Update: the newsletter is now on Substack, here. From 2018 to 2021 I experimented with writing a monthly newsletter to track what I’d been reading and thinking about that month. Same sort of …| drossbucket
> Anybody who’s not bothered by Bell’s theorem has to have rocks in his head. — ‘A distinguished Princeton physicist’, as told to David Mermin This post is a long, idiosyncratic discussion of th…| drossbucket
(I posted this on Less Wrong back in April and forgot to cross post here. It’s just the same references I’ve posted before, but it’s worth reading over there for the comments, whi…| drossbucket
Happy New Year! This is a fairly run-of-the-mill sort of yearly review post for the most part. But first off I’ve got a few notes on Lark Rise to Candleford. Lark Rise to Candleford I was rereading…| drossbucket
I’m going to try an experiment in June: writing lots of short notebook-style posts, roughly in the style of David MacIver’s notebook blog. I’ve been thinking of testing whether th…| drossbucket
This is another of my research speedrun experiments – I’ve made a category for them now, so look at the earlier ones if you want to know more. Today’s topic was inspired by this t…| drossbucket
This is a genre of post I’ve been experimenting with where I pick a topic, set a one hour timer and see what I can find out in that time. Previously: Marx on alienation and the Vygotsky Circl…| drossbucket
[Written as part of Notebook Blog Month.] This is a bit of an experiment to see how ‘set a timer for an hour and see what you find’ works for finding out basic information about a topic…| drossbucket
I did a ‘speedrun’ post a couple of months ago where I set a one hour timer and tried to find out as much as I could about Marx’s theory of alienation. That turned out to be prett…| drossbucket
I’m over here anyway fixing some equation formatting that WordPress has decided to break, so I may as well call it. If I haven’t written anything here in over two years, and I only come…| drossbucket
I’m pretty quiet on here currently. That’s because I have a different experiment going on instead: spamming out lots of short posts in one sitting on a notebook blog, Notebucket. I just…| drossbucket
[This post is also crossposted on Less Wrong.] The ‘research speedrun’ is a format that I’ve been playing with on here for the last year or so. It’s been more popular than I…| drossbucket
This speedrun is a bit of an experiment and might go terribly. It’s a more open-ended topic than the ones I’ve tried before, and I’m not sure what I even want to know exactly. The…| drossbucket
I wrote this for a monthly newsletter I’ve been experimenting with. I feel a bit awkward about publishing this as a post, because it’s very meandering and unpolished and plain weir…| drossbucket
This is mainly a review of Brian Cantwell Smith’s latest book, The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment. But it’s also a second attempt to understand more of his o…| drossbucket
I’ve been getting interested in the Romantic movement recently. I’d started to dimly sense its enormous influence on later thought, but I had only a hazy idea of the details. So I picked up Isaiah …| drossbucket
I’ve recently been reading Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics, by David Kaiser. Feynman diagrams combine my longstanding interest in physics with my curre…| drossbucket
I’m starting to write up a review of Isaiah Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism, and this quote fragment jumped out at me: Suppose you went to Germany and spoke there to the people who ha…| drossbucket
I’m a fairly frequent Hacker News lurker, especially when I have some other important task that I’m avoiding. I normally head to the Active page (lots of comments, good for procrastinat…| drossbucket
(This is a speedrun post, where I set a one hour timer to see what I can find out about a subject. See the category tag for more examples.) I’m currently reading Catarina Dutilh Novaes’…| drossbucket