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Gerrymandering Math
I ran across this summer school recently and read this white paper, and while I'm happy this sort of work was getting done I was struck by how shallow the analysis there seemed to be ( Read more... ) -
Empathy for the Rural Poor
There are a few pieces of background for what I'm planning to write here.
First and foremost, there is this post on empathy and the American left. (also this one.)
Second, there's this old interactive post about diversity and incentives ( Read more... ) -
What is to be Done
I wrote little blurbs on Facebook about how I feel sort of powerless and don't know what to do about the election results. And I think sitting around feeling depressed all day would be the easy way out but I'd rather not do that so here's my first step brainstorming ( Read more... ) -
Pokemon Go Sucks
Pokemon Go is a terrible game, which has added basically no value to the idea of a Pokemon mobile game, which is a brilliant idea and deserves better. This bothers me a lot, because the failures of Pokemon Go seem very obvious and easy to avoid, and in some cases easy to fix. It betrays the fundamental premise of Pokemon, and does this in a way ( Read more... ) -
Thoughts on the Curse of Chalion
I'm going to be starting to contribute to a group blog project that kind of came out of nowhere, which will be starting with our discussion of The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold as we read it. I'm currently through chapter three, here's what I've thought so far!
The setup for the novel seems pretty traditional. The author is doing a good ( Read more... ) -
Emotional Labor
Anna put up a post about emotional labor earlier today and reading it I had a response which was somewhat frustrated--on the one hand, the notion that emotional labor is real labor is SUPER OBVIOUS and the idea that it's distributed in gendered ways is also super obvious and a big problem. I want that labor to be acknowledged and reciprocated. ( Read more... ) -
Humane Machine Intelligence
There has been a lot of discussion of artificial intelligence in the media recently. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have all made statements about the possible dangers of superintelligent AI in the future. Others, such as Jerry Kaplan and Robin Hanson, feel that much of the concern is overblown or misplaced--however these people still ( Read more... ) -
Writing out thoughts on Israel and Palestine
I read a post about Zionism on Tumblr last night and it made me want to organize my thoughts on Israel, since I haven't seriously revisited them in a while after having received new structural information.
Israel is a little bit of an info-hazard I think, and I don't really have the time or inclination to actually double check all the factual ( Read more... ) -
Computability is Nonsense?
Start with a Godel-numbering of Turing machines whose outputs are real numbers and which can be described with a finite amount of information. In an ideal world, build a Turing-complete programming language, and take a Godel-numbering of programs which take as input a natural number (n) and return as output the first n digits of a real number (let' ( Read more... ) -
Types of Knowledge Reminder
A long time ago I read a book on pedagogy, and among many other things, it outlined four types of knowledge. Since I just posted a framework below on ethics, I'm going to remind myself of this framework and make it more accessible so that I can reference it when designing the course outline I want ( Read more... )