When water freezes, it expands. Thus, my latest invention places a weight on a column of water, then freezes the water to lift the weight, doing work. By using a weight heavy enough that the work done is greater than the energy expenditure to freeze the water, I create a perpetual motion machine. The Second […]
Some art doesn’t need to be experienced to be mostly apprehended.a A good enough description suffices. Maybe the thing follows convention too closely, or the author is in a rut. But less redundant art can still internally have a variety of flavors of compressibility: Signposting: Rather than do the thing, loudly proclaim that you’re doing the thing. Candidates: […]
[expanded from tumblr post] In the above table (from Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science), we notice that there are a lot of apparent correspondences between water waves, sound, and light. The “horizontal” notion of similarity lets us notice that sound echoes and light reflects, or that these things all have some sort of […]
“Thinking on the page” is a handle that I’ve found useful in improving my writing and introspection more generally. When I write, for the most part, I’m trying to put something that I already feel is true into words. But when I think on the page, the words are getting ahead of my internal sense […]
[Summary: Say you use a fair test to predict a quality for which other non-tested factors matter, and then you make a decision based on this prediction. Then people who do worse on the test measure (but not necessarily the other factors) are subject to different error rates, even if you estimate their qualities just as well. If that’s […]
Here it is: the post after a years-long hiatus explaining that the author hopes to revive the blog. You’ve seen this before; you know how often it works. For good luck, I made a real post before this one. I had a good first month the first time around, then slowed down and stopped over the […]
“Casuistry” is today a near synonym for “sophistry”: a certain kind of intricate, deceptive reasoning; highly pejorative. The word originally referred to case-by-case moral analysis (and, as philosophical jargon, still does). But the casuist, evidently, abused the rich particularities offered by reality to justify his prior intuitions. With a torrent of excuses and exceptions he […]
Several months ago I began a list of “things to try,” which I share at the bottom of this post. It suggests many mundane, trivial-to-medium-cost changes to lifestyle and routine. Now that I’ve spent some time with most of them and pursued at least as many more personal items in the same spirit, I’ll suggest you […]