trees are harlequins, words are harlequins

saamdaamdandaurbhed asked: At some point you shared an anti-capitalist reading list right? I can't find it right now. Can you link me to it? Thanks. I remember in particular there was this intensive economics book by an Indian guy about the problems with free market economics that you mentioned, in case that helps.

No problem. This is reading list I reblogged.

The book you’re referring to is Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises by Anwar Shaikh (PDF link from that post). I started reading it after @oligopsoneia said I might like it, and the early parts were promising but I forgot about it with all of the other stuff I’ve been doing – so thanks for the reminder!

23rd Dec 201711 notes

My XKit blacklist is apparently not working, which I just learned by having the “thinking Amenta blogs were about real things for a good 1-2 minutes” experience yet again

It is SO disorienting when that happens

22nd Dec 201726 notes

dot-garden:

continuing on the subject of bach’s church cantatas, here’s richard taruskin’s review of the teldec cantata cycle from 1991:
The essential Bach was an avatar of a pre-Enlightened – and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened – temper. His music was a medium of truth, not beauty. And the truth he served was bitter. His works persuade us – no, reveal to us – that the world is filth and horror, that humans are helpless, that life is pain, that reason is a snare.
The sounds Bach combined in church were often anything but agreeable, to recall Dr. [Charles] Burney’s prescription, for Bach’s purpose there was never just to please. If he pleased, it was only to cajole. When his sounds were agreeable, it was only to point out an escape from worldly woe in heavenly submission. Just as often he aimed to torture the ear: when the world was his subject, he wrote music that for sheer deliberate ugliness has perhaps been approached – by Mahler, possibly, at times – but never equaled.
It is for their refusal to flinch in the face of Bach’s contempt for the world and all its creatures that Mr. Leonhardt and Mr. Harnoncourt deserve our admiration. Their achievement is unique and well-nigh unbearable. Unless one has experienced the full range of Bach cantatas in these sometimes all but unlistenable renditions, one simply does not know Bach.

(via dot-garden-deactivated20181212)

22nd Dec 201732 notes

The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic - Issue 21: Information - Nautilus →

therainstheyaredropping:

As summarized by someone on Twitter: “the story of Walter Pitts, the homeless teenager who went on to kick off the field of neural networks (the foundations of many ideas in modern AI), and then burned his PhD thesis, and vanished from view.”
We read two of the papers mentioned in the article, “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”, as well as “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”, as part of a history of cognitive science course in my degree. Never knew about the history of the people behind those papers. Nor did I know that a person existed who seems to have been judged by his contemporaries as being even smarter than John von Neumann:
> That winter, Wiener brought Pitts to a conference he organized in Princeton with the mathematician and physicist John von Neumann, who was equally impressed with Pitts’ mind. Thus formed the beginnings of the group who would become known as the cyberneticians, with Wiener, Pitts, McCulloch, Lettvin, and von Neumann its core. And among this rarified group, the formerly homeless runaway stood out. “None of us would think of publishing a paper without his corrections and approval,” McCulloch wrote. “[Pitts] was in no uncertain terms the genius of our group,” said Lettvin.

(via the-axiom-of-hope-deactivated20)

#i read this long ago but somehow forgot all about pitts in the time between now and then

22nd Dec 2017218 notes

Some of the screenshots I have taken while playing Ar Tonelico 2 (Part 2/?)

#weeabraist

21st Dec 201711 notes

Anonymous asked: Same anon as before with regard to FDT. I think the biggest confusion regarding UDT and TDT and everything else is that people talk and never actually write down a formalism for what they mean. In that sense, FDT is a small step forward because it is at least a formalism. Although I'd have expected more because I do think the formalism is somewhat obvious and they've had about a decade to pin it down.

Makes sense. I skimmed through the paper last night, and there’s clearly more of a formalism there than in the TDT paper. (I didn’t know UDT was so informal as well.)

To be honest, I’m surprised that this isn’t more of a focus for MIRI – I imagine they consider a fully worked-out TDT to be a necessary condition for the stuff they want to do (?), and given the advantages over CDT and EDT, it would be a good eye-catching result to have under their belt, to help convince the world they’re moving in a valuable direction. Perhaps they have been working on it and the counterpossible reasoning stuff is just very difficult, although if so, it that ought to have decreased their confidence that TDT is the correct theory (via decreasing their confidence that TDT is possible / well-defined). I guess it would depend on the nature of the technical hurdles, though.

21st Dec 20174 notes

lifecycleofamentalobject asked: Thanks for being among the few people online who talk about _The Instructions_!

My pleasure!!

It’s my favorite novel and not as well known as it should be. I’m a bit angry at the publisher for designing the printed book to look so gigantic – it fits thematically, but it also scares people away, when in fact the raw word count isn’t that big relative to plenty of things people happily read without even making a note of their length (e.g. Game of Thrones).

21st Dec 20176 notes

Proceeding in this vein, Bloom turns what I as common reader had thought was Stevens’ indulgence of the rabbit’s momentary grandeur into (it turns out to be instead) a cautionary tale for the modern strong poet who needs a good dose of askesis to counteract his kenosis.

#quotes

20th Dec 20177 notes

celestialmechanic replied to your post “celestialmechanic replied to your photo “” Wait, have you always…”

I may be alone in this but I think AT2 (and maybe AT1) has the best context for its innuendo. Like, comparing diving to sex conveys the intimacy of jumping into someone’s innermost thoughts.

I haven’t played any of the other games, but I think I agree – the story has some fantasy concepts which initially seem like “mere pretexts” for the constant forced sexual tension that comes with the territory in this kind of anime-related media, but it makes so much sense as a pretext that the sexual tension no longer seems forced, since the whole narrative just makes sense as written

Like yes, if there was this practice of “diving into people’s minds” to boost their magical abilities, then it would be intimate and scary and frequently likened to sex, and it would be used as a kind of therapy but said therapists would be seen as disreputable in a kind of slut-shaming way, etc.

It’s a reverse Freudian reveal, where the surface meaning is “the cigar is a penis,” and the real surprise is that it is both a fully-functional penis and a serviceable, delicious cigar (albeit one you feel a bit ridiculous smoking, but that part of the metaphor fits too)

20th Dec 201729 notes

Anonymous asked: I want to read your book about “the methods of mathematical physics” for a lay/popular audience! No matter how little of it you wrote! I assume I'm not the only one! But even if that's so, please consider posting it - either here or on lapsarianalyst!

I’ll think about it. Unfortunately, almost all of what I actually wrote was a grandiose introduction, which made big claims for how cool the finished book would be, but without enough specifics for it to be very interesting on its own. I think it was well-written in an aesthetic sense, but I’d be a bit embarrassing to post now, given that I never wrote the book and probably never will.

That said, I haven’t even thought about the project at all in, I dunno, maybe a year – so now that I’ve remembered its existence, there’s a chance I’ll pick it up again, perhaps with more modest goals. For reference, the original outline went

Chapter 1: Hooke’s law, “everything is a spring” via linearization of Newton’s 2nd law about equilibria

Chapter 2: Extending Ch. 1 to cover exponential growth/decay in addition to sinusoids, so we have a general solution to 1st order scalar linear ODEs, with introduction of complex variable method

Chapter 3: Linear algebra (so we can solve 1st order linear vector ODEs, and see that they’re just Ch. 2 material after eigendecomposition)

Chapter 4: Fourier series/transform

Chapter 5: 1st order (nonlinear) PDEs, solution via characteristics (might merge this into Ch. 6 or skip it, since the applications are all linear 2nd order and it disrupts the flow)

Chapter 6: 2nd order linear PDEs, classification, solution via Fourier series/transform

Chapter 7: classical E&M as example application of above

Chapter 8: non-relativistic QM as example application of above

I was planning to explain as much as this as possible without equations, and using invented “easy” notation when equations were needed, trying to split the difference between an ordinary pop science book and a real textbook. This proved to be extremely difficult even for the simplest cases, which is why I never got very far.

20th Dec 201715 notes