infographic will have each box, each line and each text as an individual object in the document, making it trivial to fix a typo, highlight a word or change the colour of an arrow. All these features at the core of the visual power of an infographic take just a few clicks and a couple of seconds to implement. But if you generated it in ChatGPT4 as a JPEG image, you’d have to spend minutes on back-and-forth conversations to make those changes, and the result would still be slightly different from what you wanted.

In this respect I see a lot of potential in the Anthropic’s approach with their Claude5 ecosystem. They provide an interface for their AI models to directly control the tools like Excel and Powerpoint or virtually anything else through their Skills6 feature. Letting AI do its work using the same tools as you is a really effective way to cooperate without compromising on quality. Software developers have been enjoying this level to the large extent with things like GitHub Copilot7 extension in VSCode or dedicated editors like Cursor8, and I hope this philosophy will expand across all the possible tools that people use.

Epilogue

Being mortal humans, time is a limited resource for us, so we have to choose wisely what to spend it on. Therefore, it’s important to understand which aspects of your content systematically contribute to its core value, and which ones are occasional add-ons.

For instance, the photorealistic dolphin images from the beginning of this article I’ve generated with AI. It did the job of visually illustrating my point, but it has plenty of factual mistakes. In the actual sculpture the tail of the dolphin was bent in the other direction, the wooden slab was much thicker, and the polished version had no black sketchy lines on it. Yet this is the best I’ve managed to achieve in a few minutes of conversational AI instructions.

I would say its quality level is below 70%, which is pretty bad for my standards. But at the same time, I don’t have enough skills in 3D rendering to do it quickly enough at a higher quality. And this kind of illustrations are very rare in the content I produce, so it’s pointless for me to invest much time into learning it either. So this is a compromise that I have to accept on this rare occasion.

In fact, explicitly mentioning it here further proves my point about the quality gap. Pretty smart, ha? 😏

Finally, most of my criticism about the degraded quality of AI-generated content is attached to the context of today. I have no doubt that AI will keep improving, raising the level of mediocrity higher and higher. So over time the amount of polishing that you can do will be getting smaller and smaller, and eventually it might be eliminated altogether. And from that moment the only way to stand out will be through the quality of your input to the AI. But as of now – it’s quite far from perfect, which leaves you plenty of rough edges to sand and polish.

Introduction

I’m not a big fan of metaphors and analogies, as they are very limited in their purpose. They usually fall apart as soon as you start building any logical structure from them in a new context. But there are a few things I’ve understood in the process of becoming a skater that were not obvious to me earlier, which I’d like to document here – both for myself and for anyone else reading my blog.

I believe that these lessons can extend beyond just skating and can inspire pretty much anyone to look at certain aspects of life from a different angle, including sports, education, career or personal growth. As there are quite a few lessons I want to talk about, I’m dividing them in two parts:

• Part 1 – more technical, focusing on the physical and psychological aspects of becoming a skater and content creator from zero;

• Part 2 – more philosophical, about the mindset and attitude developed by skating that are worth adopting in other aspects of life.

This article is dedicated to Part 1 – how you become a good skater and why it’s worth the effort. If you, or your partner, or your friend, or your kid, or anyone in your circle is a skater or thinking to become one – you might learn something from this.

A bit of history

To begin, let me share a brief history of how I got into skating in the first place, just for some context.

I got on my first rollerblades when I was a kid, maybe around 10 years old. That was my main outdoor leisure activity for a couple of years, until I got a bicycle. It peaked on one summer when almost every day I would go with my friend to skate near a construction site at the Minska (Мінська) metro station in Kyiv 🇺🇦. We would borrow their bricks to build obstacles that we could jump over, gradually increasing the hight and length of our jumps.

That was probably when my love for tricks started, since simply skating on flat ground seemed pretty boring after that. Over the next 1-2 years I’ve broken a few pairs of skates and eventually stopped, when I got a bicycle. Yet my obsession with tricks remained throughout other activities, being it riding a bike, learning breakdance, parkour or acrobatics.

For the next 18 years I didn’t have any rollerblades, but I did occasionally skate on ice, maintaining the feeling that “I know how to skate“. Everything changed at the end of 2018, when I tried skiing for the 1st time. Even though I was still far from a confident skier, I made it to the bottom of a pretty steep slope, very proud of myself. 😎 But most importantly, it refreshed in my memory that feeling of adrenaline that comes from realizing the risk of failing and the feeling of joy after finally succeeding.

That’s when I bought my 1st pair of skates, as a cheaper and more accessible alternative to skiing. To my surprise, when I’d put them on I was as bad as a complete beginner – nowhere close to the memory of me jumping over bricks and curbs when I was a kid. So I basically had to start from zero, watching YouTube tutorials again, which was quite a humbling experience.

It so happened that I also had a GoPro camera, which I’d bought impulsively in the past and never even opened. So I decided to make use of it by documenting my progress while skating, thinking that it will help me see my improvements and keep going. Since I love cinematography, I’d soon started adding music to my videos and posting them on YouTube. As I always seek improvement in whatever I do, I started watching tutorials on how to make videos look more professional and eventually started an Instagram account as well.

This below ⬇️ is my best video from the video-production perspective. It wasn’t the peak of my skating skills, but I’ve put a lot of thought into composition, shooting on 2 cameras (Sony Alpha II + GoPro Hero4) and editing in sync with the beautiful soundtrack from my friend – Simplify1 by Polygrim.

By 2021 I’ve become relatively well known in the Wizard-skating community – a fairly niche style of skating that I was particularly passionate about. As a result, I’ve received some free equipment prototypes from a couple of brands to test them, providing some feedback and making video reviews.

The notable early prototypes I’ve tested and reviewed where:

• Ronin and Dragon rockered frames from NN Skates2

• 4100 rockered frame from Rockin’ Frames3

In February 2022, when the war in Ukraine started, I’ve stopped skating and making videos, as I didn’t have the “having-fun” mindset for quite a while. Eventually I got back to occasional skatepark sessions or city rides – just to keep myself in shape and not lose the muscle memory.

Investment of effort

I want to start with probably the most important reason why rollerblading is not as popular as more common kinds of sport, like running, cycling or going to the gym. As I’ve mentioned, all these kinds of activities feel pretty boring compared to skating, yet most people choose them. I think the reason is – it requires a significant investment of effort to learn skating decently enough before you can actually enjoy it.

At the beginning, when I started relearning how to skate, I’ve spent many days in a corner of a parking lot just training my balance, how to push, how to stop, how to turn and even how to fall properly. I had to become good and confident enough before I could start skating anywhere around other people. This is where you can properly feel the joy of skating, gliding through space like a super-human. But at the parking lot it’s not fun.

That phase of feeling weak and clumsy, falling every minute, is really frustrating. So you have to be ready to invest your time and effort into pushing through it, knowing that eventually it will actually become enjoyable. This inevitable phase is present in other kinds of sports as well, like skateboarding, skiing or snowboarding. That’s why some people give up in the middle, before reaching the fun part, while many – don’t even start.

Just to demonstrate what I mean, this is my very first video, when I’d just started feeling confident enough to go outside of a parking lot, into the wild. My moves were much less fluent, felt not very enjoyable and it was even worse before that.

This is very similar to one of my favorite fragments from BoJack Horseman – the ending of Season 2, when he was trying to do jogging: “Every day it gets a little easier. But you got to do it every day. That's the hard part.“

Visual target

Even though I’ve always been quite patient and able to systematically learn new things, it still only works if there is a sense of incremental improvement. Without it I eventually become desperate and give up.

The best way to see this incremental improvement is to have a clear target that you can look up to, such that after every increment you get a little closer to it. Without a target you may improve random aspects of your skills that don’t necessarily add up to something actually useful. A fixed target forces you to focus your effort in one direction, making the improvement more visible.

Nicola Torelli

For me the first such target was Nicola Torelli – an Italian skater whose selfie-stick-style videos I came across on Instagram. At that time he was mostly doing very dynamic free-skate sessions on busy city streets. This combination of impressively high speed in environments full of obstacles and his effortless flow through it made him look like a superman. But I knew that in reality he’s just a human, so I could learn to be like him too.

That kind of urban flow became my target. I knew exactly what kind of video tutorials to watch and what to learn. The bar has been set.

Leon Basin

When I’ve become fairly comfortable skating on the streets, I’ve come across another video that immediately became my new target, and remains my absolute favorite to this day: “The Wizard of Wall Street“ starring Leon Basin, produced by Mike Torres. First of all, it was at the whole new level in terms of production quality – it was something you want to watch on a big screen with good acoustics.

It was a proper short film with a distinctive aesthetic feel to it, both in Mike’s filming and in Leon’s skating. But most importantly, I saw the kind of movements that I had never seen before. His skates were unlike any other at that time, with 4 huge wheels on a long massive frame creating this captivating metal-sound effect. And the way he moved on those skates was absolutely mesmerizing.

It was beyond effortlessly fluent. It seemed to defy laws of physics. I’d spend hours rewatching various parts of this video, going through them frame by frame, trying to figure out how the hell he did it. For my level of skating at the time those moves seemed absolutely impossible, so it became my new target.

I had later discovered that it was a fairly new and relatively unknown style of skating, called Wizard Skating4, and the most incomprehensible of those moves is called Gazelle5. Eventually I’ve mastered it during the lockdown, and even though I never reached the Leon’s level of mastery, the amount of incremental improvements I did on the way to it was far beyond my expectations. And I’m sure I would have given up much earlier if I didn’t have this video as an inspiration and constant reminder of how damn cool I will be when I learn it. 😎

Side view

Another crucial aspect of learning something really well is having an objective view of yourself from outside. In the case of rollerblading it means filming yourself.

When you’re learning a new trick, you don’t know how it’s supposed to feel – you only know how it’s supposed to look, based on what you’ve seen when somebody else did it. So when you’re trying it again and again, for more than a hundred times, you feel that you’re slowly getting better, which can make you think that you’re already good. What often happens is that you film yourself and realise that you’re nowhere close to what you’d imagined.

This is particularly common at the beginning, when you haven’t developed the muscles to jump high enough, or swag to lean far enough, or confidence to go fast enough. Seeing yourself from the side lets you face the reality, see your mistakes and improve much faster.

This is very similar to what calls the First Mirror in her framework of Three Mirrors of Radical Honesty6.

For completeness, I should also say that sometimes it works the other way around, mostly with tricks that are very technical. Wizard skating in particular is full of subtle moves or balance shifts that are almost impossible to notice from outside, but they make a huge difference to how it feels in the process.

In those cases even videos don’t help. What does help is the randomness. Every time you repeat the same trick, something in your moves is slightly different. And when you’re doing it long enough, eventually, by pure coincidence, you do the right thing. Unintentionally, maybe because you got distracted. And that’s when you immediately notice the difference and realise that this is how it’s supposed to feel, not the other hundred times from before. And from that moment you intentionally do small variations until you get that feeling again, and again, until it becomes fully controlled, and eventually – fully automatic.

Muscle strength and technique

The best thing about rollerblading is that it makes you physically fit, without the struggle of becoming physically fit. Your muscles getting stronger is simply a byproduct of having fun.

Whether you’re skating on the street or doing tricks in a skatepark, you spend most of the time with your knees bent. Otherwise you can’t push or control your balance or absorb impact after landing. So your muscles are working out all the time, from just being on skates. You do get tired physically of course, but not mentally.

One of the surprising things I’ve realised in this period of occasional skating is how disconnected the pure muscle strength is from the technique. When I was learning different wizard-skating moves, I was doing it wrong hundreds of times until I did it right. And doing it wrong meant that I would force some moves by brute force, trying to make my skates repeat a pattern that I’ve seen in some video. And it required a lot of physical effort, pushing my skates against the natural way they wanted to go.

I struggled not because I wasn’t strong enough, but because my technique wasn’t exactly right. Eventually, by coincidence, I leaned a little bit more and moved my hips a few milliseconds earlier, and suddenly there was no resistance from the skates. They repeated that same pattern effortlessly, and that’s when I knew that it not only looked right but also felt right.

So now, when I don’t skate very often, my muscles and ankles are not nearly as strong as they used to be. But the technique is still in my muscle memory, so I can repeat most of the tricks by simply contracting the right muscles at the right time. Certainly there is less elegance and magnitude in my moves, but building strength on demand is way easier than building technique.

Hardware matters

When a random person looks at a pair of skates they see a shoe with wheels attached to it. Maybe they will note a colour of the wheels (because the boot is usually black anyway), but that’s pretty much it. And that’s what I saw when buying my first pair of skates – the old black Rollerblade Twister 80.

As my skills were improving, I started noticing different things about the skates that weren’t perfect or didn’t feel exactly right. And what I realised is that there are tons of parts that can be changed in a skate, and there are tons of different brands that I’ve never heard of, producing those kinds of parts. The boot, the liner in the boot, the insole in the liner, the laces, the frame, the wheels, the bearings, even the spacer between bearings inside the wheel – each of these things exist in many variations made by different manufacturers.

Just wheels alone have so many different aspects to them:

• diameter – affects the ride smoothness

• profile shape – affects speed and rolling resistance

• core structure – affects weight and impact transfer

• polyurethane hardness – affects grip and sliding resistance

And then you can have different colours, LED lights, metal sparkles, rebound layers. It’s a massive amount of variations in just a wheel. In a complete skate – that’s a whole universe that you can play with. And that degree of customisation is what turns a regular pair of skates into your pair of skates. It reflects your anatomy, your character, your skating style, your environment.

Speaking of environment, for example, smooth streets of Geneva 🇨🇭 can be enjoyable on small hard 76mm wheels, which would be a nightmare on the rough streets of Turin 🇮🇹. But switch to a bigger setup with softer 100mm wheels and it becomes pure joy in Turin, but potentially too fast for Geneva.

⬇️ These are just a fraction of setups that I’ve been skating over the years, and each of them had a unique feel to it. Only after experiencing enough of them I could properly understand how each aspect of every component makes an impact. So now I know exactly what I need and why, in every given situation, being it a bowl in a new skatepark or city streets of Toronto (yes, I’ve skated there too).

Good hardware also matters

One thing I’ve seen people say sometimes is – you don’t need high-quality skates to be good at skating. And they’re technically right in a way, because most of the tricks I’ve learnt, I can also do on the shittiest pair of skates. But there is a fundamental difference between learning a technique and executing a technique.

The first thing that a shitty pair of skates does, it makes it less enjoyable and less comfortable. It doesn’t really matter when you’re doing a trick once, just to prove the point. But it matters massively when you’re repeating it a 100 times in a row trying to learn a trick. Pressure points, sore feet and wheels that don’t roll properly – all that adds even more struggle to the already frustrating process of learning, making it more likely that you give up.

Another important point is that when you don’t know the technique yet, there are million possible ways of doing it wrong and only one way of doing it right. So you need that randomness effect to do its job, accidentally making the move that feels right. But when your skates don’t roll consistently enough, or the boot doesn’t hold your foot properly – that adds even more possible variations that you have no control over. That means that it will take even longer for the right combination to happen by accident, making you more likely to quit.

So yes, you don’t need advanced skates if you just want to go for a casual 1-hour skate a few times a month, since you probably won’t feel much difference. But if you want to do anything more advanced that requires consistent repetition – shitty skates will make your life way harder than it should be. And in that case it’s better to start with a good foundation – a skate that at least allows customization and upgrades when the need comes. Cheap skates usually don’t have that foundation.

Epilogue

Throughout my skating journey I sometimes asked myself this one question:
“Am I just being childish and immature? Should I just grow up and go the gym?“.

After all, the core aspect of skating that makes it so valuable for me is the fun and thrill I get from landing a trick that feels cool. That kind of joy is usually what drives kids, while adults seem to be content with more pragmatic and seemingly less fun activities. Things like running in a park, swimming in a pool, lifting weights in a gym or even playing tennis – they all have this more adult vibe of discipline and effort for the sake of outcome rather than pure joy.

This made me rethink my attachment to common wisdom and opinions of others – what some might refer to as social anxiety. This and other more philosophical aspects of rollerblading I will discuss in the 2nd part of this series, including:

• trusting the process despite fear;

• danger of hesitation;

• gradual build-up of complexity;

• effort behind effortless;

• groups driving bravery.

As you can tell, I’ve started the blog after all, thanks to the gentle push of inspiration from my most devoted listener and professional storyteller – Ife Thomas. She had convinced me that the things I notice, complain and think about on a daily basis may actually be interesting to others, not only to my own overthinking mind.

Now, a couple of months later (December 2025), that list of topics has grown quite a lot. So far I’ve been writing them down in my Notes app every time a new seemingly worthwhile thought crossed my mind. But now I’ve decided to keep that list of thoughts here, publicly available, such that you can see what I think about and what to expect from this blog in the future.

I update this post as I publish new articles, changing the publication date correspondingly.

Topics list

The topics below are listed in no particular order, and will be published based on whatever I decide to write about at any given moment. I will be updating this list, adding new items when new thoughts cross my mind or adding links whenever a topic turns into a published post.

🧪 Science related

• UV protection in sunglasses

• Bit flips provoked by radiation affecting our society (Airbus emergency, elections)

• Good vs bad experiment (scientifically speaking)

• Have you ever touched anything? (not really)

• Dust layer under Antarctic ice (IceCube)

• Safety of microwave ovens

• How to heat your house efficiently

• How to dry clothes effectively

• The importance of asking “Why?“ (link with marketing)

• How to dress to be warm

• Upload vs download bandwidth in video-calls

• What is radiation? (light, heat, ionization)

• Why stop signals are red?

• The trick of a pressure cooker

• Vitamin D, sun, iron deficiency and dark skin

• Main principles of science

• Inverse square law (photography, acoustics, audio/video calls)

• Humidity and temperature perception

• Keeping teeth healthy

• Dreams: seeing vs remembering

• Wastefulness of keeping the fridge open

• Do you turn your lights off to save energy?

• Armpits, hair and bad smell

• Voltage, current and power: confusion about USB chargers

• Swiping off water in the shower

• Organization to reduce combinatorics (labels, folders, tags)

• Teeth care: chewing gum vs rinsing the mouth, floss

• Privacy of interior lights at night

• Are scientists actually rude?

• Misuse of scientific language (energy, vibrations, quantum)

• The colours you see on this screen are not actually there

• Common misconception about evolution

🧠 Thought provoking

• Justification for premium-priced products

• What I’ve learnt from rollerblading: Part 1

• What I’ve learnt from photography (common misconceptions about pro cameras)

• What learned from my YouTube channel

• Importance of luck

• Two kinds of technological progress: social impact of AI, social media, phones

• Comfort vs resilience

• Importance of learning other languages

• Empathy and effort/comfort ratio for inclusivity

• Point of no return created by marketing (female shaving, take-away coffee)

• Systems for risk reduction (alarms, hands out of pockets, traffic lights)

• ChatGPT killing writing identity: handwriting → style of expression

• Origin of superstitions and traditions (Inception: how did you get there?)

• People not ashamed of sharing chatbot outputs

• Case for placebo

• Absence of logics in languages

• Understanding vs memorizing (circle/ellipse formula)

• Gender encoding in words (English vs Ukrainina/Italian/German)

• AI deteriorating our thinking capabilities

• Sliced bread - not the greatest invention

• Embracing of uncertainty (fakes, religion, science)

• True purpose of education: thinkings vs learning

• Hidden complexity of simple things (websites, emails, social media)

• Unappreciated single points of failure (open-source developers, ASML)

• Sustainability paradox of recycled materials

• Survivorship bias and racism

• Conspiracy theories: yes and no (SAR, Palantir)

• The meaning of miracles (past civilizations, myths, religion, UFOs, fakes)

• Religion vs mythology vs science

• Medicine vs natural selection: complex system

• Statistical perspectives (vaccination, draughts)

• Focus of attention (bias, prejudice, astrology)

• Colonial language details

• Implicit privacy consent of being in public

• Valley of despair

• Doing vs outsourcing tradeoff in learning

• Is intuition worth listening to?

• The value of reading vs listening or watching

• Perfectionism done right (brand perspective)

• Quantity vs quality of AI (autogenerated subtitles, infographics)

• The existential question about AI slop (when it’s too good)

• Capitalism vs socialism: dynamic range perspective

• AI marketing: socialist ideology vs capitalist reality

• Death of abstraction kills inclusivity (Barbie, LEGO, Hot Wheels)

• Multidisciplinary knowledge as creativity multiplier

😌 User Experience

• Invisibility of good design

• Importance of User Experience

• Priority for bicycles

• Priority of payments in restaurants

• Fuck the EU cookies regulation. I press “Accept all”!

• Edge cases causing most of the work (80/20 rule taken to extreme)

• Orientation of knife&fork packaging

• The case for piracy (torrent, Netflix)

• Reusable school books

• Time to pause and optimize (blind typing, keyboard shortcuts, manuals)

• Waiting at a pedestrian crossing

• Disproportionate effort as objective case against AI slop

• What is fundamentally wrong with Apple’s glass design in 2026 OS’s

⚙️ Technical

• My UI design for wafer-level chip-quality analysis

• Discovering a swapped cable from experimental data alone

• Insane alignment precision of silicon tracking detectors

• Foundations and perks of numerical systems? (binary, decimal, hexadecimal)

• Easy way to grow Karma on Reddit

If you have your own topic suggestions that you’d like me to think about, feel free to write them in the comments below.

Leave a comment

The problem

There is one aspect though that complicates life – individual pieces of winter clothes are generally thicker and heavier. They absorb more water during washing, which makes them harder to dry. The lower temperature, both indoors and outdoors, doesn’t help either.

As I’ve already mentioned in my post about the fridge, humidity is a problem, as it is the prerequisite for bacteria to multiply. This increases the risk of infections in case those are some dangerous bacteria or fungi. And almost certainly there will be some stinky bacteria among them, which primarily come from your skin and body oils. When they multiply they can reach concentrations at which you can feel their smell quite strongly, which is not great either.

The objective

Sticking to my target of the best user experience, I want my clothes to be dry while satisfying the following conditions:

1. have no bad smell;

2. use little energy (in kWh);

3. do little damage to the fabric;

4. take as little time as possible.

I’ve ordered them from the highest to the lowest priority, as would be during my normal washing routine. You can tell that I’m quite sensitive and intolerant to bad smells. If I can save money or preserve quality but the clothes smell bad as a result – I’m not interested, because I won’t enjoy wearing a shirt that stinks.

💡 Obviously, if I’m in a rush and have a very specific shirt to wear the same evening, this list will look different. I might have to compromise on the energy efficiency or fabric longevity for the sake of saved time.

In the following I will go through all the relevant aspects of making clothes dry, such that you can come up with the optimal process for your own list of priorities, even if it’s completely different from mine.

Humidity

Considering that humidity ⨉ time = bad smell, it would be silly to keep your clothes wet for no reason, even if it consumes no energy and doesn’t damage them.

Therefore, first and foremost – take your clothes out of the washing machine right after the end of the cycle. If you know that you’ll go to sleep or leave for work before the cycle ends – better don’t start it. Do it when you’re sure that you’ll have the time to unload your washing machine right away. Your clothes might smell better with just a small time-management tweak.

You certainly can reduce the initial amount of bacteria to start with by using a sanitizer or increasing the water temperature. Hot water will kill more bacteria, but it consumes more energy and ruins the fabric faster. Instead, a sanitizer adds a minor extra cost, cupboard space and potentially a smell of its own. So if you definitely have to leave them wet for hours, a sanitizer is probably a better option to avoid bad smell.

The physics of dry clothes

Turning wet fabric into dry fabric means removing all the water from it. The biggest amount of water is removed by simply squeezing it out, which your washing machine hopefully does for you already. It’s usually done by a spinning mechanism that creates a centrifugal force pushing the water outwards through the fabric and out. The surface tension of the water makes it stick to the fibers of the fabric, counteracting that centrifugal force. Therefore, the higher spinning rate you set in the washing machine, the more water manages to overcome this surface tension and escape the fabric.

💡 Too high spinning speed will squeeze the clothes too much, potentially overstretching them. This is particularly critical if you have different types of fabrics mixed together, like denser and heavier fabrics pushing and stretching the softer ones stuck in the middle. For this reason washing machines usually limit the spinning speed to around 400 rpm (revolutions per minute) on the Delicate program.

Once the clothes are out of the washing machine, there are essentially 3 physical aspects that define the drying process: heat, humidity and flow. Let’s look deeper into each of them.

Heat

To leave the fabric, water must evaporate, which means transitioning from a liquid state into a gas. Since surface tension keeps the molecules of water together, they need extra energy to overcome that molecular bond and break free. This extra energy comes in the form of heat, which is taken away from the fabric, effectively making it colder. The higher is the temperature, the higher is the kinetic energy of the water molecules and, therefore, less extra energy is needed for them to break free.

💡 I personally use the same principle as a cheap way to make my floor feel fresh during hot Italian summers. When it dries after a quick wash with just a bit of water it feels noticeably cooler – quite pleasant for the feet. At a larger scale this principle is used in evaporative cooling towers of nuclear powerplants1, where the rising clouds of water vapor make it more visible.

Humidity

Evaporation brings water molecules into the surrounding air, which is the only relevant process when the air is perfectly dry. In practice though, there are water molecules in the air as well, which can condensate around the colder wet fabric and absorb back into it. So in reality evaporation and condensation are two competing processes, and humidity of the air defines the balance between them. The higher is the humidity the slower will the water actually evaporate from the fabric.

One important aspect of the humid air is that it’s lighter than dry air and normally rises up, which is what allows clouds to float so high up in the sky. For this reason the upper side of your clothes dries much faster than the bottom side. The air evaporating from the top side can rise freely into the air, whereas water evaporated from the bottom side naturally rises back into the fabric, keeping the humidity high.

💡 The lighter weight of humid air is the consequence of water having lower molecular mass (18 u) than nitrogen (28 u) or oxygen (32 u), which get replaced by water molecules (“u” stands for atomic mass units2).

Flow

As the water evaporates, the air immediately around the fabric becomes more humid. Even though it rises up as it is lighter than dry air, it happens very slowly, effectively creating a higher-humidity layer around the fabric. This build-up of humid air slows down the evaporation process, taking the fabric longer to dry.

If you create a slight flow of air, it pushes that humid layer away, reducing the effective humidity around the fabric. Furthermore, this flow reduces the air pressure, which also helps evaporation. This is why clothes usually dry faster outdoors, because even a slight breeze blowing through the fabric speeds up evaporation quite a lot.

How to dry fast

When you combine these three aspects together, you get the formula for the fastest clothes-drying method – the tumble-dryer. It continuously blows hot dry air through all the parts of your clothes, ensuring that the water completely evaporates from them as quickly as possible. It’s a perfect solution if you only care about the time, ignoring the other objectives from the beginning of this article like energy consumption and fabric preservation. A tumble dryer consumes extra energy to heat the air and wears down the fabrics faster through all the extra friction it creates. Finally, it occupies extra space that might be a dealbreaker too.

The next closest option in terms of speed is a hair dryer. If you direct its hot air on the fabric it can dry out in just a few minutes. It still consumes extra energy to heat the air, but it doesn’t add any friction to the fabric. Of course it is way less energy efficient than a tumble dryer, since a large portion of the hot air is wasted to heat up the whole room instead of being recirculated back into the fabric. Therefore, it is more of an emergency solution for a single piece of clothes that you urgently need to wear.

Finally, a heated towel-rail radiator in your bathroom, if you have one, is a good way to supply the extra heat to your clothes, speeding up the drying process. It’s certainly slower than the previous two methods, since it lacks the air flow, but still much faster than just leaving them on a normal drying rack.

Obviously, in all these cases you should pay attention to the instructions on the actual fabric, since this high temperature might be damaging to some of them. These might include nylon, silk, cotton with paint on it, etc.

How to dry fast and efficiently

Now let’s switch to drying clothes efficiently first and then fast. These are the rules I follow myself, which are simply the logical application of the basic physical principles that I’ve discussed earlier.

Spread your clothes

First of all, arrange your clothes such that there is the maximum fabric surface exposed to the dry air, through which the water can evaporate. This means spreading them well, such that there are as few layers of fabric sitting on top of each other as possible – no folding, no stacking.

If your rack has those thin wires, then hang each piece across a pair of wires, not just a single one. This creates more space for the dry air to pass between the inner sides of the fabric, drying them much faster than if they were touching each other.

If you don’t have enough space to hang all your clothes in this manner, consider getting a bigger or a second rack. Or get one that has thick tubes instead of wires – whatever allows to create that space for the air to pass.

Ventilate the room

As your clothes are drying, the evaporated water increases air humidity in the room, which then slows down the evaporation process itself. To prevent that, it’s wise to open your windows and let some fresh air in. Especially if you’ve been cooking before and your windows are misted-up, all that vapor in the air will slow evaporation down quite a lot. If you have a humidity meter in your room, that’s a good way to watch how it’s changing and to decide when to air the room.

💡 Maybe unless you grew up in Germany, because then you’re probably airing the whole house every single day regardless – lüften3 as it’s called.

Add some wind

The final step to massively accelerate the drying process is to create a flow of air through your drying rack. I personally use a small fan at the lowest speed, just to create a slight breeze, without adding any acoustic noise. I think that the optimal arrangement is having it on the floor, directed slightly upwards along the lines of the hanging clothes. This steadily pushes away the humid air trapped between the vertical layers of fabric, and replaces it with heavier dry air picked from the bottom.

For the most uniform drying process it’s better to put it at some distance from the rack to create a wider flow covering it completely. You can put some water on your hand and place it at different corners of the rack to feel whether the breeze is reaching there. Since you probably won’t take the rack away until the last piece of clothes is dry, it’s better to have a weaker flow covering all of it than a strong flow that only covers a portion of the rack.

💡 Wet skin is much more sensitive to the breeze than dry skin thanks to exactly the same mechanism that I’ve described earlier: faster evaporation takes away more heat from your skin, which makes it feel colder.

Obviously, the clothes will dry faster if you increase the fan speed. It will consume more electricity and add more noise, which might or might not be justified, depending on your circumstances. But having a slightest breeze makes a huge difference compared to just stale air.

A few final touches

There are a few smaller details that might seem excessive, but ultimately they do make a difference as well. Keep in mind though that some people might think you have some kind of mental disorder when you go that deep into the details.

First, you can choose a better folding line than right in the middle when hanging your clothes. The idea here is to balance both sides in terms of weight, without any parts hanging too low, like long sleeves of a sweater or ever shorter sleeves of a T-shirt. This has to do with water being pulled down by gravity, while the evaporation happens mostly at the top. If you let too much water accumulate in a single spot, like at the bottom of the hanging sleeves, you’ll end up with them staying wet long after the rest has dried out. The same applies to trousers, where you have thicker fabric with pockets at the top, which hold more water than the thinner parts at the bottom. Placing that top part higher distributes water more evenly throughout the fabric, letting it evaporate faster.

Finally, you can rotate them when one side is almost dry and the other one is still wet. That would be the external side of the fold if you’re not using a fan, or the inner side if the air flow from the fan is strong enough. Either way, if there is such an asymmetry, you can flip your clothes, exposing the wet side of the fabric to the faster-drying environment.

Epilogue

As you can see, there is plenty of physics going on even in such a simple thing as drying your clothes. It involves heat, humidity, air flow, fabric thickness and surface area, etc. It can easily get extremely complex if you want to simulate every aspect of it to the last detail, which would involve the Navier-Stokes equations4 with lots of math. Yet there are plenty of ways to use physics in everyday life just at the level of concepts, basic understanding and logics, which is not as complicated and boring as the school curriculum makes it seem.

I hope that I’ve demonstrated this through a meaningful example and made you appreciate the power of scientific approach in particular. You can simply decompose a complex process into individual components and understand the dynamics of each of them. That is enough to judge what is the best way to get the outcome you want under any circumstances.

More cases like this will follow as I keep writing articles from my to-do list.
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While most of these developments were put in practice by engineers and entrepreneurs, it’s the fundamental scientific research that made those advances possible in the first place. For example, there would be no steam engine and later combustion-engine cars without the formulation of fundamental laws of thermodynamics first. There would be no microscopes and later photography without scientific formulation of the laws of optics. There would be no telephone and later computers and smartphones without the scientific formulation of electricity. No GPS2 without general relativity. The list can go on and on, with all the scientific works and industrial applications tightly intertwined into a series of small advances and groundbreaking discoveries, which ultimately have led us to the current state of technological development.

💡 This level of development is so high that it can seem absurd at times. Like when you check the Weather app on your phone, which sends GNSS signals to the satellites orbiting the Earth, to determine your location, then requests the aggregated data from a dozen of weather stations and processed by multiple servers, sending it back to you over a series of optical fibers and radio transmitters to eventually show you a number and an icon 🌦️ on the screen.

All this when you could just stand up and look out the window 👀

There are a few core principles that scientific approach is based on, which make it so effective at gradually building knowledge across decades and centuries. In the following I will talk about those principles, as I see them based on my own academic experience.

1. Verifiable Answer

The very first requirement for any kind of question to be scientific – it must have an objectively verifiable answer. Usually it’s some aspect of the world that we’re trying to understand, approaching it with a specific discipline that is best equipped for that specific question (physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, mathematics, etc.) Regardless of the discipline, the answer to the question must already be embedded in the world itself such that the reality becomes the ultimate judge. Example scientific questions can be:

• What makes objects fall on the ground?

• Why the sky is blue?

• Why fingers get wrinkly under water?

💡 Answer to the last question is at the end of this article, and it might surprise you!

Scientific approach to answering such questions has essentially 3 steps:

1. make a hypothesis about what the answer would be → potential answer;

2. develop it into a theory, using logical reasoning, to describe all practical implications of that hypothesis → theoretical predictions;

3. verify that all these predictions agree with reality at all times → experimental observations.

Step 3 is what separates science from philosophy, which addresses questions that are rather general or abstract, and therefore unverifiable. Philosophical questions don’t have one objectively true answer. Instead they can have multiple answers (like hypotheses) that can be quite elaborated with logical reasoning (like theories), but there is no way to tell if any particular answer is actually true. Ultimately success of a specific philosophical idea is determined by how many people know about it and whether they approve it. This leaves plenty of space for ego, authority, influence and other human factors, which are very much restricted in science.

💡 I would say that philosophy is actually closer to politics or marketing than it is to science, so it’s quite ironic that the academic degree given to doctoral candidates in scientific disciplines is still called “PhD” (Doctor of Philosophy). Considering how far science has gone from philosophy, that name should have been changed to something like “Doctor of Science” long ago. But people don’t like changes and often choose familiarity over common sense, especially if they are not scientists.

This requirement to be experimentally verifiable limits the list of questions or answers that science can seriously consider. For example, imagine a hypothesis that gravity is caused by a big monster inside the Earth pulling objects down by invisible strings. To prove it you’d need to dig a very deep hole and find that monster. If you have no technical capability to do that, then considering this hypothesis is pointless, since there is no way to verify it. Therefore, you lower the ambition of your question to something more practical, like “How fast do objects of different sizes, shapes and materials fall down?“ or “How does the falling speed depend on the height?“, etc. These are more specific questions for which predictions can be made and verified through experiments, to eventually converge to a theory that is able to make correct predictions for all these situations.

Now, after studying these very specific questions we’ve developed a very elaborated theory of gravity that explains way more effects than the underground monster could ever explain. Therefore, now we can say with absolute certainty that there is no way it’s because of a monster inside the Earth, without the need to dig underground.

2. Respect for Skepticism

Step 3 – proving that all theoretical predictions of the theory match the reality, is practically impossible, since there is usually an infinite number of situations for which the predictions can be made and tested. Therefore, scientists do the opposite – they assume that the theory is right and then try to prove it wrong by strategically choosing specific cases that challenge its predictions.

Only if the theory passes these tests every single time, such that scientists run out of any new meaningful cases to challenge it, only then they consider it to be a valid theory that can be trusted and built upon. Nevertheless, a bit of skepticism always remains in the back of every scientist’s mind, because at any moment some new experimental evidence can appear that contradicts that theory prediction, meaning that something in it is still missing.

What’s important is that as soon as a contradiction is found, it doesn’t matter any more how successful the theory has been before or how respected and influential the authors of the theory are. A single experimental evidence will prove it wrong, because it’s not someone’s subjective opinion, but an objective truth revealed by the nature itself.

This is the fundamental difference of science from religion, which is built on belief, seeing skepticism as a weakness. A perfect example of that is the famous trial of Galileo Galilei3 for his heliocentric theory, suggesting that Earth orbits around the Sun and not the other way around. This was seen as a heretical contradiction to the Holy Scripture by the Catholic Church, which insists on humans and the Earth being the central figures in the Universe.

3. Precision of the Language

As science relies heavily on comparison between theory and experiment, it is critical that apples are compared to apples, meaning that what is observed and what is predicted must be exactly the same. This is achieved by a rigorous use of language, with precise definitions of any special terms, elaborated description of all the conditions and effects being considered. Before publishing a scientific paper, every sentence is questioned by the authors for the possibility to sound ambiguous.

This minimises the possibility of misinterpretation by any other scientists who might want to challenge it or build on top of it in the future. This is also why mathematical language plays such an important role in most of the scientific disciplines – numbers, graphs and formulas provide much less room for misunderstanding than words.

Another manifestation of precise language lies in the way results are formulated in scientific publications – they precisely describe the exact thing that was predicted or measured. Any further speculative guesses or logical implications are clearly stated as the author’s personal opinion rather than an objective fact, such that others can decide how skeptical to be about it.

💡 The title of my PhD thesis was: “Associated top-quark-pair and b-jet production in the dilepton channel at sqrt(s)=8 TeV as test of QCD and background to tt+Higgs production“. It had 60+ pages of detailed explanation of all the aspects of my analysis (what and how has been measured), and only 3 pages with the actual results (plots and numbers).

This precision of the language also doesn’t let science talk about things that go beyond its reach, like, for example, whether our world was created by god. Science can tell us with a high degree of confidence how long humans have been around, how old our planet is, and based on how the universe is behaving – that it must have started from The Big Bang. It can even tell roughly how long ago it happened, and we can even detect the light that was produced at that moment4, but what was before that – we have no way to know, as there was neither space nor time before the Big Bang, according to our current understanding. Therefore, no matter what idea you have about the reason behind the Big Bang, for science it doesn’t matter because all of them are equally unverifiable.

It’s not excluded though that in the future our knowledge will advance to the point where that kind of question will become scientifically meaningful. But for now it is just a speculation that belongs to philosophy or religion, but not science.

4. Consistency in Every Detail

If two independent groups of scientists perform exactly the same experiment to measure exactly the same thing, in theory they should obtain exactly the same result. In practice though this is nearly impossible, because there are tons of tiny details that will inevitably be different between any two experiments. These can be the model or calibration of the instruments, fluctuations in the electric power line, slight differences in the room temperature or humidity, etc. All the tiny factors add up, potentially leading to noticeable differences in the final results.

This is why we look not for exact equality but for consistency between different results. This requires the result (R) to include not only the measured value (V) but also its uncertainty (ΔV), which accounts for all the known sources of variations.

In fact, sometimes more time is spent evaluating the uncertainty than performing the measurement itself, yet it is absolutely necessary for being able to tell if any two results are consistent or not. There is an elaborated mathematical apparatus for saying how compatible any two results are, which always boils down to numbers – the most precise language we have. And at no point something that looks inconsistent can be explained with just a “boh“5 🤷🏻. It can only mean a mistake in the experiment or the theory, which must be resolved.

A chain of such theoretical predictions and experimental measurements that are always consistent between themselves is what allows science to gradually add deeper and deeper layers of understanding, keeping this massive structure of knowledge stable and functioning across centuries of documented research.

Instead, inconsistencies are usually what drives major discoveries, forcing scientists to come up with deeper theories explaining the reality in more situations than before. Without very precise language and very tight consistency requirements at each point, it would very quickly become “roughly right“ in every situation, leaving no actual inconsistencies to resolve.

5. Peer Review

The last important step relies on scientists checking the work of other scientists. In particular, this is part of the review process before an article gets published in a scientific journal. In any serious journal there is a pool of scientists – “reviewers“, who get to critically review every article submitted for publication, checking if it satisfies all the necessary quality criteria:

• be scientifically meaningful and new compared to everything that has been published before;

• provide clear and precise documentation with no ambiguities;

• be consistent with existing publications on the same topic (or explain the inconsistencies).

Usually one article is reviewed by several independent people from different institutions, each of whom is an expert in the relevant field and submits a list of comments about every single detail in the article that is not fully clear or convincing. The original authors then have to address each comment by providing explanations, improving the text of their article or including additional calculations or measurements proving that their results are actually correct.

💡 Many journals adopt special anonymity policies, hiding the names of the authors from the reviewers and vice versa. This reduces the chances of prejudice or conflict of interest during the peer-review process, making it more likely that all publications are evaluated only based on their scientific quality and value.

Quite often a single article goes through multiple rounds of such exchanges between reviewers and authors, which can take months or even years until all the reviewers are satisfied. Only then the article is allowed to be published, becoming available to the wider audience, who can read it, discuss it at scientific conferences or use it as inspiration or reference for new studies.

Surprising inconsistency of wrinkly fingers

Here is a peculiar example of an inconsistency revealing a deeper scientific knowledge – the mystery of wrinkly fingertips.

We all know how the tips of our fingers get wrinkled if we keep them under water for a while, for example in a bath-tub or in the sea. The most intuitive hypothesis for this effect would be that it must be the water somehow getting soaked under the skin and making it wiggly. It also seems reasonable to assume that it must be the combination of the hard skin and the soft tissue underneath that is responsible for this effect.

If you consider other parts of your body that have soft tissue, like your buttocks, cheeks or ear lobes – no wrinkling happens there, as it’s covered by soft skin. Same situation with the rest of the body, where you have just soft skin and no soft tissue underneath. The only parts where you do have soft tissue under hard skin are your hands and feet, which both get wrinkled.

If you look at it as a philosopher, applying only logical thinking, you could declare this case solved, since logically everything matches perfectly. But if you look at it as a scientist, you’d perform experiments to prove your hypothesis. You’d put hundreds of people’s hands under water and sure enough, every time you would see the tips of their fingers get wrinkled. Following the principle of precise language, you’d have to measure at least one parameter that can be expressed numerically – for example, the time it takes the wrinkles to appear for each person.

What you’d probably see is that it’s not the same for everyone, so you’d have to do it more systematically. You’d document all the possible variables that could potentially have an influence on the wrinkling time, related to both the skin (thickness, oiliness, age, colour, etc.) and the water (temperature, acidity, concentration of chemicals, like salt or chlorine, etc.) As you go on with this experiment, collecting thousands of data points, you might start seeing some correlations and eventually develop a theoretical model that can predict how long it would take the wrinkles to appear for a given person in a bath tub with a specific water at a specific temperature. I don’t know if such a model would have any practical value, but in principle it’s possible.

What all these experiments would do is that they would add more details to the theory of wrinkled fingers based on the initial hypothesis – that it’s the combination of soft tissue + hard skin + water causing the skin to wrinkle. Yet none of them would prove the initial hypothesis to actually be true, since there is always room for skepticism.

💡 The initial hypothesis implies that there must be some unknown physical or biological effect in action. What if it’s the same effect that causes fresh paint on metal to wrinkle and chip away after hot-summer rain? This could be a good reason to study wrinkled fingers further and potentially discover a new way to make paints more water-resistant.

Eventually a single inconsistency ❌ in a very rare case proved this initial hypothesis wrong. It happened when the same experiment was repeated on a person with a kind of damage to the nervous system that interrupted any sensory input from their hand. In that case wrinkles did not appear, no matter how long their hand would stay underwater. That was a paradigm shift, since now it can’t be just the water itself making the skin wrinkle, but our brain commanding it to do so when it senses the presence of water.

At this point a completely new set of questions can be asked to understand it further. Is it conscious or subconscious? Does it depend on the mood of the person? Can it be caused by a dream during sleep, without any actual water in action? Finally, why on Earth would our brain send such commands in the first place?

A widely-adopted possible answer to the last question is that wrinkles noticeably improve grip on wet surfaces, making it easier to grab smooth objects under water and safer to walk over wet rocks, feeling less slippery. Since we barely ever use that advantage in our everyday life, it’s hard to imagine why that feature would be present in DNA of all the people on Earth. A speculative explanation for that is that it’s a very old remnant feature that we’ve inherited from reptiles, who spent way more time in water. The fact that some monkey species also develop wrinkles in the same way fits this hypothesis in the evolutionary context, but of course it’s not enough to really prove it. As scientists, we would need way more evidence and zero contradictions to eventually accept it as a mainstream theory.

💡 If you’re curious to know more, this BBC article provides a great overview of the different studies about this peculiar phenomenon and many cool aspects that have been discovered along the way, including the potential for early detection of Parkinson’s disease.

Epilogue

There are obviously way more aspects and nuances to a scientific process, which also appear differently in various scientific disciplines. But the core principles I’ve discussed above are the most important and universal, I think.

It’s important to note that these are the principles of science as a discipline, not necessarily of a scientist as a human. Any given scientist, being susceptible to the same kind of biases or character flaws as anyone else, can potentially deviate from these principles. Yet the rigorous system of science is meant to minimise their damage, while scientists are trained to be fully aware of such risks at all times.

I would say that these principles are followed most effectively in fundamental research, where the main objective is to simply discover the truth. Conflicts of interest and consecutive biases arise more often in applied research, which inevitably is connected to someone’s interests, which also have more influence on the funding. A prime example of these scientific principles being violated can be found in pharmaceutical research, as has been described quite well in this article by MIT Press:

In 2010, the NIH (National Institute of Health) found that studies with significant or positive results were more likely to be published than those with non-significant or negative results and tended to be published sooner.

So even science can get messy when people get involved, but I would blame it on the people rather than on science.

Ever since I’d become financially independent, any purchase I’ve made has gone through an internal justification process that boils down to one question – “Is it worth the price?”.

Here I want to share my pragmatic approach to this question, which doesn’t seem to be as widespread as I thought. I believe it would let you spend your money more wisely and be less affected by marketing manipulations.

💎 The thing to buy

First of all, let me clarify the exact type of spending I’m talking about, since it doesn’t necessarily apply equally well to every situation. I’m talking specifically about the cases where you want to buy something – usually an object – that exists in several variations at different price points. Therefore, you need to decide whether to buy the cheaper version or the expensive one.

This object can be anything – from a winter jacket or a pillow to a cooking pan or a pair of headphones. As long as you need just a thing – like a smartphone, and not the thing – like the iPhone 17 Pro 256GB, you’ve got multiple options to choose from.

If you need something very specific – there is not much to think about. You either have the money or you don’t 💁🏻

💰 The budget

Before even starting to evaluate any specific spending, you need to know your budget – how much can you possibly spend? These are not the money you currently have in your bank account, but the money you can spend without affecting the rest of your life. This means that you’ve subtracted the money you have to spend on all your basic needs, like rent, food, commuting, savings, and any other purchases you have to make. The rest – you can spend on your purchase and keep living your life as usual.

When it’s a big purchase that is planned way in advance, like buying a house, a car or something so expensive that takes several months of savings, you’d need to do some maths to calculate the expected amount of money you’ll have at the moment of the purchase.

Either way, you need to have a cut-off number – the maximum amount you can possibly spend on the purchase, which often reduces the number of options you can even consider. Usually the fewer are the options, the easier it is to choose.

☑️ Algorithm of choice

Let’s say your budget is €2000 and you need to buy a new smartphone. To simplify the problem, let’s say you’re already in the Apple ecosystem, so it has to be an iPhone – no other brand. But which one exactly?

With the €2K budget, today in Italy, you technically can buy the most expensive version (iPhone 17 Pro Max 2TB for €1999). But if you buy a cheaper one (iPhone 17 256GB for €799), you’ll have more money left to spend on something else in the future.

1️⃣ Spending → Saving

So the 1st step of my pragmatic approach is to reformulate the question in terms of saving rather than spending. Instead of asking yourself:
❌ “Should I buy a €1999 phone or a €799 phone?”
ask yourself a different question:
✅ “What should I spend the extra €12001 on? A nicer phone right now or something else in the future?”

Now, you can’t be sure what exactly you would spend these saved money on, yet it’s safe to assume that you’ll spend them on something that contributes to your everyday life. And the bigger chunk of life you take, the more possibilities it will contain to spend these saved money.

These can be the freedom to go to a concert, or travel to another country, or buy something you might enjoy. Either way, not having the money in the future will limit your possibilities and degrade your user experience with respect to the scenario where you do have the extra money. So unless you’re into “Live Fast Die Young” philosophy, saving money for later seems like a better option.

2️⃣ Money → Time

The 2nd step is to translate the problem from the dimension of money to the dimension of time. Instead of asking yourself:
❌ “What should I spend the extra €1200 on?”
ask:
✅ “How long would these €1200 serve me if I spend them now?”

Assuming a stable source of income, the longer chunk of life you take, the larger budget you will accumulate, making these €1200 seem less and less significant over time. Therefore, in addition to the usual parameters like the price, list of features, cool-factor, etc., you might also consider how long will this purchase serve you.

This is essentially what accountants call amortization2.

3️⃣ Resale or not resale

The last point to consider is what happens to your purchase at the end of service – will you throw it away, pass to someone else, or sell it? If you plan to sell, then estimate how much money you’ll get back and include that in your spending/saving calculation.

Furthermore, the plan to resell can affect your decisions in steps 1 and 2, since different models can depreciate differently over time, or even change the way you’d use them in the first place.

Returning to the iPhone example, you might choose a model based on its colour and finish. But if you put a protective case around it, to keep it like new and maximise its resale value, then you won’t actually see and feel that finish anyway, making it a useless criterion to decide on.

⏱️ Example: my watch

About 10 years ago I’ve decided that I want to wear a wrist-watch, which should have a minimalist Bauhaus-style design. After some research I’ve found my favorite model – mechanical Junghans Max Bill3, which had the right aesthetics accompanied with a satisfying ticking sound of its analogue mechanism. But at that time it was out of my budget.

So I ended up buying a much cheaper alternative – quartz Brathwait Classic Slim, which had a somewhat similar, but less sophisticated look, and was powered by a simple mechanism with a battery. It certainly didn’t look or feel as premium as the Junghans model, but it did the job for the budget I had.

About 8 years later I’ve got the budget for the Junghans watch, which I’ve bought without hesitation. And at no point during those 8 years had I considered getting an Apple Watch, which would provide a ton of extra features at a much lower price. To a large extent my reasoning was driven by the expected time of service.

Both left and right watches have a time of service that may easily exceed my own lifetime, limited only by their physical breakdown. The quartz watch is in a little weaker position, as it needs a new battery every year. Probably at some point such watches will disappear from the market, together with batteries for them, but I don’t expect this to happen any time soon. Having a stainless steel case and a scratch-resistant sapphire dome, it barely changed its appearance, so I would say that it served me very well for those 8 years.

The watch on the right doesn’t even need a battery, so having the same steel+sapphire construction and even more timeless design, it can last for way longer, serving not just me but also someone after me. This can’t be said about the Apple Watch, as it is designed to become obsolete after 5-10 years. Its hardware will become unsupported by the evolving Apple ecosystem and its non-replaceable battery will lose capacity, eventually making it unusable as a watch.

It’s worth noting that I had an option to buy a cheaper version of the Junghans watch, featuring a dome made of plexiglass instead of sapphire. That would greatly increase the chance of scratching or breaking it, effectively reducing its service time. So going for the sapphire option was an obvious choice that better justified the price of the whole watch.

Obviously, it would be a very different list of criteria projected on a shorter timeline if I were choosing a smart-watch instead of just a watch. Considering how rapidly these technologies are developing, I would be looking at the timeframe of just a few years, where price difference of even €100 would play a much bigger role.

♻️ Anti-consumerism

Looking at things through the lens of their service life forces you to be mindful about sustainability of your purchase, in line with the anti-consumerist mindset. It’s easy to fall into the countless marketing traps that convince us to buy something based on a cheaper price or a limited-time discount, exploiting our urge to save money. Quite often that amount you’d save becomes insignificant once you look at it from the time-of-service perspective.

In most cases the time of service is defined not by the product’s nature but by your intention. Take a chair for example – it’s a pretty simple functional object that can easily last for 100 years, if made well. Yet it’s your own decision whether to buy it for a lifetime or for a blink.

In IKEA4 you can get a cheap chair that would only last a couple of years, because of its poor quality. It’s designed for short service life, which is marketed as an opportunity for you to change your interior many times throughout your life. So choosing a more expensive alternative of higher and more enjoyable quality is only justified if you intentionally decide to keep it forever – choosing quality over quantity.

You might not want to do that if you’re buying it for a rented apartment in a city that you’re planning to leave in a year or two. But if you’re in a stable long-term location then why being a scrooge? 🤔

🧠 Premium mindset

Something I’ve noticed is that many people put themselves into a certain category of wealth and stick to it at all times, no matter what they’re buying. To put it simply, upper-class people only buy expensive things and working-class people only buy the cheapest things. And it doesn’t matter what the thing is – a car 🚙, a winter coat 🧥 or a kitchen knife 🔪 – in each product category they will only look at the price point marketed for their class.

I would argue that if you start considering the time of service, you can unlock premium quality in certain product categories with negligible effect on your budget. This would improve your user experience and make life more enjoyable.

Returning to the product categories I’ve mentioned above, let’s have some rough estimate of their cost and time of service:

• 🚙 – a car would cost at the order of €10000 and serve you for 5-20 years;

• 🧥 – a coat would cost at the order of €100 and also serve you for 5-20 years;

• 🔪 – a knife would cost at the order of €10 and easily serve you for 10-50 years.

I’ve only mentioned the order of magnitude for the cost to demonstrate the amount of money we’re playing with when choosing between a cheap and high-end version of a certain product. If you spend extra €200 on a car, you’ll hardly notice any difference compared to the base version, but for a knife – it will be something out of this world compared to a cheap €10 knife, and it will last for much longer than a car.

🔪 Knife example

This is exactly what I thought when I visited Japan 🇯🇵 – a country known for the highest-quality professional knives. I’ve dedicated a budget that I could possibly spend at that time and bought the best knife I could find for the money, with my name engraved on it by a Japanese guy working at the store.

Now, every time I’m cooking at home – I’m enjoying the look of it, how smoothly it cuts through vegetables, how nicely the handle feels in the hand, even the sound it makes when wiping it with a towel. A cheap knife doesn’t simply break sooner, or loses sharpness faster. Some of these aspects you will never experience in a cheap knife, even when it’s brand new. And if you never reach the upper class, you’ll never get that bit of daily life experience, which was totally within your reach all this time.

It has been 4 years now that I’m enjoying my Japanese knife, but my target is 40 years at the very least. For that purpose I’ve also brought a Japanese sharpening stone, which could probably last for a 1000 years. Maybe I should carve my name on it as well, for the future archeologists… 🤔

A similar logics would apply to a coat – you could spend extra €200 to get a really high-end piece made of high-quality materials that would last for decades and age more gracefully. The only catch is – your body-shape or your aesthetic tastes might change over such a long time, putting a limit on the maximum time-of-service you can practically target.

⭐️ Justified premiums

Putting in practice this time-of-service approach, here are a few examples of products that are totally worth extra price.

• 🍴 cutlery (spoons, forks, knives) – you hold them in your hands, put them in your mouth, they’re are practically indestructible;

• 🖋️ stationary (pen, ruler, stapler) – you feel it with your hand, can last for ages;

• 🪮 comb or hair brush – good designs last for ages;

• 🔈 passive loudspeakers – you can switch amplifiers over time, but a good-quality speaker will preserve sound quality for decades;

• 🪑 furniture (if staying long-term) – can easily serve multiple generations and you get to look at it and touch it every day;

• 👜 bag or purse – cheap ones break after few months; quality ones last for years and look better;

• 👟 shoes – when made of high-quality materials they can easily last for 10+ years and age quite well;

• 💍 jewelry – we have samples preserved from ancient civilizations;

• 🫖 kettle or mokka pot – very simple construction and working principle that is hard to break, but can be a piece of interior;

• 🛠️ mechanical instruments (screwdriver, hammer, wrench) – you get to feel them in your hands and they’re meant to last.

Many more can be added, depending on your lifestyle and priorities, but I think you get the point.

🎬 Epilogue

As mentioned in my earlier article on UX, I care a lot about getting the most enjoyable user experience out of my life under any given circumstances. This is why I look for ways to use high-quality products when it matters and the situation allows.

In all my examples I’ve only considered features of the products themselves, which is not always enough. All these time-of-service projections might be overestimated when taking into account external factors, like living in an area with high robbery rate, where your beautiful watch or coat, meant to serve you for 30 years, is likely to be stolen in the next 2 years. I wouldn’t invest in buying high-end furniture for my home if I lived in a war-zone city that is bombed every day. I wouldn’t buy expensive jewelry for a scatterbrained person who is likely to lose them in a year or two.

Another important aspect – high price doesn’t always mean high quality that will extend the time of service. This is particularly relevant for clothes in the modern age of fast fashion. Making sure that you’re overpaying for quality and not for the logo might require some research.

I believe it’s totally worth the effort, as it will make your personal user experience more enjoyable and improve sustainability of our society as a whole.

But what does “warm” actually mean? Let’s look at it more deeply from a scientific standpoint.

🌡️ Temperature vs Warmth

First of all I want to define the terms that I’m using, to avoid potential confusion.

🌡️ Temperature – is an objective property of matter that can be precisely measured by an instrument. It can be expressed in various units of measure, like ºC (Celsius), ºF (Fahrenheit) or ºK (Kelvin), which are simply different conventions that certain groups of people have agreed upon. Yet the key aspect is that as long as properly functioning instruments are used to measure it and the relevant unit conversions are applied – every measurement will show the same value, no matter who had done it. Temperature is objective.

🥵 Warmth – is a subjective measure of how warm (or cold) something feels to a specific person, where the objective temperature of the substance is only one of the aspects contributing to that feeling. I’ve touched upon this in my introductory article, mentioning how cold water felt burning hot to my freezing hands during the Ukrainian winter. Similarly, Italians are usually surprised by how comfortable British people look wearing summer clothes in winter, which would feel unbearable in Italy. Same objective temperature is perceived as different degrees of warmth (or cold) by different people.

I don’t want to go into the deeply personal aspects of temperature perception, which have more to do with biology and psychology than physics. Instead, I will focus on the technical aspects, which are more universal and work the same regardless of personal variations.

🥵 Humans as walking heaters

We, humans, are warm-blooded mammals with the healthy body temperature of around 37ºC, which we need to maintain in order to keep all the internal biochemical processes functioning properly. Most of the time the temperature of our environment is lower than that, so the body constantly consumes energy to keep itself at this higher temperature despite the colder environment. Normally this extra heat is the natural by-product of our metabolism, so we don’t even notice it.

💡 This is why you have to eat every day to stay alive, even when simply lying in bed and doing nothing. In a way we are natural heaters that run on food instead of electricity.

When the outside temperature becomes so low that the normal metabolism can’t produce enough heat, additional mechanisms kick in, like contraction of the outer blood vessels and shivering. These are much harder to miss – a clear signal to our conscious mind that we should find a more sustainable and comfortable way to keep our body at its design temperature.

↔️ Heat transfer rules it all

We perceive external temperature through thermoreceptors1 embedded in our skin, which detect the direction and intensity of heat transfer between the skin and the outside world. Unlike a thermometer, which measures the objective absolute temperature, our skin can only feel how much something is warmer or colder than itself. Therefore, our subjective feeling changes with the temperature of our own skin.

This suggests that you should feel the coldness of the surrounding air pretty much all the time, since even in summer the air temperature rarely goes above 37ºC. First of all, your skin is colder than your inner body, since it stays in direct contact with the air that cools it down. Therefore, its baseline temperature is somewhere closer to 30ºC. But the main catch is in the intensity of the heat transfer between your skin and the air.

Even though room-temperature air at 25ºC is definitely colder than your skin, you’d feel perfectly comfortable in it, because the rate at which it is taking away your heat typically isn’t high enough to feel it as cold. I say “typically”, because there are nuances…

🌈 Thermal aura

When you are standing still surrounded by cold air, your body is losing heat primarily through 2 mechanisms:

1. 🔆 radiation (~60%) – the one captured by infrared thermal cameras, emitted from your body like rays from a lightbulb (typical wavelength: 0.012 mm);

2. 💨 convection (~40%) – substance absorbing heat through direct contact with your skin (typical air conductivity: 24 mW/(m·K)).

💡 Don’t confuse the “heat radiation” with “ionising radiation” that comes from radioactive materials, X-rays or UV-rays. These are completely different phenomena that have very little in common. I will talk about it more deeply in another blog post.

The key distinction between these two mechanisms is that infrared radiation leaves your body and travels until it is absorbed or reflected by something (air is essentially transparent for infrared rays). Convection, on the other hand, only works through direct contact with your skin.

Since air has a fairly low thermal conductivity, convection creates a layer of warmer air around your skin, which looks like a slowly-evaporating aura. This is why your skin doesn’t really feel the actual temperature of the air, but a warmer version of it. This also explains why you feel much more comfortable in 20ºC air than in 20ºC water, which has a much higher heat conductivity, taking away your heat way faster.

💨 Gone with the wind

We all know that the wind makes us feel colder, and before becoming a physicist I assumed that this is simply because the wind makes the air colder, without ever questioning the mechanism of it. But at some point, after I’ve learnt about the basic principles of thermodynamics, it struck me that just the air being in motion cannot lower its own temperature. And you can easily verify it by placing a thermometer in front of a fan – the air blowing at it will not change its readings at all.

It only starts making sense once you replace the thermometer with something that is producing heat itself, like your body covered with the “thermal aura“. As the wind blows at you, it strips away that heated air, replacing it with the new colder air, which is ready to absorb more heat from your skin through convection. The same thing happens if the air stands still and you’re moving instead – like walking or riding on an electric scooter.

So technically the wind doesn’t arbitrarily cool you down. It just makes you feel the actual air temperature instead of the one heated by your body. If you think this is a useless change of words saying exactly the same thing, here are a few logical consequences that might not be obvious if you consider wind as a simple “cooler“:

1. the stronger is the wind, the colder it feels, as you’ve surely experienced yourself, but only up to a certain point. Eventually new colder air will be incoming faster than your skin can give away its heat through convection, meaning that any further increase of wind speed will not make it feel any colder. In other words, if your fan had extra speed settings of 4-…-10 in addition to the usual 1-2-3, the 8-9-10 would all feel the same. This resembles the terminal velocity of raindrops that don’t kill you, which I’ve mentioned in my earlier article.

2. the wind only cools you down because the surrounding air is colder than you. You would feel no effect in a room at 37ºC, while at 40ºC the wind would actually heat you up instead of cooling you down.

   💡 I have to mention that in practice even the warm wind can still cool you down through evaporation of sweat. This is another temperature-regulation mechanism in our body that has plenty of its own interesting aspects closely tied to humidity, which are worth a dedicated publication. In cold weather it’s less relevant though.

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🧥 Clothes as thermal insulators

The main objective of warm clothes is to reduce the heat loss of your body as much as possible. Among everyday objects you can find the ultimate thermal insulation in a thermal flask (aka thermos).

Its key element is the vacuum between two walls, preventing convection. Thus, the only way for the heat to leave the flask is through the tiny junction between the two walls at the top, where heat can pass from the inner wall to the outer one and then to the outside air. Achieving vacuum in everyday clothes is pretty much impossible, so our aim is to get as close as possible to the thermos effect using more practical and wearable structures – fabrics.

👕 T-shirt anatomy

Let’s zoom into a Jersey fabric – the most common material in T-shirts. Essentially it’s a repeating pattern of fibers with pockets of air in-between.

The air has low heat conductivity (~26 mW/(m∙K))2, whereas fibers have high conductivity (~40 mW/(m∙K))3. So in simple terms, your body heats the fibers, which hold the warmed air inside, making it harder to replace by the external cold air. In analogy to the thermal flask – fibers act like the junction between two walls and air acts as a vacuum between them.

Translating these concepts to a fabric, its thermal performance depends on 2 closely intertwined aspects:

1. material composition of the individual fibers, which defines how well the heat propagates from your body to the air;

2. weave or knit, which defines the pattern of how the fibers are put together into the actual fabric and, respectively, how much air it can hold.

Typically you can find materials that are purely natural (cotton, wool, silk, linen) or synthetic (acrylic, polyester, nylon) or a blend of the two. Silk or polyester feel cold to the touch, because their fibers are very good heat conductors, whereas wool or acrylic are at the opposite side of the spectrum – warm and bad heat conductors.

Obviously, the thicker is the fabric, the longer is the path and the larger is the number of air pockets that the heat needs to go through → better thermal insulation ✅. But also, thicker fabric makes it more bulky, heavier and harder to style 🛑. So unless you’re happy to wear a heavy and thick knitted wool sweater, you can find a smarter way to achieve a similar level of thermal insulation.

🥪 Sandwich style

As I’ve mentioned above, it’s actually the air that has the lowest thermal conductivity – not the material of the fabric itself. So we can use that feature to our advantage by adding air to the equation. For example, if we split a single layer of fabric in two, we’ll end up with a thin layer of air in-between that will act as extra insulation, which is practically weightless. And the more air you can hold – the better, which is why they should not be perfectly smooth, but have some structure to them, like fleece, corduroy or deep knit.

Some of these fabrics might not feel very nice to touch, so you’d probably want to add a thin layer of softer fabric underneath. It doesn’t have to be dense – just enough to prevent the contact with your skin. As always, air between the fibers would only help.

Finally, you want to prevent the warm air from being blown away easily, which is why it’s important to have an outside wind-proof layer. That’s where synthetic materials are particularly effective, like tightly-woven nylon or polyester, which are more lightweight than natural leather or pressed wool felt.

So to summarise, a perfect sandwich of clothes would look something like this ⬇️ depending on how warm you want it to feel. Extra warmth requires an extra-air-holding material, such as goose down or fur. In some warm jackets you can even find a layer of perforated aluminium foil to reflect infra-red radiation back into your body.

💦 Beware of Sweat

When pursuing your perfect combination of warm clothes, it’s important to remember – don’t exaggerate. Making yourself too warm will activate your natural cooling mechanism – sweating. As you sweat, the fibers of your clothes get wet, significantly increasing their heat conductivity.

This is another reason why having multiple layers is beneficial. If you do sweat, the water will mostly absorb into the 1st layer, and much less into the 2nd one, which is separated by the air gap. This will limit the damage to your heat insulation and give you the opportunity to take that 1st layer off, keeping the rest of the clothes intact.

Finally, having multiple layers gives you more flexibility in regulating how warm you want to feel, simply by taking off one layer or the other. This is particularly useful if you’ve entered a warm room/bus/train or about to do a physical activity, like walking fast or carrying a heavy bag.

Without adjusting your level of thermal insulation, even a few minutes of such disbalance may cause enough sweat to turn your warm clothes into a cooler. Even though it feels good in the process, as soon as you get back to the previous conditions – cold air with no physical activity – you’ll start freezing. And restoring the original level of insulation by evaporating all that sweat will take a long time – often enough to catch cold 🥶

This is where preventive action is key❗️

🎬 Epilogue

Understanding how the heating technically works allows you to choose clothes wisely and achieve the best result for the given environment, availability of materials, budget, etc.

Just don’t forget that it’s not the clothes that make you warm – it’s your body. Warm clothes is just one of the methods to make you feel warm. You can also produce more heat, by walking faster or jumping on the spot, burning more energy as a result. Or you could change your diet to add a healthy layer of fat under your skin – a built-in thermal insulator4.

Finally, depending on the distribution of fat, blood-circulation and hair across your body, you might have significant heat loss through other parts of your body, like feet, hands or head. So if you can’t or don’t want to insulate every single part of your body, focus on the ones that have the maximum value of temperature times area.

We’re all different, so do what fits you best. Just approch it keeping the science in mind.

Everyone who had spent at least few days living with me has developed a supernatural skill — they can feel my stare at their back 👀 roughly 3 seconds after opening their fridge. Some probably feel it even when I’m not there 😁

When researching online I’ve seen people mentioning 20 seconds, and I know a couple of people who can leave it open for over a minute! That makes my eye twitch 🙈

I can’t help wondering where does this attitude come from? I thought everyone was conditioned as a kid to close their fridge, like in this opening scene from Young Sheldon, but apparently something went wrong at some point.

My hypothesis is that it’s the influence of the movies and TV ads, where people are often portrayed taking their time to look into the fridge, deciding what to take or even what to cook – all while keeping it open. It’s supposed to reflect the image of abundance, the lifestyle you’d like to relate with. But what looks good for an ad or a movie scene does not necessarily translate well to real life.

The reason I’m bugging everyone about it, including you 🫵🏼 now, is that keeping a fridge open is really wasteful. And the longer you keep it open — the more wasteful it is. I’m sure you’d agree that wasting is bad, but what exactly is being wasted? Let’s look at it from a scientific point of view.

🎯 The purpose

What is the main purpose of a fridge?

If you say “to keep the food cool“ you’d be technically correct. Yet I would say that conceptually this is not the end-goal, but rather a practical means of achieving the real purpose – preserve the food for a longer period of time.

There are other ways of food preservation like salting, pickling, preservative chemicals or high-temperature sterilisation, which also slow down the process of food going bad. Refrigeration is simply a more universal method that can be applied to a larger variety of products, also without affecting their taste and nutritional composition in most cases.

🦠 Microbes are to blame

The process of “food going bad“ is mostly caused by microscopic organisms doing their job: mold or other fungi growing on the surface, bacteria spoiling the fats and proteins in the milk, etc. The larger is the population of these microbes → the faster they will do their job → the faster the food will go bad.

Proper sterilisation kills all those microbes, leaving no population to grow. That’s why canned food can stay safe to eat for years, as long as you don’t open it. Yet as soon as you open the can, the air gets in together with some microbes inevitably present in it, which will start doing their job and multiplying. From that moment the easiest way to slow down this process is by lowering the temperature, which is what a fridge is designed for.

❄️ Keeping it cool

Let’s see how a fridge keeps your food cold. Conceptually it’s made of two main components:

1. a double-walled container with some insulating material between the outer and inner walls – meant to keep the temperature inside separated from the outside;

2. a cooling plant – meant to cool down the stuff inside when it gets too warm.

While the container is a passive object, the cooling plant is an active device that consumes energy. Since it’s impossible to create a perfect thermal insulation, a tiny bit of heat will always pass through those double walls, slowly raising the temperature inside. Therefore, the cooling plant will turn on from time to time, whenever the temperature inside gets noticeably higher than it should.

This is what drives the energy consumption of your fridge, even during the night – when it stays closed all the time. As you can imagine, when you open the door, thermal insulation breaks down → heat will enter inside the fridge more quickly → the cooling plant will have to work harder to compensate for it. This is obvious.

But does it actually make any difference?

Some people would just say NO. Some went further and made simple thermodynamic calculations to prove that it makes no appreciable difference, like in this old Reddit thread: “you could open up the fridge and replace all the air 10000 times before it would cost 1 dollar” 😮

But I’ll go even further…

🌡️ Warm air not welcome

I say that keeping the fridge open does make a difference, but to appreciate it, one has to approach the problem as a scientist – looking at the whole picture and taking into account all the relevant effects, rather than simply applying a textbook formula to a single specific feature.

Let’s start with that thermodynamic calculation, which does miss a few aspects. In practice the fridge does not always stay fully loaded (or even 2/3 loaded). Quite often it’s mostly empty, until you stack it up with fresh groceries – in that case the relative impact of the incoming warm air gets much greater. Also the temperature difference that the fridge has to maintain can be significantly higher, especially on hot summer days without AC. I would be pretty unhappy staying in a kitchen at 20ºC (or 68ºF), which the calculation was done for.

But still, even if it would take only 1000 times to waste 1$ instead of 10000 – you still probably wouldn’t care. So let’s move to more significant aspects of opening the fridge door.

🔧 Faster breakdown

For the fridge to operate efficiently it has a temperature sensor inside, connected to some logics unit, which decides when to turn on the cooling plant based on the measured temperature. Cold air is denser and heavier than warm air, therefore the temperature sensor is usually placed in the upper part of the fridge, to detect the rising of the temperature earlier.

Now, when you open the fridge, the heavy cold air will start escaping, while the warmer air will be entering from the room, accumulating mostly at the top of the fridge – right where the temperature sensor is. So even though the relative amount of heat leaving the fridge is negligible compared to all the heavy and cold food inside, the air itself around the sensor will get noticeably warmer. This is enough to make the fridge think that it’s too warm and turn on the cooling plant.

Effectively the fridge could just stay off, letting the food inside slowly cool down the warmer air around it. As the Reddit guys said, the actual amount of heat absorbed by the food would be negligible – but the fridge doesn’t know that. It will turn on for a minute or two anyway, since heat-exchanging process through air is quite slow.

So even though very little heat is lost when you keep the fridge open, it will do extra unnecessary cycles of turning ON and OFF, consuming electricity and wearing down the motor of the heat pump. And the last thing you want is your fridge to break down, leaving you without fresh food for days, forced to suddenly arrange the ordering, moving and installation of bulky and heavy double-walled containers. So letting your fridge stay in the OFF state for as long as possible is in your best interest.

Of course this largely depends on the logics implemented in the electronics of any specific fridge, which in principle could be designed to account for such effects. But I doubt that the majority of fridges have this level of sophistication, especially the cheaper ones. If you happen to work in this industry – please share your knowledge in the comments.

❄️ Frost build-up

When warmer air enters the cold fridge, it condensates on the cold surfaces of the fridge – creating tiny droplets of water. On the coldest side of the fridge, which is the one meant to cool the air inside – those water droplets will freeze, turning into frost.

The frost works as insulation between the cooling wall and the air inside, making the heat exchange less effective. It will cause your fridge running longer to remove the same amount of heat → more waste of energy and longer periods of noise. Eventually you’ll have to manually defrost your fridge, unless it has the auto-defrosting feature. In any case that’s additional waste of energy that can be avoided.

💦 Condensation on the food

The same condensation that turns into frost on the cold wall, remains as water on the surface of all the products that the warm air got in contact with. Naturally, the longer you keep the door open → the larger amount of warm air enters inside → the more water droplets will build up → the higher will be the humidity inside your fridge. And that’s exactly what microbes need to multiply.

As a result, population of harmful microbes will grow higher, making your food go bad faster. This does not apply to the food that is hermetically sealed, since the condensation will stay outside, without getting in contact with the actual food. But all your 🌱 salad leaves inside opened plastic bags, or 🧀 cheese wrapped in plastic foil or 🥦 vegetables lying in the open – they will be affected.

This is something that no smart electronics can prevent. It can only be done by something smarter, like your brain.

💡 This is why most fridges have dedicated containers at the bottom to store fresh vegetables. That’s the place where it would take the longest for the condensation to build up – it’s closed from all sides, making it harder for the warmer air to get in, while positioning at the bottom ensures that the heavier cold air stays there for longer.

All this goes directly against the very purpose of the fridge – keeping your food fresh for as long as possible. So by keeping the door open you’re doing the opposite – increasing the fraction of your food that will be wasted. Not very sustainable.

🍔 Culture of abundance

For sure some people consciously choose to treat a fridge like a piece of art in a photo-gallery, slowly moving their gaze across the shelves while deciding what to pick. Even knowing about all the downsides they might still keep doing it – it’s their own decision after all.

What I find more disturbing is that lots of people do it unconsciously, following the patterns they’ve seen somewhere and accepted as a standard, without ever questioning it. I suspect that movies and TV ads play a major role in creating this standard. In those ads successful people are portrayed exactly like that – relaxed, staring at the fridge with a curious and slightly dreamy face, as if they have all the time in the world and no pressure whatsoever. And if the food goes bad – there is always more at the grocery store 💁🏻

I’m sure I look less “chill and successful“ when opening the fridge already knowing what I want and where it is, and getting it in 2 seconds max. In the conventional perception of the modern society that dreamy face says “abundance“, while my organised face says “scarcity”. And everyone prefers abundance.

Just a few examples of those ads here: Freshpet, Westinghouse, LG, JustEast or some movie scenes. And apparently people cared about it more in the past, according to this opening “fridge scene” from Young Sheldon (S02E13).

🎬 Epilogue

Considering all the effects I’ve talked about, I hope that I’ve convinced you that being mindful about opening a fridge is not pointless. At the end of the day everyone decides for themselves what defines their user experience the most: is it wasting less energy and food, or is it having less noise in their kitchen or is it having a relaxed and dreamy relationship with their fridge.

Hopefully now you’re more conscious and intentional about your choice, whatever it is. And if you’ve learned something new on the way – I’m even more happy 😊

It’s always easier to do a shallow analysis, considering only what is on the surface. But a deeper look with a systematic scientific approach often reveals underlying mechanisms that might turn the initial conclusion upside down.

This is the power of a scientific mindset – the foundation of my thinking process.

P.S. Some companies do take this door-opening aspect seriously though, like Samsung with their AI Vision Inside or LG in their ad: “The Fridge Made For Gazing“.

It took me about 2 minutes of thinking 🧠 to come up with this chain of reasoning. Yet it took me at least 2 hours of typing 👨🏻‍💻 to prepare this article.

The easiest way to make it worthwhile is letting thousands of people read and put this in action. So if you’ve found it interesting – please Share with your friends, colleagues and peers!

How would you feel if you were walking down the street and someone threw a piece of dog 💩 at you? Be honest, I’m serious 🙂

Now, how would you feel if you were walking down the same empty street, but this time you stepped into that 💩 yourself? Would it make any difference?

Thank you, if you’ve answered both questions. I’m curious where I stand on the spectrum of rage in the modern society. I hope that at least the 1st situation never actually happened to you 👀

I personally would be equally furious in both cases, since both are a terrible user experience for a simple activity of “walking down the street”. The only difference between them is that in the 1st case I would have the exact reason of my bad experience standing right in front of me, readily available to throw my anger at.

Instead, in the 2nd case the responsible person, the dog owner, is not available. They even didn’t target me personally – it was a situation ready to cause bad user experience to whoever will “get lucky”. Yet I would still be very unhappy, to say the least, because I know very well how the experience of “walking down the street” could be if they hadn’t ruined it.

😌 User Experience = Quality of Life

Stepping in dog 💩 is a perfect analogy of how I feel every time I have a bad user experience of any kind, being it a cumbersome interface of a phone app, a car blocking my ride in the bike lane or unorganized crowd of parents picking up their kids from school all at once.

Like the dog shit on your shoes, none of it is a life-threatening tragedy. It simply adds unnecessary, often unpleasant, interruptions to your peaceful “walk down the street”, stealing your time, energy and peace of mind.

Ultimately it degrades your quality of life. This is why I believe that the abbreviation UX should be used way more often in everyday discussions, going far beyond the articles about web-design and marketing.

Good UX should be a baseline, not a premium feature.

💛 Good UX is respect

When I think about why a dog owner would leave their dog’s shit on the sidewalk I imagine two possible reasons:

1. the dog owner was not aware of the disaster it might cause to someone;

2. the dog owner was blatantly careless about it.

While the first case may deserve a tiny bit of empathy, it’s also the most unlikely, I think. In the second case, the person should be punched in their face straight away. A lack of care about others is disrespect. And I think you’d agree that being respected by others is one of the fundamental aspects of a civilized society.

When it comes to paid products or services, the responsible companies are being paid to design and implement our user experiences. Therefore even the lack of awareness is not an excuse. It effectively is a lack of care as well, simply delegated to the management level. So no matter how you look at it – your bad user experience almost always is a sign of disrespect to you as a customer.

📢 Talking about UX

I’ve been to many places, seen different ways of living, used various products, read lots of articles on UI/UX design. So I often notice bad user experience and immediately see how things could have been done better.

In most cases I simply get annoyed, because the people responsible for it are either not accessible or don’t really care about making it better anyway. But recently it was brought to my attention that often people genuinely don’t even realize that their experience could have been better, because they don’t know exactly how. So instead of simply rumbling about it I’ve decided to turn my thoughts into something more structured and potentially useful for others.

❗️ With this blog I’m hoping to inspire people to pay more attention to their own user experience, care more about experience of others and ultimately improve the quality of life in our society.

If some of you turn out to be the ones actually designing or making decisions on UX of others, I would be glad to make a difference 😇

🚦 Good UX vs Bad UX

As I mentioned in my short-bio post, Apple products have played a pivotal role in the development of my taste in design and user experience – both aspects that made them stand out in the consumer-electronics market.

I personally think that the best thing about computers and laptops made by Apple is the fact that they run on the macOS operating system, which defines the user experience to a greater extent than the design, build quality or performance of the computers themselves. There are other brands that manufacture computers of comparable quality and performance, but only Mac computers can run macOS natively.

Apart from some foundational features differentiating it from Windows or Linux operating systems, there are plenty of tiny details in macOS that make me feel like people designing it actually cared about my user experience.

Here are a few examples…

✅ QuickLook in Finder 👁️‍🗨️

This was the first thing that truly impressed me when I switched from PC to a Mac. In macOS you can select a file, press `Space` on your keyboard and instantly see its contents in a minimalistic overlay window with some very basic controls to explore its contents. It does it so quickly because it’s not launching an actual application associated with that file format, which has to load the full-blown interface, taking up to dozens of seconds.

Yes, Windows Explorer does let you see thumbnails of images and a few types of documents, but it’s fixed in the interface and is very limited – meant to get a rough idea how the file looks. Instead, macOS Finder supports way more file formats: from images and videos to text and calendar files, while its separate overlay window can be moved and resized freely, such that you can actually zoom in and scroll to the exact portion of the document you’re actually interested in. And another press of `Space` key closes the preview immediately.

Usually when making a presentation or a writing a document, you have multiple intermediate versions stored in the same folder, as you’re approaching the “final draft“. Apple’s approach makes it naturally effortless to quickly sip through dozens of older versions using keyboard ⬆️ and ⬇️ arrows, looking for the removed older slide you want to recover or to find some 3-year-old presentation that had a diagram you want to reuse now. Or you pick 2 nearly identical versions of a photo and switch back and forth to immediately see what has changed. It’s just extremely convenient and fast.

These things are unbearably complicated and slow when you don’t have the QuickLook capability. So once you get used to working this way, sitting behind a Windows Explorer again feels like putting your clothes on using only one hand. It’s not simply 2x slower than doing it with both hands – it’s a completely different experience.

✅ Option key ⌥

This one is quite an elegant and subtle feature of macOS that even plenty of Mac users are not familiar with – some actions throughout the operating system behave differently when you hold the `alt|option|⌥` key.

For example, some items in the context menus of many apps have a less-frequently-used version of the same action, like `Close` and `Close All…` to close all windows of the app, or `Paste` and `Paste without formatting` in a Word document. In macOS such “niche” items are not displayed unless you press the ⌥ key, which replaces the default version of the action with the alternative one, also propagating it to the key shortcuts. I find this to be a really elegant way to fit the same amount of functionality in a visually cleaner interface, making it less cluttered and overwhelming.

Another example – normally when you click on the WiFi/Bluetooth icon, you see a very simple list of available networks/devices that you can connect to, which is what you’re interested in 99% of the times. But if you also hold the ⌥ key, you see lots of extra information, like MAC and IP addresses, signal/noise levels, etc., which are only relevant for expert users. In particular the WiFi info pane is really handy when you’re trying to find a spot in a cafe with better WiFi signal – just go around and watch the `Tx rate` change. The higher the number, the better data-transfer speed you’ll get.

Finally, all Mac keyboards have a row of special function keys at the top to control your display brightness, speaker volume, etc. If you press those buttons while holding ⌥ key, macOS will open System Preferences with the section related to the button you’ve pressed, where you have access to advanced Display or Sound settings. Another convenient shortcut that is much faster than getting there manually.

✅ Alternative characters Ø

More than 90% of the time I’m typing in English (both conversations and programming code), so I’m using the default ABC keyboard layout. But living in Italy I often have to type in Italian, which uses extra characters with accents, like è, é, ò, ó. So instead of switching to a dedicated Italian layout, I can easily get those extra accentuated characters by pressing and holding the base letter followed by a number corresponding to the special character I need.

In addition, sometimes I use “umlauts” that appear in some German and Dutch brand names, like Kärcher, Rösle, Häagen-Dazs. Or to write accurately the name of the experiment in US where I used to work before my PhD, which was technically called DØ, where Ø stands for “zero“.

Sometimes I just want to show off, writing the French spelling of “naïve”, which brings me a bit of joy, since letter `Ï` is a distinctive letter in the Ukrainian alphabet and quite rare in other languages.

Of course all these characters can also be found in the dedicated pane with hundreds of emojis, flags, math and other special symbols. But pressing and holding one key is way more efficient → much better user experience.

💔 Keyboard brightness 🔆

To not sound like an Apple fanboy, let me also mention an example of bad UX from them, which I find pretty frustrating and careless.

For many years all Mac keyboards had 2 buttons (F5, F6) in the top row for controlling the backlight brightness. I used them always to switch between just two levels:

• completely OFF: during the day or when I’m watching something at night;

• ON at lowest brightness: when working at night (I don’t like bright cold light).

Starting from 2021 or so they’ve replaced those 2 keys with a Dictation and Don’t Disturb keys, without any possibility to get the old functionality back.

Trying to understand why they would do such a thing, I imagined that they must have looked at some usage data and came to the conclusion that only a small fraction of their customers actually use those buttons. Probably most people are either happy with it being always ON (relying on auto-adjustment) or don’t use it at all. So I must be more demanding than others to the amount of light that I want to see coming from my keyboard 💡

On top of that, for a couple of years preceding this change they’ve been shipping laptops with the configurable interactive touch-bar instead of the fixed keys. This means that in principle they could have seen exactly which custom keys their users had been actually using most often. So as a data-scientist myself I have to respect data-driven decisions like that. Yet the problem is not in the decision – it is in the careless execution.

There are two obvious ways how they could have kept the old functionality for “niche“ users like me, without interfering with their decision to remove the keys in any way:

1. let the display-brightness keys (F1, F2) control the keyboard brightness when holding the `Shift` key – elegant, logical and technically pretty simple;

2. let the new keys be simply F5 and F6, making the actual functions attached to them configurable in the keyboard settings – more flexible and inclusive, but also technically more complicated to implement.

In the end I’ve ended up installing a dedicated software for custom key bindings to implement the 1st solution, which I’m fairly satisfied with. Yet it is not a frictionless experience by any means, and it poses a security risk that comes with any 3rd party software. I would expect something like this on a Windows machine, but certainly not on a Mac.

Given how obvious and technically simple this solution is, not implementing it must have been a choice – a deliberate choice of being careless about the user experience.

🎬 Epilogue

Returning to the beginning of this post – life is already hard enough on its own. Let’s not add more shit to it.

Whether we have to clean it off our shoes or need to constantly scan the street to not step in – it takes away the energy, the focus and the joy of life, multiplied by the number of people experiencing it.

Think about user experience. Care about others 🙌🏼

This is an introduction to my blog, which is meant to give you a glimpse of how I see the world and why you might be interested in looking at it through my lens. I find my scientific background the most defining factor of my personality. So below I share a few demonstrations of how it works.

At the very least, you’ll see what a more serious version of a “Big Bang Theory” character would look like in real life.
At the very most, you‘ll get motivated to develop a scientific mindset of your own, to hopefully look at your own life/work/habits/beliefs with a higher degree of structure and awareness.

🚰 Is the water cold or hot?

I was about 7 years old when I’ve formulated my first proper scientific question: “What defines the direction of heat transfer between 2 substances?”.

It was winter in Kyiv (Ukraine) and I was washing my hands after a long play with snow outside. I was washing them with cold water, which felt really warm to my frozen hands, so I could clearly feel them getting warmer. Yet I knew that the water was actually really cold, which I normally couldn’t stand when washing my hands after a dinner at home. So I found it confusing that the same “cold” water (marked with a blue circle) was cooling me down when I was warm, but warming me up when I was cold.

My fairly primitive thinking was the following: If the water is “cold” then it should cool me down. And if it’s “warm” then it should warm me up. The fact that it changed depending on how warm I felt made no sense to me at the time. So I understood immediately that there was something missing in my understanding of the process, but I had no idea what 🤷🏻

Only later I’ve learnt that the concept of “cold” and “warm” is relative, and it becomes fairly straightforward once you switch to absolute concepts like “temperature” and “equilibrium”. So I did have my attention and curiosity already then, but I lacked some basic knowledge about the subject, its language and mechanisms at work.

Since then I’ve learnt about many more aspects of “warm” and “cold”, some of which you’d find quite surprising, if not mind-blowing. I’ll talk about those in another post.

🌧️ Why doesn’t rain kill you?

About 10 years later I’ve been sitting at the introductory physics lecture by Dr. Yuriy Opanasiuk at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where I had later received my Masters degree. There, for the first time, I have realized how cool the world looks through the lens of physics, when he asked:

How come the rain droplets don’t hit you to death when falling from the clouds at such high altitude?

If you studied physics at school, you probably know that Earth’s gravity causes every free-falling object to accelerate, increasing it’s speed by roughly 9.8 m/s (or 35 km/h) every second. It takes a long time for the rain to reach us from the clouds, so it should be flying at a bullet-like speed by the time it‘s down here. But it clearly doesn’t 🤷🏻

So this simple question did 2 things to me:

1. it showed me a strange feature of the world that I had never noticed or thought about before;

2. now that I had noticed it, I realized that I didn’t know how it actually works — my understanding of the world was clearly incomplete.

The explanation of this phenomenon is very simple once you know the whole picture: in addition to gravity pulling the rain droplets down, there is also a stopping force of the aerodynamic resistance by air, which grows as the droplets move faster. Eventually it reaches the equilibrium speed, at which both forces balance each other and acceleration stops.

This also means that a hypothetical rain on the Moon would be deadly, as there is no atmosphere to slow the droplets down. In reality this is not an issue of course, because an atmosphere is the very thing that produces the rain in the first place.

🎥 Check out how objects behave without air in this video. It’s pretty cool!

In fact, determination of all the forces acting on an object in a specific setting was one of the first topics in the Physics course at university. Once mastered, most kinds of object movements become not only understandable but also predictable, when equipped with some math.

⚛️ Physics in everyday life

Those laws of motion apply equally to a rain drop falling from the cloud, an apple falling from the tree or a ballistic missile falling from the sky. Completely different settings governed by the same underlying principles.

That’s the beauty of the scientific approach — instead of learning by heart a hundred special cases you dig deeper to understand a single underlying principle that describes all of them at once.
Ultimate efficiency! 💪🏼

Here are a few examples of how I use the laws of physics to make my everyday life slightly more enjoyable or efficient, which I will talk about in my future posts:

• wear dark clothes on sunny winter days;

• keep the fridge open for as little as possible;

• take off my backpack in crowded public transport;

• never leave the washing machine with wet clothes inside;

• open windows when turning on the kitchen exhaust;

• strategically place my WiFi router in the apartment;

• use warm-light lamps in the bathroom;

• use an infrared heater for my desk in winter;

• only wear UV-protected sunglasses;

• use a pressure-cooker;

• break boiled eggs inside cold water;

• charge my phone wirelessly overnight;

• hold the phone to my ear when sending voice notes.

Some are obvious, some might be not.
There are many more topics to talk about that go beyond just physics and beyond just everyday life. More is coming…

Hello 👋🏼 I’m Nazar Bartosik – an academic nuclear physicist (PhD), which means I’m also a programmer, a scientific writer, a public speaker, a data scientist and a person with analytical mind. On top of that I have a few non-professional self-taught titles:

• photographer: Instagram

• rollerblader: NazarOnWheels

• videographer: YouTube

• father and a curious person in general.

So far my life had unfolded in 4 countries: 🇺🇦 Ukraine (22 years) → 🇩🇪 Germany (3 years) → 🇨🇭Switzerland (2 years) → 🇮🇹 Italy (8+ years). I’ve been to many more, thanks to my academic work, mostly tied to one of the Large Hadron Collider experiments.

I speak 4 languages: Ukrainian, Russian, English, Italian, not counting the ones I can program in.

All this lets me have a broad view on many topics, usually seeing them from more and deeper perspectives than most people would.

🧐 Overthinker with attention to detail

I’ve been attentive to details for a long time but only recently realized that I’m also an overthinker. Surprisingly enough I’ve discovered it thanks to the Instagram recommendation algorithms. Yet contrary to the negative fame of overthinking as a destructive never-ending loop of thoughts, I see it as my superpower. 💪🏼

Combined with systematic analytical thinking from my physics career and attention to details trained by photography, I usually manage to steer those loops into logical chains of thoughts, terminated by definitive conclusions. Furthermore, playing chess during my teenage years trained me to always think several steps ahead no matter what I’m dealing with, which means that I build those chains of thoughts pretty much all the time (as long as I’m awake 💁🏻).

The chains of thoughts that I find worth your attention I share in this blog.

🎯 Laser focus on User Experience

Growing up in post-soviet Ukraine I envied products from the “western" capitalistic world, which always seemed more colourful, more stylish, of higher quality.

I will never forget the feeling of scrolling the click-wheel of my first iPod nano, which I’d bought damaged on eBay to repair on my own. After disassembling it to replace the battery I could see all the complexity inside that powers that beautiful and seamless user experience, completely hidden behind a well-thought design. That started my dedicated interest and appreciation for good design: of user interfaces at first, then industrial design of products and ultimately the user experience as a whole.

When I went abroad for the first time, I couldn’t stop noticing all the details of how things were done differently from what I’ve been used to, from plastic-bottle recycling stations in supermarkets of Hamburg to metro stations showing the time left until the next train. That routine keeps running in my head to this day.

In case you wonder what’s up with the metro-station timers… In Kyiv metro you’re shown the time passed since departure of the previous train, not the time left until the next one arrives. Keeps your memory and math skills in shape, while building emotional resilience to uncertainty 👌🏼

Since I get to live only a single life, I care a lot about getting the best possible user experience in any given situation, as long as it aligns with my values and possibilities. So multiple times a day, every day, I get annoyed by my user experience being worse than expected. Often it is simply caused by the behavior of individual people, which has less to do with physics and more with sociology or philosophy. Yet even more often it happens because someone at some point made a bad design decision, which most certainly can be improved with a bit of effort and thinking.

This is what Nazar Thinks about most often, and I’ll be writing about that too.