Words with occasional pictures
New and old writings, continuously updated, but also preserving self-described “classics” I’ve written over the last 20 years or so. Engineering, politics, history, science, complexity, agile, all that kind of stuff.
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❡ The Type Personality of an Advertisement (April, 1904)
❡ Push instructions done lazily
❡ Self-referential continued fractions
❡ Taps Mike
❡ Organic chemistry (1834)
❡ Observations and adjustments on a very negative review (1834)
❡ An improved review of Physiologie Vegetale (1834)
❡ On dissectable prime numbers
❡ 20200210 quil
sketch: hesitant wobblers
❡ 20200209 quil
debugging
❡ 20200208 quil
sketch
❡ 20200207 quil
sketch
❡ 20200206 quil
sketch
❡ Notes on rewriting real numbers
❡ Notes on exporting quil
sketches
❡ Looking for pattern-avoiding sets of numbers
❡ Notes on higher-order functions in ReQ
❡ What does a program do? (part 1)
❡ Some “simple” number theory benchmark problems for GP
❡ A rediscovered poem
❡ Drawing recursive line intersections
❡ A compass-and-straightedge (and hard probability theory) puzzle
❡ A self-rewriting system
❡ Rewriting ReQ style
❡ Revisiting the ReQ language
❡ Tropical string mathematics
❡ Robustness in Push (and Klapaucius)
❡ Where things go wrong
❡ Such a wet robin….
❡ Reliability and creativity
❡ A different kind of testing for genetic programming systems
❡ Overlapping “answers”
❡ Arithmetic sausage links
❡ Watching the arithmetic sausage getting made
❡ On quantile dictionary words
❡ Changing the idea of type in Push
❡ A few more evolved FizzBuzz Push programs
❡ On the Automatic Generation of Other People’s Code
❡ Evolving FizzBuzz programs with Clojush
❡ Considering lexicase selection algorithms in SQL (and NoSQL)
❡ Some examples of generalized continued fractions
❡ Some Continued Fractions benchmarks for machine learning
❡ A Very Small Push
❡ Permutable programming languages
❡ Building graphs with integersticks and bad matchsticks
❡ A game for the Traveling Salesman to play
❡ Diffusing domino tilings: thinking about sets all time
❡ Diffusing domino tilings: questions from the audience
❡ Building some domino tilings in code
❡ Reminding myself about hypergraphs and tiling
❡ The why of colored domino puzzles
❡ Some tiling challenges
❡ Even more library books (unread)
❡ Enumerating some solutions for those Manhattan distance problems
❡ More on inferring lattice position from Manhattan distances
❡ More library books, some unread
❡ Étude: How much do you need to know?
❡ From the list of overdue library books, some unread
❡ The cracks in the sidewalk
❡ It doesn’t add up
❡ On needing help
❡ On having two goals
❡ String chemistries: poking around
❡ String chemistries: A play world
❡ Let’s do it wrong together
❡ Research and recreation and lattice proteins
❡ A wiggling lattice protein
❡ But you can choose your neighbors
❡ What can you make of this, Johnny?
❡ A puzzle for three-eyed photographers
❡ How to embed a highcharts.js plot in a reagent component
❡ You should be using ParetoGP for symbolic regression
❡ One helpful way to think about GP
❡ A sort of doomed mission statement
❡ Among the Big Scientists
❡ Another Quil sketch
❡ Embedding Quil sketches
❡ Music theory in Clojure
❡ One mystery solved
❡ An admirable essay on Dewey at Aeon
❡ Mutating Register Machines
❡ Breeding Register Machines
❡ (Almost) evolving Artificial Chemistries
❡ Building an RSS feed
❡ Running Register Machines
❡ Making a Register Machine
❡ A quick Artificial Chemistry in Clojure
❡ Against The Swerve
❡ Learning in Public
❡ Humane scale
❡ Passing the Lemire Test
❡ More gentle comparisons between Push programs
❡ Finishing the Interval Push type in Klapaucius
❡ The Interval Push type in Klapaucius
❡ Rethinking the Push span as an undirected interval
❡ Adding a Span type to Push; part 2
❡ Adding a Span type to Push
❡ When do continuous spans overlap?
❡ The very idea of numbers
❡ Monotonic sentences: A puzzle
❡ An ye shall know us by our hobbies
❡ An extract from The Last Lost World
❡ The March of Revision
❡ A Cnut of the Apocalypse
❡ The problem with “Customers”
❡ Down is just the most common way out
❡ The Three Languages of Genetic Programming
❡ Best Seen plots are best not seen…
❡ Modeling requirements discovery and product design
❡ Against Originality
❡ Salmon in a swimming pool
❡ Can one visualize cosmopolitanism of college students?
❡ How might one compare “agile” to “other” software development usefully?
❡ telegraphic memories of a weather-induced flight
❡ Expressiveness, “contraction” and the “edge of chaos” in genetic programming
❡ Working out the details of a real options framework
❡ To the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”
❡ Dewey’s “Pattern of Inquiry”: money shot
❡ The Arena, September 1897
❡ The Eagle Magician for March, 1918
❡ Planning and discovery, maybe?
❡ Can I blame Herb Simon?
❡ Solar Edisonism
❡ Just want a target
❡ “…yet to be navigated…”
❡ test-driven woopsie
❡ Winter squash caramel
❡ A keeper
❡ Gerald Stanley Lee on mislearning
❡ Personal brand: red hot, with a smell of burnt flesh
❡ There are exactly two ways: one, and many
❡ Just who do you think Citibank is targeting with dunning notices?
❡ More Gerald Stanley Lee
❡ What’s needed: A decentralized copyright clearance authority
❡ Artists, Poets, Tramps and Babies
❡ Prescience
❡ On the Hobby of Philosophy
❡ On Authors
❡ The table
❡ Quotable Guizot
❡ Back, sortof
❡ Sprinkler shadows on the ground
❡ The “Best” Tonic advertisement
❡ Robert E. Tozier, 1930, Langley
❡ Quotable Deadwood
❡ Palettes by the book
❡ Revisiting The Voice of the Machines
❡ Sayings for almost every day
❡ Learning from left field
❡ How many people have ever read that?
❡ You’ve got to stuff all that nonlinearity somewhere…
❡ Ten ideas about Ideas
❡ Worrying about collectibility
❡ You eggheads are in a lot of trouble….
❡ Why I love our library
❡ The Voice of the Machines, by Gerald Stanley Lee
❡ Quotes from Lem’s One Human Minute
❡ The unremarked Apple iPhone thing
❡ A hundred years before Andy Clark
❡ Journeys to Bagdad
❡ Xmas
❡ Upon refusing to sign an NDA to attend a research conference
❡ On Wilderness
❡ Qualifications
❡ Invention through the ages
❡ The String Theory Incident
❡ Rule of thumb: To best ensure destruction, never create
❡ Wind and chaff, and the laughter of yokels: Beyond student, teacher, publisher, and librarian
❡ Can’t tell the players without a program
❡ Science progresses one __ at a time
❡ I am now the Answer
❡ The thing we take for granted
❡ Bad mechanism design in auctions
❡ Watch the video
❡ Deferred acceptance: science advances
❡ You think too much to have daughters
❡ Iconoclasm redux, played out in words
❡ You are a mere tenth of a Real Man
❡ Papers being browsed today
❡ Self-governing Corporations
❡ Worth the time to read through
❡ There is water
❡ The world is again safe for living humans.
❡ Synchronicity effects in online discussions
❡ Your culture, your career. Your habits, your goals.
❡ You know, people pay me to do this crap
❡ Unsatisfied Desire to Hear Polka of Doom
❡ First thing we do is…
❡ “Wollerkertoot” and meta-miscellany
❡ British Israelites?
❡ 20th-century poetry was for sure automated
❡ Tiny dinosaurs from space that grow many legs
❡ You never tell me that you love me
❡ A great interface
❡ I could do that
❡ I called Stella
❡ Want some, got some, not the same thing
❡ You sick people
❡ A fine way with words
❡ Learn some history
❡ Kevin Kelly on the future of science
❡ Lying season, lying years
❡ “The torpor of his mind renders him… incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation…”
❡ Karl Popper and Battlestar Galactica
❡ The Commemorative Library Digitization Symposium edition of Anthony Hope’s “The Indiscretion of the Duchess”
❡ Rumors about kittens and stuff
❡ Kids draw scientists
❡ If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?
❡ The subtle influence of goons
❡ As ever
❡ A little man with a radio that lives inside Sun Boy’s ankle
❡ Tenure Considered Harmful: Dean Dad
❡ Typographical errors in library catalogs
❡ My wife says she always knows I’m about to get in trouble
❡ A learning ecology
❡ r vs. K
❡ On the lifetime of genres
❡ Leave no national meeting undrunk
❡ Worth
❡ Just because you read it in a book?
❡ Fascism then and now
❡ A future of higher education (or whatever it will end up being called)
❡ If you’re going to be awake in the middle of the night anyway…
❡ Tell me again, what is it that you do?
❡ Giving thanks where they’re due
❡ A finely crafted analogy can convey one’s point with both elegance and force
❡ The deeper truths I learn in school, you never knew before
❡ Acquisitions of 11/2005
❡ Judge not, lest something or other
❡ It is said…
❡ Ever have one of those days…
❡ Complexity and Diversity
❡ Engineering Preprints?
❡ Welcome to class
❡ Bookstores and how they fail
❡ Eighteen years, give or take
❡ Ummmm… what?
❡ Vehicle piloted by a fish
❡ Three years it’s sat
❡ A brief note on cell phone radiation hazards
❡ You do actually have to be from here
❡ Three crows
❡ Picture of a deer
❡ What I’m reading
❡ Echoes of the past
❡ Oi! Linguiſt or perhaps 18C perſon! Long eſs?
❡ I am reading
❡ I’d hammer in the morning
❡ Ickily statisticky
❡ Everything will be wonderful in the future! (just like the past)
❡ Where a molecule is affects what it does
❡ Design a 2-dimensional cellular automaton that solves a system of linear equations
❡ hints of a fearsome truth
❡ It’s a windy old world
❡ A kind of garden
❡ What I want today
❡ Science viewed as a way of quickly recovering from stupidity
❡ Real weirdos, wandering far off in the forest, quite distant from the American Way
❡ Two comments on Google Print
❡ To be small, and to not be small
❡ Ragged days for an old fave
❡ Feeding Everything to Us All
❡ The first seventeen endnotes from Chapter Nine
❡ Against bad grading practices
❡ The ratchet auction: A new method for efficient online sales
❡ To remove mustiness from old tomes, or perhaps prevent the dropsy
❡ Object lessons for travelers, authors, bibliomaniacs, and those who admire mummies and Hemerocallis
❡ The Drunkard’s Auction
❡ Valuable old books
❡ Your fridge will still be stupid and cold, but maybe my milk will tell it jokes
❡ We’ve gone and done it now
❡ Weston the Pedestrian
❡ Ann Arbor Forteana
That's all I've got for now. But there will be more, no doubt, another day.