Dorian Minors
Cambridge-educated brain scientist, behavioural science professor, and creator of btrmt.
About me
About me
This is where I’m supposed to sell myself and what I’m doing here, but it’s not really that complicated. My name is Dorian Minors. We each live such peculiarly turbulent lives, “the halt, lame, half-made creatures that we are.” I wanted to understand why.
I started btrmt. over a decade ago to share the psychology I was studying with people who weren’t, or couldn’t. Why should these ideas only be accessible to people with the right degree? I’ve since continued—six years in the military, a PhD in brain science at Cambridge, now Associate Professor at Sandhurst. Clinical practice, teaching, research. All of it looking for some instruction manual for this device in our head that seems to hold such potential to smooth the rough edges of our lives.
Sadly, I didn’t find one. Anyone who tells you they did is lying to you.
But I did discover something else along the way. The habits of thought, feeling, and action that shape us—they’re protective. Graceful solutions to an impossibly complex world. The trouble is, most of them were given to us, not chosen by us. Absorbed from the world and people around us. And we rarely pick them up and examine them. How could we, when what little attention we have is routinely directed towards the economy of shame, outrage, yearning, and terror that floods our media streams.
So, very simply, this is what btrmt. is about. I gather the patterns we inherit and examine them, so you can choose the ones worth keeping.
fine print
Fineprint
Contact me
Contact me
btrmt. and its projects all use the company name BTRMT LIMITED when I'm selling you something, registered in England and Wales (no. 13755561). The registered office and postal address is:
Capital House
61 Amhurst Road
London E81LL UK
And you can contact me there or you can just email me at dorian(at)btr.mt.
Legal
Legal
Detail on any product related policies can be found at the associated project page.
Privacy
Privacy
I store webserver access logs for the default time (about 15 days) before they’re purged. The logs collect your IP address, the IP address of the site you came here from (if any), timing, type, and content of HTTP requests on the site, as well as standard ‘user agent’ information (browser, operating system, and platform). This is unfortunately essential—all websites need to do some logging to serve you content and protect against malicious actors. It is, however, GDPR compliant, not least because in the timeframe between when you ask me to remove your data and when I have to have it removed, your data will have already been purged. I’m pretty sure I can reduce the storage time to seven days, but it seems like a hassle, so I won’t unless someone asks. I don’t send any of this information to third parties, and I force HTTPS on the site (which protects the usage of your IP address and other identifiable data in the logging in my webserver from third parties).
There are only two other instances on this website where your data is processed.
This site uses Goatcounter to get a sense of how users find and use my site. I host the instance, so your data doesn’t go to any third party. Check their privacy policy for the most up to date reference regarding the data I collect with it, but the short version is that I gather non-identifiable data only (GDPR compliant), will only remember you for 8 hours (via hashed IP address), and I don’t drop cookies that follow you around the web. If you want, I can blacklist your IP so Goatcounter doesn’t track it. Just email/mail me. Though then, of course, I’ll be storing your IP address in my “don’t track these IP addresses” list, and this is not hashed. Also, your ISP might change your IP address occasionally, and I have no way of knowing that unless you keep me updated.
The newsletter is run on Sendy. I track who opens the newsletter so I can clean my list of inactive people and thus avoid running afoul of all the various spam-related regulatory techniques out there. I also collect clicks because I do a bit of A/B testing sometimes but, unlike opens, I do this anonymously so I never know who clicked what link. I host the instance, so your data doesn’t go to any third party. However, I do use Google reCaptcha to protect my signup forms on the site here from bots. I have no idea what information that collects about you, but the script is only injected when you click on the email form input and doesn’t stick around after you’re redirected to the confirmation page, so you’re Google-tracked from when you start typing your email in the form to when you click subscribe. Worth noting.
Newsletter Troubleshooting. This is not strictly privacy related, but you need JavaScript enabled to use the signup form, or I can’t inject the reCaptcha script (see above) into the site. So if you’re having trouble signing up, that might be it. You can try enabling it, or just contact me instead and I’ll subscribe you by hand.
If you got directed here because you’re having trouble receiving my emails, then it’s probably because I send mail using Amazon SES and your email server doesn’t like it. Try checking your spam box and/or whitelisting my email:
dorian(at)btr.mt
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