25/8/2023 11:09 Why incels should read Michel Houellebecq: I enjoyed this review, by Kathleen Stock, of Houellebecq’s Les Particules Élementaires.
17/8/2023 8:41 Fusion Foolery: Tom Murphy adds his voice to the many scientists warning against the fusion hype. He performs an interesting calculation showing how laser fusion in the NIF style could never supply commercial power, even if it worked perfectly.
13/8/2023 7:19 Why I love to be hated: “in the future it will be seen as a badge of honour to have been cancelled, and a mark of shame to have kept your head below the parapet.”
11/8/2023 7:17 The Next Generation of Web Layouts: Jeffrey Zeldman muses on the future of typographic design for sites aimed at readers. Useful for its many links, but manifesting the usual blind spots of web designers. The author mentions “small details that make reading screens of text a pleasure instead of a chore”, yet his screen of text is blighted by a fixed element asking for money. Trying to read it makes me feel like something’s in my eye. Here and in the links, “typography” is confused with font choices, etc.; but reflowing text with eager linebreaking means that type on the web will always look bad, no matter how carefully chosen your fonts or how harmonious you think your size scales are.
1/8/2023 13:55 Oppenheimer’s forgotten astrophysics research explains why black holes exist: Apparently there’s a popular movie out now that’s supposed to be about Oppenheimer, but doesn’t mention his only significant scientific work.
27/7/2023 10:26 Why biological sex matters: Richard Dawkins stating the obvious about biology, language, and politics, at a time when stating the obvious has become a courageous stand.
25/7/2023 10:11 JuliaCon 2023 Live Streaming: Some of the program of this year’s Julia conference will be streamed on YouTube, free to watch.
22/7/2023 10:11 The implicit epistemology of White Fragility: An analysis by Alan Sokal: “I extract, and then analyze critically, the epistemological ideas that are implicit in Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling book White Fragility and her other writings. On what grounds, according to DiAngelo, can people know what they claim to know? And on what grounds does DiAngelo know what she claims to know?”
18/7/2023 8:17 Multiscale analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s innovations in American paper money: “Benjamin Franklin fought against money counterfeiting in pre-Federal America by inventing new printing methods and production measures.”
15/7/2023 11:26 PSA: Thread-local state is no longer recommended: “Any code that relies on a specific threadid staying constant, or on a constant number of threads during execution, is bound to be incorrect.”
30/6/2023 16:26 Captcha this
29/6/2023 12:32 Supreme Court Decision Ending Anti-Asian Quotas at Harvard and UNC: Read the decision here.
27/6/2023 8:54 Bloomsday! The Library’s One-of-a-Kind Copy of “Ulysses”: The Library of Congress tells us about a rare and extraordinary copy of James Joyce’s masterpiece in its collection.
22/6/2023 8:20 Announcing Svelte 4: A new major version of the best javascript framework.
21/6/2023 7:41 I still think it’s very unlikely we’re observing alien aircraft: A thoughtful look at the evidence for alien visitations, interesting from a general epistemological point of view.
11/6/2023 6:30 The SPLC Is Overcounting ‘Hate’ Groups: I started ignoring the Southern Poverty Law Center when they put Ayaan Hirsi Ali on their list of extremists. The Reason Foundation details their grifting strategy.
8/6/2023 8:29 Wonky: Explication of the rhythmic complexities of some popular music, brilliantly presented. A superb use of web technologies.
7/6/2023 7:59 Potential of the Julia programming language for high energy physics computing: “In this paper the applicability of using the Julia language for HEP research is explored, covering the different aspects that are important for HEP code development: runtime performance, handling of large projects, interface with legacy code, distributed computing, training, and ease of programming. The study shows that the HEP community would benefit from a large scale adoption of this programming language.”
31/5/2023 8:40 Curl creator ponders embracing Gemini: Daniel Stenberg, the creator and maintainer of Curl, is considering including the Gemini protocol in that indispensable networking toolbox.
31/5/2023 7:27 Federal Judge Holds That Border Searches of Cell Phones Require a Warrant: The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports on the historic, and most welcome, decision. They helped bring this to pass through their legal advocacy over many years.
