Books of Blood 1-IV by Clive Barker. Classic Steven King esque horror short stories. You can't go wrong!
Consciousness and Fundamental Reality by Philip Goff. Surprisingly readable argument for Russelian monism (which is kinda like pan-psychism). I personally wasn't convinced by his arguments regarding the intuitiveness of anti-physicalism, especially his interpretation of the Mary's Room argument, but it will definitely make you think.
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle. Starts off with ARG vibes in the 90s. Protagonist is kinda passive and the ending somewhat anticlimatic.
Son of Man by Rajan Khanna and Robert Silverberg. Freaky and perverted. Extremely 70s. Anticlimatic. Guy wakes up in the future and interacts with a bunch of evolved humans.
Liberals and Cannibals by Steven Lukes. Interesting nonfiction book on moral relativism. Only read if your interested in political theory.
The New Cosmic Story by John F. Haught. Outlines a narrative history of the universe. Good choice for woo lovers.
Wow, 10 months of this dumb concept. Let's go for 10 more!
Anyone up for an optimal game of pig?
Computing A Glimpse of Randomness
Technically, it's possible to compute the first 64 digits of (a) Chaitin Constant! (It's impossible to compute anymore than that I guess.)
On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines
Can machines be physically large? Note the date...
Alternate California border proposals and How To Escape From the Simulation.
Good news, either escaping from the simulation is possible (if the simulation hypothesis is true) or it's possible to box AI!
Evangelize like it's 1999 with Evangelism is War! Learn all about Microsoft's culture in the 90s.
This is the pdf I used when I made my program that attempts to simulate every possible turing machine. The goal was to compute the Chaitin Constant. It didn't work, turns out uncomputable functions don't converge?
Go to page 222 to see the current world record for the smallest binary (2-state) universal turing machine. A universal turing machine can simulate any turing machine, when given the right input.
A classic of biology whose lessons can apply to everything from computer science to politics. Don't be scared by the size of the document, the essay starts on page 19 and is only 5 pages long. Maybe I'll review some of his other essays someday
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox is a good layman's resource for explaining why there (probably) aren't any aliens in the observable universe. Great read for statistics lovers. Those for whom statistics is anathema should just read the introduction and conclusion.
I manually added a "web clap" feature! Basically, you press a button and the number increases. Show your support of the site by clapping! It's big in Japan. In the process, I migrated the site to use Perl pre-processing. This is apparently called "CGI", which stands for "Common Gateway Interface". Thank you to CGI 101 for the help.
For those curious, I used an HTML form that activates a Perl script which updates a non-public file that contains the current number of "claps". When accessing the page, a Perl script is run that accesses the value and prints it alongside the HTML. Only what the Perl script prints out is sent to the visitor.
Benford's Law Strikes Back! Benford's Law is the statistical finding that in many collections of numbers, smaller digits are more common than larger digits. This very readable article explains why this finding still has no explanation.
It's been a while. Sorry about that! I'll try to be more consistent with the "PDF of the Month". I recently installed Prototyping, an AutoHotKey file that remaps the caps locks key to give you "Vim-lite" behavior. I edited it to allow traditional caps lock behavior if it is pressed with the Shift key.
Should I get an email for this site? I'll think about it.
Cleaned up html. Removing css may or may not be temporary. Chris Koehnkes' site (chriskoehnke.com) was a great inspiration. If you want to follow my rss feed, I recommend FeedDemon. It's old but still works well and isn't as buggy as QuiteRSS. I also got the dates working in the rss feed. Small victories I guess.
Created an RSS feed. It was easier than I thought, but doing it manually is pretty tedious.
Pivoted to single page site. It's just easier to manage the html this way. Maybe someday I'll shift to a static site generator like Jekyll or something.