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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• ❡ Mathematical programming challenges for humans and other processes
• ❡ 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
• ❡ A game for the Traveling Salesman to play
• ❡ Building graphs with integersticks and bad matchsticks
• ❡ 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
• ❡ Mutating Register Machines
• ❡ An admirable essay on Dewey at Aeon
• ❡ Breeding Register Machines
• ❡ Building an RSS feed
• ❡ (Almost) evolving Artificial Chemistries
• ❡ Running Register Machines
• ❡ Making a Register Machine
• ❡ A quick Artificial Chemistry in Clojure
• ❡ Learning in Public
• ❡ Humane scale
• ❡ Against The Swerve
• ❡ 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.