Thoughts of the Moment

Much of what crosses my mind does so in passing. For the sake of somewhere to put it, without the pretence of it fitting into an overall hierarchy of ideas, I have this area of my website; its contents are filed according to when I wrote them, and try to explain in their introductions what prompted them. Along with such thoughts of the moment it seems to be a suitable place for book reviews. Consequently, this index is based on chronology. I'm perfectly happy that this isn't enough to qualify the result as a blog: that isn't something I'm trying to do (although I have – at the request of my employer, on the Qt project blog – blogged about work I've done for the Qt project).

2020
on-going development.
2019
A year of doodling, notably including lots of new SVG images.
Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
A fine and marvelous (albeit, surely, biassed) glimpse into the life of India at a time of (within the usual limits humanity imposes) peace and harmony, despite the yoke of foreign oppression. At the same time, a heart-felt tale of what joy it is to be intelligent and free; and how scary it is to harness the former to a sacrifice of the latter.
Running resumes
A lazy year had left me weighing 105kg; fine weather at a late Easter got me moving – but only thrice.
2018
What I got up to that year.
Asimov's non-fiction
Re-reading some books I first read in my teens.
What is the speed of a diffuse object 
A partial beginning of a thought about how we describe the movement of diffuse objects.
On the evil of advertising
An incomplete beginning of a late-night ramble, probably upon my return from a pub.
Running continues
A harder winter lead to a slow start; an abnormally hot spring and summer put me off continuing.
Avoiding reductio
An attempt at using more constructive reasoning about some puzzles I read.
On intuition and mathematics
A call for a more nuanced relationship between the two, recognising that intuition can be educated to better accord with rigour.
2017
The modest amount of activity I got up to in another quiet year.
More running
I managed to drag myself out for a run, enough times that I even ended up running (rather than jogging) sometimes.
2016
Few changes during a year with no enthusiasm, during which a disk crash lost local changes.
Running again
I tried going for a run, for (almost) the first time in a quarter century, and actually liked it.
2011–2015
My web-site continued evolving without me writing any new thoughts of the moment.
2010
Changes during a quiet year. (From 2004 to 2010, you might even find some posts by me on GrokLaw, but its search engine is now broken and I can't remember my user-name.)
DnD caricature updates
I played with the same web-test as below (2009) some more, even considering which feats, skills and spells a DnD me would be inclined to learn.
On divisibility
A quick look at the atomist-continualist controversy.
XML for people's names
A rant about bad schemas in illustrations meant to show how good XML is. (In progress until 2011, Feb 21.)
2009
development during the international year of astronomy.
We are all mongrels
Much of the mythology around race and ethnicity ignores the practical reality of actual human ancestry: pure-bloods are a myth.
Sharing house-work
How to cope with house-mates when you don't all have the same tolerances for various kinds of squalor.
Teaching the controversy
It's not a scientific controversy: it's purely political and religious. So, do those who teach religion embrace teaching the controversy ?
A DnD caricature of me
playing with a web-test that tried to model me as a Dungeons and Dragons character.
Supersonic ionization
Crude estimates at whether supersonic movement can turn air to plasma.
The elusive Higgs boson
and why I don't didn't believe in it.
Thoughts on EPO G3/08
a set of questions the European Patent Office has asked its Enlarged Board of Appeal.
The Laius complex
another perspective on the tale of Œdipus.
Science's humility
concerning the errors that arise from mis-interpreting science's willingness to admit its limitations, and the errors that come from forgetting them.
2008–…
The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy
2008
Over-view of the few changes in a year when I was otherwise busy.
Year-end disruption
or, a short account of why there were no updates in the last few weeks of 2008.
Distributed internet searching
For the searches where you need human help, bug trackers provide a possible framework for building a community of folk willing to help with such searching.
LHC@home
Now that CERN's LHC is coming on-line, they'll be needing computing resources.
Iran, space and nuclear technology
a wry (and sadly cynical) look at what the mighty reveal about themselves in their protestations about Iran's enthusiasm for twentieth century technology.
2007
Highlights of a year's development.
2007/December/27

An illustration of how a loss leader might help a business earn money.

2007/October/3
Verbal doodles about revealing clothing.
2007/September/30
Studying JPEG, to work out what to do with images I've uploaded from my camera.
2007/August/5
A quick diatribe about base one zero
2007/June/29
The Black Sphinx
and my solution of a cryptographic puzzle it presents.
2007/April/20
A modest suggestion towards reducing abuses of the patent system.
2007/April/8
What is the SCO group claiming ? An attempt to make sense of part of an on-going law-suit.
2007/January/23
Who killed Diana ? As if the facts of the situation weren't plain enough …
2007/January/18
Charge ! An idea for a board game
2006
Changes to this site.
2006/October/15
A tribute to constitutional monarchy
2006/October/7
On Numbers and Games
2006/September/8
On the principle of population
2006/August/27
Making teams work
2006/August/23
What is a planet ?
2006/July/26
On herding cats
2006/July/23

monkeys: a diatribe about bad programming.

2006/Summer
Building the spinning colour cube, a note-book of some SVG development.
2006/April/26
How often is the 13th day of the month a Friday ?
2006/April/23
Cross-cultural trade in world history
2006/February/13
a partial study of the game of noughts and crosses
2006/January/14
an incomplete look at how many valid end-states there are for the game of sudoku
2005/October/12
Intelligent Design is not a Theory
2005/October/11
On the true origins of HTML
2005/September/30
Population limit
2005/June/29
Leaps in the dark
2005/June
Remarkable Physicists
2005/March-ish
The Man Who Knew Too Much
2002/February/8th
Ecological Randomness
2000/Summer
The End of Time

Finally, some old notes on activity among my mathematical pages, that predate the start of the yearly activity diary pages above:

Summer 2005

Learned (from hixie) how to use XHTML and a DTD hack in the DOCTYPE to map mnemonic character entities to their right Unicode code points (and, hence, a suitable glyph if your browser can find one).

Spring 2000

Creation of a fresh area in which to start on a project with more emphasis on editorial cohesion. Haphazard material will still arrive here: when I have a coherent handle on stuff, it can join the queue to migrate into that more orderly area.

November 1998

Time to separate the naturals from the foundation. This is going to be a major up-heaval: if you hit broken links, try inserting /ground or /finite after ~eddy/math, or removing either, or replacing it with the other. Turn math/found into math/ground. Sorry if even these fail !

In 1998

I spent a lot of time on a low-level toolset with which to describe relations, mappings, collections and lists (of which pairs are a significant example). When I've finished sorting that out, I aim to build up the structures that yield scalars and linearity, all in a single fluid notation, shared (with common meaning) across all branches of the toolset. My hope is that it'll make it easier to see how the toolsets needed for gravity and quantum chromodynamics relate to one another. Spring/Summer 1998: Yoneda, Autumn: the naturals.

Marcia's Singularity


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