Recently updated blogs

It’s super late at night on Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. I shouldn’t be thinking about weird internet drama, but here we are. Since I last wrote about the ongoing WordPress situation: Matt Mullenweg promoted a “fork” of WordPress that wasn’t actually a fork. He then hijacked one of the most prominent plugins in the WordPress development world. The first point is pretty minor, but highlights the depths of strangeness at …

The comet has returned! Will it live up to expectations?

The video game market is far wider than it has ever been. If someone were to ask what the target market was for video games in the 1990s, most people would respond, “Elementary and teenage boys,” and the games being made reflected that. Now, however, the market has become so broad that it essentially includes everybody, and the games being made today reflect that as well. You can see it …

Recently I came upon these action figures at the Dollar Tree. They stand around 4.5 inches and are well detailed.

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In 2016, I had returned to America after several years outside the country. I did an amazing job of avoiding most, but not all the election season. I didn’t see any meaningful difference between either candidate. Hillary Clinton was evil and corrupt1, and her name is associated with a “two to the back of the head” suicide2. I joked with a friend that I hoped Trump won, just so that …

. 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 …

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 …