I like to write, but I have a problem with starting new projects and not finishing them. It’s not that I lose interest, it’s more that I write and write until my head gets all turned around and I have no idea whether what I’ve just written is any good. Sometimes I’ll know just how […]
Just What the Heck is Non-Monotonicity?
I am still working on the remaining analysis of Duluth municipal elections – hold your horses! – but I thought that as a breather I would talk about something that comes up a lot when people are talking about switching over to instant-runoff voting. Normally I would use the term ranked-choice voting, which it the […]
Would Ranked-Choice Voting Make a Difference in Duluth Municipal Elections? Part 2
Last time I looked at single-winner elections, this time I will be looking at the multi-seat elections. Note that what’s actually being proposed is more properly called “single transferable vote”, but I’ll be calling it ranked-choice voting in order to maintain consistency. The multi-winner version does rely on ranking choices, so it’s not a total […]
Would Ranked-Choice Voting Make a Difference in Duluth Municipal Elections? Part 1
There is a fairly good chance that the City Council of Duluth will be putting ranked-choice voting (AKA instant-runoff voting) up for referendum sometime in the next five years. I sat in at one of the City Council meetings last week and listened to a task force Mayor Ness had formed talk about whether or […]
Supreme Court Decision a Day: Roe v Wade
The vast majority of Supreme Court decisions are actually about pretty boring stuff. There’s case set to be heard in a couple of days, Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific which will determine whether the payment for translation services extends to the payments for translating text documents. The case is over a matter of slightly more than […]
Supreme Court Decision a Day: Brown v Board of Education
So I recently started reading Supreme Court opinions. This initially started when I was busy proving someone wrong on the internet, but I was quite surprised to find that they’re (mostly) very human-readable. I suppose I just assumed that SCOTUS opinions were going to be arcane and incomprehensible, and so I had never read one. […]
Books Read 2011 Data Mining
Sometimes I wish that I’d taken more stats, so that I could do some better plotting of data. Either way, the sample of books I read in 2011 is probably too small to be meaningful. However, just for kicks, here’s some data in chart form. Authors This graph by nationality is pretty unsurprising, as all […]
One Sentence Book Reviews, 2011, pt. 3
This is the third part of a three-part series. Part one, part two are available for perusing. I finished up the last book of the year at 10:20 PM on 12/31/2011, just barely meeting my self-imposed goal of sixty books for the year. I did National Novel Writing Month for November, which slowed me down […]
Data-Mining My Reddit Comment History
Alright, so I was cruising reddit the other day and found a python script that mines through your comment history and pulls all that information into a text file. I immediately did so. One small downside of this is that only the last three months of comment history are stored for access from your comment […]
On The Pros and Cons of Brain Uploading
First, some definition of terms. When I talk about brain uploading, I mean making a copy of the brain with virtual neurons, virtual chemicals and virtual chemical receptors. I’m also starting with the premise that this virtual copy contains that nebulous quantity I’ll dub “youness”, though obviously that’s up for debate. I consider it to […]
What I Want Out of Superman
Superman has always bugged me. The idea of dressing up in a special outfit and going to fight crime I can sort of understand, but it makes more sense for Batman than for Superman. Batman devotes nearly his whole life to fighting crime; even those token times spent as Bruce Wayne serve mostly to provide […]
One Sentence Book Reviews, 2011, pt. 2
I’ve gotten through another twenty books since last time. This puts me about a month ahead of schedule in my reading, which means that I might just have time to read Infinite Jest after all. The Magicians by Lev Grossman – Cynical and somehow still wondrous, and offers a nice variety of emotional impacts. Bossypants […]
When Life Begins
Let me be upfront: this whole blog post is about how much I hate the phrase “Life begins at conception”. The problem is twofold. First, it’s incredibly ambiguous. “Life” can mean a whole bunch of things. I believe when pro-life people use the term, they mean it in the sense of “continuity of identity”. To […]
One Sentence Book Reviews, 2011
Okay, so this year I’m trying to get through 60 books, which I think it a reasonable goal that will keep me reading without getting sick of it. At year-end, I’ll throw the list up along with some graphs about what my genre tendencies tend to be, authors I read, etc., but for now here […]
The Other Ending of Pulp Fiction
I keep having this same dream where there’s an alternate ending of Pulp Fiction which everyone hates and I find absolutely hilarious. The actual details of this alternate ending aren’t important, because like most dream stuff, they don’t actually make sense in the context of reality. Just imagine me laughing my ass off in a […]