All posts
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On personhood, in the Ramayana and in court.
I’ve been working on a modern retelling of the Ramayana. Mostly because the myth provided a framework for approaching a number of issues that I wanted to discuss, like free will: numerous commentators think the Ramayana is primarily a story about fate, and the structure of Valmiki’s telling, in which an episode of the gods…
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On returning books unread.
I would’ve liked to write a post about Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,” because it seemed like he had an interesting thesis. From what I gathered reading the first five chapters and the short blurb on the dust jacket, he wanted to write about the contribution of the American slave trade, especially…
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On the grain size of reality and, eventually, creative work.
I thought Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe was fun – he describes some good thought experiments, such as a suicidal contraption to test an idea that wavefunctions don’t collapse and we instead experience randomness due to a bifurcation of realities with perceptual continuity in only one of them – but I didn’t like that he…
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On free will, a bit, but mostly on graduate school and Rob Peace.
I’m supposed to be writing a post about free will. And I did start writing it. Began something like this: Given that my motivation for writing these posts is that K told me I needed to, to explain some of the research I’m going for my project, it might be fair to wonder why I…
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On child abuse and drawing conclusions from data.
If you’re looking for a good strategy for having a bad weekend, I’ve got one: you could go to your local library and borrow Ross Cheit’s book The Witch-Hunt Narrative. Cheit ruined my weekend. And his work is out there, ready to ruin yours too! Not that his book isn’t good. It is. I’d write…
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On The New Jim Crow.
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow was very good. Very scary, very compelling, very good. But I think her book would have been stronger if she had addressed what I felt was a gap in reasoning for her central claim… … I should mention, also, that I’m writing this about two months after having read…
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On time travel movies, particularly Timecrimes.
Timecrimes is the best time travel movie I’ve ever seen. Which seems like pretty high praise. There are lots of time travel movies out there: this isn’t a category like “best cowboy movie where the shootouts are replaced by drug trips” (Renegade) or “best cowboy movie where the shootouts are replaced by ramen noodles” (Tampopo)…
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On Cosmos and working through the math.
K and I have been watching that new Cosmos television show. The library had the whole set of DVDs, and she and I have both been tired enough that it’s felt nice to zonk out with some television in the evening while N is having her fifth dinner. K really likes the show. Things were perhaps…
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On toxoplasma.
I was talking to K and she pointed out that I missed the point of this whole “internet” thing. Apparently the goal of writing for the internet is not to sound like a pedantic stuff-bucket? This is something I hadn’t yet realized – I mostly use the internet to watch videos of Louis Scott Vargas…
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On quoting Bolaño.
I don’t know. I wrote an essay about this quote Gumaro drank a lot, but he almost never showed the effects of alcohol. When he got drunk, he would pull his chair over to the window and scrutinize the sky, saying: “My brain needs air.” This meant that he was elsewhere. Then he would start…
Frank Brown Cloud 