This blog has moved
I m over here anyway fixing some equation formatting that WordPress has decided to break, so I may as well call it. If I haven t written anything here in over two years, and I only come here to fix broken things, Continue reading
drossbucket
Latest posts
Let’s try and understand Brian Cantwell Smith again
This is mainly a review of Brian Cantwell Smith s latest book, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment. But it s also a second attempt to understand more of his overall project and worldview, after struggling through On the Origin Continue reading
Notebooking
I m pretty quiet on here currently. That s because I have a different experiment going on instead: spamming out lots of short posts in one sitting on a notebook blog, Notebucket. I just realised I never linked to it from here, Continue reading
Research speedruns
[This post is also crossposted on Less Wrong.] The research speedrun is a format that I ve been playing with on here for the last year or so. It s been more popular than I expected and it looks like there s a Continue reading
Speedrun: Mess
This speedrun is a bit of an experiment and might go terribly. It s a more open-ended topic than the ones I ve tried before, and I m not sure what I even want to know exactly. The background is that I m a Continue reading
Book review: The Roots of Romanticism
I’ve been getting interested in the Romantic movement recently. I’d started to dimly sense its enormous influence on later thought, but I had only a hazy idea of the details. So I picked up Isaiah Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism to get a better understanding. I chose this book in particular because I love Berlin’s style. The book was originally a series of lectures, given to an audience in…
Book Review: Drawing Theories Apart
I’ve recently been reading Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics, by David Kaiser. Feynman diagrams combine my longstanding interest in physics with my current weird-interest-of-the-moment, text as a technology (this was also the background inspiration Continue reading
(Slow) speedrun: Germaine de Staël
I m starting to write up a review of Isaiah Berlin s The Roots of Romanticism , and this quote fragment jumped out at me: Suppose you went to Germany and spoke there to the people who had once been visited by Madame de Staël, who had interpreted the German soul to the French. It s a poetic turn of phrase, and I have just about enough mild curiosity to fancy doing a speedrun on her. Currently I…
Hacker News folk wisdom on visual programming
I m a fairly frequent Hacker News lurker, especially when I have some other important task that I m avoiding. I normally head to the Active page (lots of comments, good for procrastination) and pick a nice long discussion thread to browse. Continue reading
Speedrun: Abacus schools
(This is a speedrun post, where I set a one hour timer to see what I can find out about a subject. See the category tag for more examples.) I m currently reading Catarina Dutilh Novaes s Formal Languages in Logic, and Continue reading