7/12/2024 8:05 Martianus Capella: Precursors to Copernicus. Well told, with fine illustrations.
6/12/2024 9:50 My interview on TalkRadio about “Einstein’s Tutor”: I talked with Paul Ross for a quarter hour about my
book on a UK radio station. You have to make a free account to listen. My bit starts at 1:39. The host was charming and gracious and had clearly read the book.
3/12/2024 10:08 Beastly beginnings: Erik Kwakkel, in his website medievalbooks, offers up some fine prose on the animal origins of old books.
29/11/2024 20:13 Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too): Detailed discussion of labor abuses made more common, and somehow more acceptable, when perpetrated with the assistance of “apps” (Uber, etc.). A slight omission is the prevalence of such practices as pretending that employees were “independent contactors” long before the existence of cellphones. I was a such a fictional contractor when I worked for a summer as a bicycle messenger in New York City. We satisfied the legal definition of employees, but somehow the messenger companies got away with classifying us as contractors, which meant no benefits whatsoever.
23/11/2024 13:56 Pipe Viewer: I didn’t know about this obviously useful utility: just stick it in your linux command pipeline to get a progress meter.
17/11/2024 16:28 The meaning of “AI”: “This ridiculous situation could’ve been avoided if we had settled on a more accurate buzzword like ‘applied statistics’ instead of ‘AI’.” This analysis by Jeremy Keith really hits the nail on the head efficiently. I’ve been (annoyingly, I’m sure) refusing to let people talk to me about “AI”, because the language models that they’re referring to do not exhibit intelligence.
10/11/2024 11:17 My Gym Code of Conduct: I don’t even go to a gym these days, partly because I prefer not face the horrors listed in this article. “At one end, you have the animals that leave piles of sweat on the equipment. At the other end, you have those who wipe everything down with antibacterial wipes as if they had committed a crime and need to remove DNA evidence.”
