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Near the end of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics there appears the passageFurther, if a man prospers or fails to prosper because he is the kind of man he his, just as a man sees poorly because he is blue-eyed, then not luck but nature is the cause.(Translated by Anthony Kenny.) Earlier in Chapter 2 of Book VIII, there is a reference to the superior eyesight of the black-eyed. This is not …

I was getting the feeling lately that I’ve been writing a lot here lately, and I already had an export of all of my blog posts, so I decided to check my word count each year over the last 8 years. As of yesterday, I’d written 167,824 words for this site in 2024. It turns out that’s a ton! Apparently I wrote my ass off in 2020 (187,535 words), but …

Bad Climate Socialism by Hamilton Nolan [T]here is a difference between socializing the costs of things we need more of, and socializing the costs of things we need less of. Universal public health care would be good. Universal public insurance for people to continue to build more beachfront homes that scientists tell us will be at ever-increasing risk of destruction from climate change—allowing us to delay our ultimate reckoning with …

Spoiler: It’s nothing scandalous or bad. Every once in a while, someone posts this photo on Twitter to attempt to dunk on furries: Midwest FurFest 2018 Over the years, I’ve seen this discourse play out several times. The people that post this photo usually don’t elaborate on why they think this photo is meaningful, they just let it stand alone and expect their audience to fill in the blanks. So …

A September Yo-Yo in SoCal; Record hot to cool to hot again September was a bit of a roller coaster month in California (especially SoCal). In the southern half of the state, a record-breaking early Sep heatwave kickstarted a major wildfire outbreak that coincided with a major late monsoonal surge–leading to a dramatic mix of […] The post Major autumn heatwave to continue streak of record heat in interior Southwest; …

Education reformers find it harder to change classes for younger students, as later classes depend on earlier classes, and still later classes depend on those. In general, system features that evolved earlier, or which more other features depend on, are harder to change, and get more “entrenched”. Early basic features of our DNA systems, and our software systems, have become similarly entrenched.Cultural evolution doesn’t work if people just copy the …

Autumn greetings! Reading: Every night for the past week or so, I’ve been curled up with Dustin Pittman’s New York After Dark and Mark Bozek’s The Battle of Versailles: The Fashion Showdown of 1973 (photos by Bill Cunningham) — just living in the past, I guess! I attended launch events for both books. Audio: The news, more than I have in a long time…to keep up on presidential election updates …

Basic Apple Guy: Mac OS X Tiger, Apple’s fifth major release of OS X, was much beloved by the Apple community & holds the title as the longest-running version of Mac OS X (30 months). Released in 2005, Tiger introduced notable features including Spotlight search, Dashboard, Safari RSS, Automator, and more. It also felt like a very refined version of Mac OS X, with a lot of fit and finish …

How Apple's Macintosh design philosphy affects the web.

Inspired by Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. A reader suggested to me that this could be interpreted as a story of sexual violence. I don’t contest the validity of this interpretation, though I intended a reading that more specifically underscores the relationship between body horror, childbirth, and pursuit. I’m putting this under a “read more” to alert any readers that might prefer to avoid any themes referenced in this paragraph. Outrunning him in …

Here we are at Night 5, the penultimate game of this phase of the CSW Mordheim Campaign. For this evening we ventured out to the suburbs where Michael hosted us in his lovely home. GAME 1 For this game Michael had assembled a remarkable table that combined the original card-and-plastic Mordhiem buildings with traditional bases, other terrain elements, risers, water and even a ship! A three way battle with Mattias's …

“Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing you have received - only what you have given. A full heart, enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage.” Francis of Assis

I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned about conducting skip level 1-1s. What is a skip level 1-1? Skip level 1-1s are a way to sense what is happening in your organization. The basic idea is: You schedule meetings with your “skip levels”. A skip level is the person two levels down. Your direct reports’ direct report. So if you manage Alex, and they manage Beth, you would …

September 30, 2024 No Blog Next Week I’ll be out of town Oct. 6-11 (Sunday through Friday). I’ll be competing in the Huntsman World Senior Games on Mon & Tue (Oct. 7-8) in Saint George, Utah. Then I fly directly to Houston for the US Table Tennis Hall of Fame Inductions and Banquet on Thursday (Oct. 10), where I’ll be doing the presentation for Dennis Taylor. I’ll write about this …

Shift networks (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Jeremy Kun asks how to permute vectors using few vector additions, elementwise multiplications, and rotation operations, for an application involving homomorphic encryption. Our fractional universe (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Jim Propp and his guest columnist Jeff Glibb parody those breathless but vague pop-sci expositions of new mathematical discoveries. Byrne’s Euclid (\(\mathbb{M}\)), the one with colored diagrams replacing all the symbols, newly digitized and available online from the Harvard library. Noted …