Recently updated blogs

Here’s a quick round-up of new music this week! The Headline Track: Sunday (1994) – “Blossom” Sunday (1994) has done it again with another perfect track in the form of “Blossom.” The band masterfully balances introspection with euphoria, and dark humour. Lines like “I’m not in possession of a Smith & Wesson / Or I’d decorate the ceiling / The Sistine of my feelings” strike a brilliant balance between wit …

Ship Statinfasst We’re embarking on a leisurely cruise through the highlights of Statistical Inference as Severe Testing [SIST]: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (CUP 2018) this fall (Oct-Jan), following the 5 seminars I led for a 2020 London School of Economics (LSE) Graduate Research Seminar. It was run entirely online due to Covid (as were the workshops that followed). In this new, relaxed (self-paced) journey, excursions that had …

In 1962, V. A. Antonov did some remarkable simulations showing that in Newtonian mechanics, gravitating systems can violate the usual rules of thermodynamics. Instead of reaching equilibrium they can get hotter and hotter! Suppose you put a lot of stars in a large sphere, and suppose (unrealistically) that they bounce elastically off the walls of this sphere. In fact suppose they’re point masses, so they never collide, and interact only …

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant […]

I saw the Jenny Holzer show at The Guggenheim this week; close friends will know that I have a strange relationship with her work. The exhibition, which closes next week, is sort of a reprise of her groundbreaking show there in 1989. Here’s Roberta Smith’s review in the Times from December of that year (emphasis mine): Ms. Holzer has been given the run of the Guggenheim, or more precisely half …

To chase, or not to chase, that is the question.

I went to a conference in Stockholm and wrote about it on LinkedIn.

Let's call an artificially intelligent system a person (in the ethical, not the legal sense) if it deserves moral consideration similar to that of a human being. (I assume that personhood requires consciousness but does not require biological humanity; we can argue about that another time if you like). If we are ever capable of designing AI persons, we should not design them to be safe and aligned with human …

Inside you are two Lupins… Yes when he got his top surgery he got bespoke bean nipples.

Chris Carter. When I was sitting in my office in my surf trunks, barefoot, playing ball with the dog every twenty minutes, writing the pilot for The X-Files, I never imagined that they would be making X-Files underwear and that 10,000 people a week would be logging onto the Internet to talk about the show… — Chris Carter, 1995 Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, couldn’t have been more …

I probably came off last week as a bit of an extreme “journal abolitionist”. This week, I wanted to give a couple caveats. First, as a commenter pointed out, the main journals we use in my field are run by nonprofits. Physical Review Letters, the journal where we publish five-page papers about flashy results, is run by the American Physical Society. The Journal of High-Energy Physics, where we publish almost …

Apart from the infamous one about 3D printers (I was right), and the one that featured on the orange site, my most popular post is a fairly technical one about GitHub webhooks. It seems to be especially popular with Russians coming from Yandex, so before I start this post that is also about webhooks, here's a message for my Russian friends: Пожалуйста, постарайтесь остановить бесчеловечную войну вашей страны против народа …

Is this the first game where you're charged with the task of building dungeons, and defending them from invading would-be heroes? I don't know of any that came earlier than it, but I can believe that something along these conceptual lines might exist on some eighties microcomputer somewhere. Either way, Chaos Seed: Fengshui Chronicle (also known as Chaos Seed : Fuusui Kairouki) is a very early entry into the genre, …

August 2024 Norway is one of my favourite countries to visit due to the beautiful countryside, many good walks helped by the right to roam that exists, similar to Scotland and as a result I usually go there once or twice a year. In 2024 I headed to Hammerfest, which is right near the northern tip of both Norway and Europe. Hammerfest is located at 70.6 degrees north on the …

William Seabrook–a hard man to introduce. A cannibal and explorer, a drunkard and a fetishist. A dabbler in occultism, and in surrealism too, though always on the outskirts. Never quite “whole hog”. A kind of liminal figure, I suppose. His most significant claim to fame, at least to the broader world, is his introduction of the term “zombie” to English speakers through his 1929 book, “The Magic Island.” This paved …