Thursday, March 20, 2025

Perhaps we should let Turing off the hook as well

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A little while back, we came to the defense of Arthur Conan Doyle by pointing out that surprisingly many intellectuals and scientists inclu...
Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Noah may be overthinking "We'll do the Flintstones but in the future, with robots instead of dinosaurs."

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I wrote this about a year ago but it somehow disappeared into the draft folder shortly after Noah Smith wrote this post . Fortunately, thoug...
Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Every picture tells a story

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 A bit of context. Substantially more people died in the Eaton fire than in the Palisades fire. Far more people were left homeless in Altade...
Monday, March 17, 2025

"The SAT Gave Me Hope"

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Back in 2014, the New York Times published a brief memoir about taking the SAT and how unfair it had been. This was another case of the pape...
1 comment:
Friday, March 14, 2025

At least he didn't call it 'crowd sourcing'

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[While while looking for notes I'd made for last week's Hitchcock/Lovecraft post, I search for that author's name and this poppe...
Thursday, March 13, 2025

I tried to come up with a snarky title, but I was hard-pressed to top "timeless appeal" -- another entry in our Adventures in IP thread

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Not the worst IP proposal for a universe we've seen recently (remind me to talk about the return of Atlas Comics), but probably the most...
Wednesday, March 12, 2025

How can we possibly hope to rebuild after losing more than one half of a percent of our housing?

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 Two months later and the Wall Street Journal is still pushing the drama (not to mention a couple of its favorite narratives). Rebuilding Lo...
Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Note to Elon: When people are accusing you of being a Nazi, blaming it on a George Soros conspiracy may not be the smartest move.

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It's not often that I recommend a Motley Fool article over a Lawyers, Guns & Money post , particularly not one by Scott Lemieux, ...
Monday, March 10, 2025

Ten years ago at the blog, March was pretty much Mars One month

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It has largely been shoved down the memory hole, but in 2014 and 2015, virtually every major news organization was credulously reporting on ...
Friday, March 7, 2025

XKCD on DST

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From XKCD Monroe also suggests an alternate solution in the title text, averaging out the spring and fall changes and setting clocks 3...
Thursday, March 6, 2025

Have we mentioned how unfair it is to single out Arthur Conan Doyle?

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Yes, I'll admit that falling for those fairy pictures was pretty embarrassing, but Doyle had lots of company in his belief in the parano...
2 comments:
Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Clive James's example may be god-awful, but what about the point he was trying to make?

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 Picking up on our discussion of this claim: The best Hitchcock film was directed by someone else. Charade would not be as good as it is i...
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Tuesday, March 4, 2025

A Blacker Black Box

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From Matt Levine's newsletter: There are two basic ways to use artificial intelligence to predict stock prices: You build a deep learn...
1 comment:
Monday, March 3, 2025

The Grandiosity/Contribution Ratio -- another newly relevant repost

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One of the recurring threads at the blog for years now has been the Lords of Ithuvania , the way we have collectively treated people who stu...
Friday, February 28, 2025

More thoughts on criticism -- critics and reviewers

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 Both reviewer and critic are honorable professions, with, if anything, the former being more valuable. The best reviewers by a wide margin ...
3 comments: