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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…
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On chimpanzees and Nash equilibria.
This is a pretty cool study, I think. Amongst other things, the authors compared the performance of pairs of chimpanzees in a zero-sum game to the performance of human pairs. And they noticed that pairs of chimpanzees typically perform much closer to the Nash equilibria than do human pairs. I do wish the authors had…
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On organ trafficking.
The New York Times has run several features recently discussing organ trafficking from living donors. As in, paying somebody to go under the knife and have an organ cut out in order to give it to you. Typically kidneys, since humans can get by with one but are born with two. And, yes, currently illegal in this…
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Frank Brown Cloud 