Recently updated blogs

. Readers: I gave the Neyman Seminar at Berkeley last Wednesday, October 9, and had been so busy preparing it that I did not update my leisurely cruise for October. This is the second stop. I will shortly post remarks on the the panel discussion that followed my Neyman talk (with panelists, Ben Recht, Philip Stark, Bin Yu, and Snow Zhang), which was quite illuminating. “I shall be concerned with …

If you love reading about the history of science fiction, you should love reading Jim Emerson’s series Futures Past. I’ve previously reviewed the volumes for 1926 & 1927, and 1928. In the early 1990s Emerson started this project as a fanzine focusing on the history of science fiction, and published four issues: 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 before he had to stop. Then a few years ago when he retired …

Almost three weeks ago, I proposed a collaborative project, combining the efforts of professional and amateur mathematicians, automatic theorem provers, AI tools, and the proof assistant language Lean, to describe the implication graph relating the 4694 equational laws for magmas that can be expressed using up to four invocations of the magma operation. That is to say, one needs to determine the truth or falsity of the possible implications between …

Last Friday we said goodbye to 159 colleagues as part of our alignment offer. It was a tough day, there are a lot of close relationships within Automattic, and goodbyes are always hard. On Monday, I got to be Oprah for a few minutes. We had scheduled a town hall for leaders around the company to speak to everyone, and our Woo team had ~350 people in person at a …

We made one stop in the Grand Canyon that I’d never visited before, or even heard of. Some of our group had found it on a previous trip, a short scramble up a small side drainage flowing with a tiny stream of salt water. All around the edges of the trickling flow, the stones were encased in salt, gleaming white under the sun. And not just stones: There’s so much …

I hadn't been to a poetry event in a little while, so when I saw Milk Poetry were doing a special horror themed slam I signed up immediately. My work has often traded in the bizarre and surreal, mixing elements of horror in with poetry so it seemed a good fit. I performed G-Man which has become a favourite of mine. I didn't win, but that's not really the point …

The older sister of Bao-yu, the boy, now a young teen, who was born with the jade stone in his mouth, is an Imperial Concubine, a high prestige slave of the Emperor. She is likely herself still a teen when we learn, in Chapter 16 of The Story of the Stone, that she has been given permission to visit her family. The family responds by planning an enormous party, thus …

via NASAZoeA placid, mid-sized gas giant orbiting just beyond the frost line of a K-class star. Blueish-purple atmosphere. Ring system. Typical collection of rocky and icy moons. Magnetosphere within typical range for a body of this size and composition. No major hurdles to colonization, and no real reason to go out of your way to do it either.Enter MUIR.MUIR began as an overseer during the post-Collapse ecological recovery of Earth. …

I've been overthinking while trying to remember something I read or watched a few years ago that explained fourth-dimensional thinking and time travel. It involved looking directly at the tip of a pencil rather than seeing the entire pencil itself and I found it was a perfect analogy for how to think about "time."Films such as 1997's Event Horizon and 2014's Interstellar have also explored a similar concept when they …

“In ‘The Working Day’, Marx reports that the appointment of Mr. H. S. Tremenheere as Commissioner of Inquiry coincides with the occurrence of “several public meetings and … petitions to Parliament [whence] arose the cry of the London journeymen bakers against their over-work … [appealing] not [to] the heart of the public but its stomach” (Marx [1867–1887] 1990, 215). And what was it that turned the stomachs of this public …

One of my friends recently stumbled across a mix CD that I put together back in 2006, filled with songs that I had been listening to at the time. Through the marvels of modern cloud services, I’ve recreated it as a Spotify playlist. I think the tracks and the sequencing both hold up pretty well. There are videos of the tracks along with a bit of commentary below. Flying — …

Change the cost of Disarm to be “one Lemons, Oranges, Kiwis, Grape, or Cherry” and change its effect to be “Choose a Trap Cell whose Content is the same as the resource spent for this action and make it a Plain Cell.”

Album of the Week, October 12, 2024 Wayne Shorter as a composer in the 1960s was stretching his wings. Over the course of a few albums for Blue Note, he went from the Trane-inspired writings of JuJu to the incredible cool of Speak No Evil to the avant-garde leanings of The All Seeing Eye. For those who might have been expecting more of that latter album, recorded in late 1965, …

Subscribe WordPress Facebook Twitter Instagram If you enjoy reading please consider “buying me a pint”, this will help to cover my hosting and image hosting and help to ensure further trips can go ahead!BUY ME A PINT History and Brews: Pubs in Beeston, Attenborough, and Long Eaton Today I visit various pubs in the Beeston and Long Eaton areas, detailing their histories, atmospheres, and available beers. The Victoria Hotel, dating …

There have been increasingly clamorous calls for the banning, removal, or controlling, or censoring of ‘misinformation’ as an enforced general policy. This may be through law backed by punishment. But what does this mean? The calls seem also to be suggesting that something new and perilous is happening in human life that was not there before. That now, because of misinformation, something especially harmful is occurring. The fashionable word ‘misinformation’ …