Recently updated blogs

Nicholas Shackel (Cardiff) has a new book out that might be of interest to readers, and there is a discount code available that Nick has asked me to pass on. Details below.Bertrand’s Paradox and the Principle of Indifference Nicholas Shackel This book casts a new light on Bertrand's Paradox, giving original analyses of the paradox, its possible solutions, the source of the paradox, the philosophical errors we make in attempting …

On 22 May 2019, I write about five years of A Single Div, my favorite little side project.I participate in #inktober but with single div illustrations. I call it #divtober.I have so much fun with the challenge. My enthusiasm for the process grows even more.I get nerd sniped and draw a Tesla Cybertruck with one div which becomes one of my most popular pens on CodePen.I fall in love with …

History of Computer Games: 1976-2024Updated on an almost daily basis as of 2024, this is a history of computer games that I am covering on cRPG Blog. The computer games are listed in chronological order, from oldest to newest.This chronological computer-game history is concerned with computer games that were coded for Western computer-game machines.I define a computer game as an entertainment-based and/or educational computer program that is coded to be …

Omar Hamaoui arrives at the hip Bethnal Green café dressed in an Iron Maiden t-shirt, well-fitting jeans and a Keffiyeh draped over his head. His muscled former-rugby-playing-arms are covered in tattoos. He’s a spoken word poet who, despite his dyslexia, has been reciting his poems in spoken word performances throughout London and has just recently published his first book called “Saved by the pen”. The book contains poems about overcoming …

I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK’s top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of the top 10 universities in the world. The US - a country with 5x more people and 8x higher GDP - has the same number of universities in the global top 10.On these visits, I was struck by the …

There's an anonymous facebook posting that's been making the rounds, in which a studio art director tried to hire AI prompters to make art, only to discover that they were completely unable to carry out minor revision requests. Asked to remove a person from a shot or fix perspective errors, the prompters would return completely different art instead, or with other weird changes that didn't fit the brief. I completely …

A new game for the Commodore PET, also, how to detect keyboards on a Commodore PET. Rumors that I am might be writing a game (or is it a playable joke?) are not entirey unfounded. Also, another (maybe helpful) note on PET keybords and how to detect them. Continue reading…

Interfaces are becoming less dense. I’m usually one to be skeptical of nostalgia and “we liked it that way” bias, but comparing websites and applications of 2024 to their 2000s-era counterparts, the spreading out of software is hard to ignore. To explain this trend, and suggest how we might regain density, I started by asking what, exactly, UI density is. It’s not just the way an interface looks at one …

What is the software industry playing at? - Tagged: Rant, Agile, Software Management

It is a well know fact I was a huge fan of pooping at work. There is something about getting paid to take a shit and wipe your ass on the company dime. Now that I don’t work pooping just isn’t the same.

Original airdate: May 19, 2024 The premise: Bart’s prank involving a human brain in a jar backfires when he is forced to “care” for it as a school assignment. He begins to form a true kinship with the human organ, a growing obsession that begins to worry Homer and Marge. The reaction: I’ve talked several times about the difficulty this show has had writing Bart over the last few decades. …

Bertrand and I have recently finished our review paper on Bayesian prediction. One of my favorite part there is the distinction between inferential and predictive Bayes. A Bayesian procedure is such that we treat observed data as a realization of random variables, and we calculate the conditional distribution of unknown quantities given the observed data. In this sense, there is no difference between posterior inference $p(\theta \vert y)$ and posterior …

Great news. Issue number two of "Incredible Doom - Eternal September" is now fully available online for free. Here's how you can enjoy it:Patrons: Grab your free e-book now as a token of our appreciation.Everyone else: read the whole story on the archive page here, get the e-book for just $3, or, if you love flipping through physical pages, snag a beautiful 53-page print version for $9. Tip: Buying both …

In August 2020, the New York Times asked me to write an op-ed for a special feature on authoritarianism and democracy. They declined to publish my submission, which I am sharing here instead. A little over 51 years ago, a rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying three astronauts and a space car. After a three day journey to the moon, two of the astronauts climbed into a spindly lander …

This was a good spring for cherry blossoms. We had many sunny days when the trees were in bloom in April. On a day like that it’s easy to think the meaning of life is beauty and calm and love and peace. The same when the white lilacs are in bloom. Though lilacs do make poor cut flowers. They don’t last long. So maybe the meaning of life is impermanence. …