Mail to "cshalizi at bactra dot org dot oryx". (My address doesn't really end with the name of a genus of antelope .)
Visit bactra.org → On Hacker News May 2015 – Dec 2023
I find this literature irritating and opaque. This is at least somewhat because I do not yet understand it well, and there's too much of it. But clearly I need to wrap my head around it, before I become technically obsolete. My scare quotes in the title of these notes thus derive in part from jealousy and fear. But…
A much-abused result in mathematical logic , supposed by many authors who don't understand it to support their own favored brand of rubbish, and even subjected to surprisingly rough handling by some who really should know better.
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…