there  could  be  snakes  in  here

I reviewed a huge number of things because I was unemployed (Oliver Sacks, China Mieville, Clive James, David Foster Wallace, David Graeber, Ed Glaeser, Daniel Haybron). I argued against a new popular kind of intellectual puritanism. I set out my consequentialism, which tries not to squash other goods than justice (DRAFT!). I talked about my life goals in the context of death and politics (DRAFT!). I calculated the highest wage a strict consequentialist can keep for themselves. I thought about the net-negativity of most jobs. I made a playlist that tries to get you to save yourself. I tried to dress up my maths education in ordinary transcendent meaning. I wrote a poem in pseudo-SQL. I reviewed Rousseau, LeGuin, Giddens, Fukuyama, Gleick. I made a scrapbook of semi-scientific thoughts. I made a scrapbook about epistemology and harm harm harm. I reviewed Chomsky's sloppiest book. I wrote a poem about the impulse of criticism. I wrote a poem about the former. I reviewed Gellhorn,...

Stable breeder in Conway's Game of Life. Original author one ' Hyperdeath ' One of my computer science lecturers does philosophy in passing while discussing superficially unphilosophical things like Harvard vs Princeton and the gubbins of molecular computing. (Molecular as in Hofstadter's comment: "Looking at a program written in machine language is vaguely comparable to looking at a DNA molecule atom by atom.") It is gigantic stuff: "People always define computers as 'data-processing machines' - which they are not and cannot be, because data are mental events. Machines process representations - and all this is is us using the physical world to help us with the mental world we have such limited range within (usually to help us with the physical world we have such limited control over). (This is also why the infinite cannot be properly represented, because there is nothing usably physical for the purpose.) (In the reified field that g...

[WORK IN PROGRESS, noob bashing welcome] Its specification allows accessibilities to conflict. Java lets you control how much of your program can access any given variable or class. However, the default level of accessibility doesn't have a closed specification, that is, it can be 'overloaded'; this causes problems when you have more than two packages and mix certain accessibility modifiers with inheritance between them. (The problem with the linked case is that it's syntactically correct and but the resulting output varies depending on the compiler you use. This matters not for the small number of programs it cockblocks or crashes, but because compiler writers are scarily devoted and prescient, so to see them failing to resolve ambiguity is a blow to human pride and existential security.) Escape characters and directories You can't use certain directories within strings, cos backslash is used to mark escape characters and the beginning of Windows directori...

(c) "The Ship Comes In", JD Fergusson (1931) “ The dark dry questions are breaking heads. And what have the red and blue to do with that dark river in which we swim?" - Iain Crichton Smith In case you haven’t heard, the Scottish questions are “Why independence? Why the Union? Who needs to prove what?” People usually get fixated on just one issue – whether fear of new borders, fear of the Euro, fear of losing arms jobs, boo the monarchy, boo the expenses scandal. I've tried to get all pros and cons into view; as a result, this post stretches on. If you refuse to sit through 4000 words of amateur political analysis, please skip to the punchline here . I was undecided before writing this. This time last year I was dead against independence, on the grounds that nationalism is 1) bullshit and 2) dangerous bullshit. That’s still true, but the first thing to notice is that supporting independence doesn't make you a nationalist . (That sounds obvious, ...

(c) Alberto Magnelli (c. 1909) For the first time in a year I really want home internet access. I want an m4a convertor, and a script that downloads TVTropes and the Stanford Encyclopaedia*, and to know the Gaelic for Gordon. Also I want the history and present disposition of the Argentine punk band Boom Boom Kid, and to hear my DJ mate’s new playlist, and to prove to my flatmate that Pluto has not been reinstated as a planet by an appropriate authority , nor do Chinese people customarily use newspaper for condoms. Why go without? After all, there’s no strong argument against it: the ‘information overload’ hypothesis is really not well-founded, the educational potential of the net is, at last, better than most IRL schools’ [citation impossible], and one can avoid almost all of the unbelievably horrible things on it almost all of the time. I go without because four hours a week at the library is enough and because, these dry days, I actually read instead. (There's also...