Recently updated blogs

“Fast” enumeration of partial assignments in SAT problems Published 2024-10-15 In my last post on SAT problems I noted that you can remove a single variable from a SAT problem using the technique I outlined. That is, you can build a SAT problem over the remaining variables that is solvable iff there is some assignment of the removed variable that satisfies the original problem. This will only sometimes run in …

For the past week, I've been working on a command-line tool to generate images from css-doodle source code. If you're familiar with command lines, try installing it with npm: npm i -g @css-doodle/cli After that, you'll be able to generate images with one line of command. cssd render code.css -o result.png If the code includes animations, you can also generate a video by using the .webm or .mp4 extension for …

I love waxworks. When they are good they’re very, very good and when they’re bad they’re even better. I’ve been hooked since experiencing the famously terrible Louis Tussaud’s House of Wax in Great Yarmouth, and never miss a waxworks if there’s one to visit.The National Wax Museum Plus in Dublin is a mix of waxworks and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not-type exhibits. Believe it or not, this is footballer and …

Before we moved to New Mexico, one of our favorite places to see the fall leaves was Missouri. Every year, we’d head to the Ozarks to soak up the vibrant reds and golds of the changing leaves. But now that we live in the Southwest, we’ve found even more reasons to love autumn. The fall here isn’t just colorful—it’s magical. With golden aspens glowing against red-rock cliffs, cool mountain breezes, …

This will be a talk for the (In)determinacy in Mathematics conference at the National University of Singapore, 20-22 November 2024 Abstract. I shall discuss the question whether we may regard determinateness of truth as flowing from determinateness of objects in … Continue reading →

– Well, it looks like we’re here in another US election year already. As Advanced Mustachians, we already know that the ongoing battle of Harris vs. Trump should not be consuming much of our time. Sure, we do our research and cast our votes but after that we move right on to focus on other things within our own circle of control. But out of all the things the politicians …

I do love me some video-games. But one genre I have loved since almost the beginning of my hobbyist career has been racing games. And any keen reader here will note that I almost always have a racing title in my most played of a month (or week, when I did that to myself).I also have a beefy PC that I a built at the tail-end of Covid. In part …

(Skippable Backstory) A few months ago, Tammy Winter published a thread of advice for precocious young people. My addendum to it was the following: Build a technical foundation. Opinions differ, but I’ve found it very hard to develop deep technical skills later in life: responsibilities eat into the necessary huge...

It’s Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, so I’m out at Squam, eating delicious food and spending time with family. When I was living on the west coast that wasn’t really in the cards, so we’d host our own, which was a delight, but it’s nice to do the big family one again. Styling RSS I’ve mentioned before, I use Vienna as my RSS reader. I like it generally, but I wasn’t satisfied …

Crouched, hunched, bent-double on a floor, wooden, carpet, concrete. One input, one output, mediated via a BOSS ME-50 multi-effects pedalboard. Looping, delayed, pitch-shifted, crunched. Over the last few years, I’ve performed occasionally as Snails in Joyland, an improvised noise act which prides itself on being simple and crunchy. I say occasionally, because it works out to be at a frequency of about once per year. I like taking Snails to …

2024 Ok I’m still playing catch up. Many of these I read some months ago. I’m unsure in which order but I start off as usual with a re-reading of: Tender is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald Which I enjoyed more than ever and indeed am now convinced that this is his greatest novel. I loved the opening prose so much that I picked it up a few weeks later …

At the ultimate point Where extinguishing flips A cold switch, chilling dip And the lights go out One by one, one by one: Each a picture, each an image Of people, person, place; The furnishing awareness Dusted with half-remembering, Dissolves into people, person, place: The milliseconds of the only movie I ever made But never could publish Subsists for me alone: mon oeuvre Unique et solitaire: ma vie. The loves …

A guide to the Soekarno–Hatta Line – the Jakarta airport train. Travel information, tickets, and which stations are best for visitors. The Soekarno–Hatta Airport Commuter Line (formerly the Soekarno–Hatta Airport Rail Link) is the airport railway connecting Soekarno–Hatta International Airport to Central Jakarta. The Soekarno–Hatta Line was built with the combination of a new railway connecting to an existing track. As such the railway has to weave its way around …

This week in Modern Plain Text Computing we put together some of the things we’ve been learning about cleaning and tidying data. Here’s a somewhat sobering example using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which is how the NTSA tracks information about road accidents in the United States. Our data file shows counts of pedestrians aged <16 killed in road accidents on each day of the month in the …

I was thinking earlier today that I haven’t posted here in a while. I also have been thinking that I should worry less about publishing finished ideas, as I frequently tail off before that point. Then, the idea goes, forgotten, forever. So why not plant that seed here? It will go unnurtured but at least it can get a couple roots down, to let it weather the storm of amnesty …