bormiq.shop

you’re probably ready to hate this company that designs irish pubs abroad, but reconsider

2025-10-27T00:00:00-07:00

The Dublin-based Irish Pub Company has designed upwards of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries around the globe

You’re cringing already, right? No! Wrong! Millwork and stone, not tinsels and leprechauns. Local diaspora history. I don’t care if there’s a whiff of escape room to the accoutrements – I want people in this world to care enough to pay for fancy floor tiling.

Via Sacha Judd.

fairytale Czech hotel in the mountains

2025-10-19T00:00:00-07:00

Built in 1899 by the Czech architect Dušan Jurkovič, known as “the poet of timber” for his woodwork, the cottage and hotel are a lively combination of Czech-Slavic heritage and the Art Nouveau style of the time. The fairy tale-esque dining room, in particular, features Art Nouveau chandeliers and frescoes decorated with motifs from local legends. Constructed during a time of strong Austrian and Germanic influence, the mountain residences showcase the renowned architect’s focus on local culture and folk art.

After enduring a period of neglect and disrepair in the mid-1900s, both buildings have been lovingly restored, named National Cultural Monuments as part of a National Open Air Museum in the mountain town of Pustevny. As in 1899, they welcome overnight guests to this beautiful alpine area, while the restaurant serves local Wallachian cuisine like zelňačka (cabbage soup).

The website has more photos. I love, love, love folk ornament and it’s even better put to an ambitious program by a creative overseer with resources.

talmudology: yes, there are stupid questions

2025-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

If a baby pigeon is found within 50 cubits of a coop, it is presumed to belong to the owner of that coop. If it is found further away than 50 cubits, it belongs to the finder. Ever keen to push the limits of rabbinic law, Rabbi Yirmiyah asked “if one foot of the pigeon is within the fifty cubits and one foot is outside, to whom does it belong?” This apparently was one question too many. The rabbis (rather unfairly in my opinion) expelled Rabbi Yirmiyah from the Yeshivah for asking it.

robert hand, thoughtful about astrology

2025-10-09T00:00:00-07:00

I’d provide readings in various aspects of medieval astrology. And I’d probably wind up with readings in various modern systems as well. For instance, although I’m not specifically a Jungian astrologer, I think that reading Jung is a very valuable thing to do, because he’s one of the few moderns who thinks like an occultist. So, you can see how that style of reasoning is applied in a modern context. Jung’s style of thinking is basically magical in the proper sense of the word, not the negative sense. People don’t understand that Jung is actually a product of that underground tradition of thinking in the West. The lineage runs something like this:

First of all, you have the native, ongoing magical subculture of the Middle Ages, which wasn’t terribly influential outside of a few small circles of students. Then, during the Renaissance, you have Pico della Mirandola in Florence and Johannes Reuchlin in Germany, both of whom bring out the Cabbalah - that is, they bring it out of Judaism into Christianity. Reuchlin was a lawyer who defended many prominent Jews in Germany against various kinds of political harassment in court. As a result, the Jews so respected him that they honored him by introducing him to their secret teachings. And Pico, of course, found a rabbi who was willing to teach him both Hebrew and the Cabbalah. That began the Christian Cabbalistic tradition, which in turn led to such thinkers as Jakob Boehme (who, it is generally recognized, had considerable influence on fields outside of his immediate mystical circle). This surfaces in 18th- and 19th-century Germany as what is called Naturphilosophie, which simply means “nature philosophy.” This was actually a generic term for all of science - but it meant something more specific; it was a very vitalistic philosophy, talking about properties of nature that would generally be regarded as occult.

Both Jung and Freud, but especially Jung, came out of that tradition. So Jung is … I wouldn’t say the “end product,” because he’s not the end, but he is a product of that tradition. So he’s not “New Age” either, if you follow my meaning!

First of all, let me dispose of one obvious question: Do I run my life by astrology? The answer is no. Do I look at my major transits to see what’s coming up and try to anticipate them? Yes. I think I’d be a fool not to. Occasionally I’ll cast a horary, but it’s usually a bad idea to cast horaries for oneself. But, in my opinion, the main influence of astrology is that I think differently as a result of studying it. I have tried to stop thinking like what I refer to as a “mechanist-materialist” and have started trying to think consistently, throughout all of my life, the way I think as an astrologer. As a 20th/21st-century person, that isn’t easy! But I think I’ve attained a slightly less intense level of schizophrenia in this regard than most astrologers. Most people who do astrology think like astrologers when they’re doing astrology, and they think like modern people when they do everything else - blissfully ignoring the fact that these two worldviews are completely incompatible.

I don’t mean that you can’t “believe in” science and “believe in” astrology. (I use these terms in quotation marks, because it is inappropriate in both disciplines to “believe.”) But you cannot “believe in” the positivistic, materialistic worldview and also believe in the implications of astrology. You just can’t.

At this point, I’ll challenge anybody who thinks they can come up with an acceptable scientific explanation for the phenomena of astrology, because it isn’t do-able! Parts of it maybe - but very restricted and limited parts.

So, astrology has affected my way of thinking in general, but I don’t run my life by it - because I think astrology should never be a substitute for experience. You should be there with your experience, having things happen. But you should use astrology to understand that “this too shall pass,” if it’s a particularly difficult period, or occasionally use it to take advantage of an excellent opportunity. But to actually get up in the morning, look at your transits, and say, “Well, how shall I deal with today?” No way. That’s crazy-making!

I don’t know if I can even really say you should follow the link, because I think my median reader will find too much in this interview that your positivist principles will object to. Still: mayhap the excerpts give some slight pause to the general caricature of this whole world as Barnum effect and self-soothing delusion. (You are free to regard it as glass beads, of course!)

read charles mills on tolkien and race

2025-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

(the proper DOI link)

I’m partially linking this just because it was so irritating to find that my old annotation now pointed to a paywall. I read it in 2023 and have had it mulling around the brain ever since. The kinds of discussion you find about it online are disappointing¹. My own notes here will be brief.

I had hoped for more from Nine Tolkien Scholars Respond but it’s mostly people saying “[gosh wouldn’t we have gotten a lot further if this had been published when it was written]” with a couple gestures in the direction of “[this has informed something else I’ve published elsewhere]” and “[kind of what I was trying to get at in my book]”.

The contrast between the rootedness of the goblins in the Hobbit and the facelessness of the orcs in the Lord of the Rings is something that had escaped me as a child reader but seems obvious now.

Reading this the recent attempts of Wizards of the Coast to de-race their game design seem… less than half-hearted cosmetic patches. If you are to replace “race” with “species” yet preserve half-orcs and half-elves we are not to take your biology very seriously.

The actual racial hierarchies, the coding of various groups here seem the least ambiguous. The identification of the narrative with the Crusades gives me a little pause just because I can believe a lot of ambient belief wedges itself into artistic work, but I wouldn’t have imagined Tolkien in particular could fictionalize the Crusades by accident. I should probably pick through Devereaux but as ever find myself perpetually stymied by fits of military-history-induced narcolepsy.

It is interesting to observe different people seem to reason from different isms being unacceptable in their media. Various flavors of “I can excuse [X] but I draw the line at [Y]” without being made explicit (and its corollary: “[If I would have to draw the line at Y, I don’t want to, therefore not-Y.]”) ↩

scientifica: mono bitmap font tiny-style

2025-10-03T00:00:00-07:00

I have been pondering what use I could make of a typeface designed to emulate the little pixel text used on tiny, tiny displays or icons. This one kind of looks good enough to use as a code daily driver?? (Don’t quote me, haven’t tested that out yet.)

an internet of dogs (geocities)

2025-09-30T00:00:00-07:00

On the memorial page to my dog Heloïse that it’s intentional you can’t find from the top level of my website, the MIDI the gramophone plays – rollicking! piano! badly charted if we’re being honest at least as far as the rhythm goes! – is the song I sang to her when she was sick. The page features pixel kitsch that goes far beyond what you see on Lialina’s archives for its being self-conscious and chosen in a latter era. And for all that affectation, even now: if I click on the thing and hear the music I cry.

Anyway. It’s obviously mortifying to admit, but I want to give you that as context before you go look at these pages about people’s dogs. Social media tuned all of our instincts for how to present ourselves online, how to signal to each other correctly. The web publishing people did before that tuning seems wildly different, and I think it’s easy for those who weren’t there to cringe at it, or to project something onto it that was absent at the time.

Well, I’ve put my money where my mouth is, so I guess I’ll form it as a prescriptive opinion: the sincerity of people loving their dogs So Much they had to write HTML about it is something we need more of in this world, even if it’s embarrassing at the edges.

it was annoying to refind the text of jenny holzer’s truisms

2025-09-28T00:00:00-07:00

I walk by a Holzer installation as part of my commute, sometimes stop, pick a maxim for the day. It’s not so different from pulling a Tarot card or finding a line in a reading – except I’m lying, it is, sometimes I find myself irritated by the ideologies I can read there.

Anyway.

The sound of a maxim is something to understand, to dissect. Holzer’s oeuvre a useful dataset.

nihilism re: attention difficulties

2025-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

The suspicion that all this is élite anxiety in the face of a democratizing mediascape deepens when you consider what the attentionistas want people to focus on. Generally, it’s fine art, old books, or untrammelled nature—as if they were running a Connecticut boarding school. Above all, they demand patience, the inclination to stick with things that aren’t immediately compelling or comprehensible. Patience is indeed a virtue, but a whiff of narcissism arises when commentators extoll it in others, like a husband praising an adoring wife. It places the responsibility for communication on listeners, giving speakers license to be overlong, unclear, or self-indulgent. When someone calls for audiences to be more patient, I instinctively think, Alternatively, you could be less boring. In a sense, what attention alarmists seek is protection from a competition that they’re losing. Fair enough; the market doesn’t always deliver great results, and Hayes is right to deplore the commodification of intellectual life. But one can wonder whether ideas are less warped by the market when they are posted online to a free platform than when they are rolled into books, given bar codes, and sold in stores. It’s worth remembering that those long nineteenth-century novels we’re losing the patience to read were long for a reason: profit-seeking publishers made authors drag out their stories across multiple volumes. Market forces have been stretching, squashing, spinning, and suppressing ideas for centuries. Realistically, the choice isn’t commodified versus free but which commodity form suits best.

There’s something question-begging about the framing there as ideas existing pre-formed and then either being posted online or sold in stores, being “warped” either way. This is sort of in the right direction, I guess, in acknowledging influence at all - but…

In general I think we’re all pretty uncomfortable with the idea that the little homunculi who live in our heads aren’t able to steer us in the ways they want. Desires for desires. I’m being tongue-in-cheek about the mental model there, but the reviewer is being too cute by half in denying the difference between being absorbed in a book and being rendered incapable of making it through a paragraph without twitching away to other thoughts.

Capacity and incapacity: we don’t just prize the patience-demanding works because of prestige dynamics. (Am I allowed to say that’s a “luxury belief”? It’s often seemed to me that it’s only held by those who’ve never had their own world expanded beyond what they grew up with, either because they grew up fully within the blah blah intellectual heritage of civilization blah or because they have managed to make it to adulthood without realizing such a thing meaningfully exists.)

Hayes himself confesses to spending hours “utterly transfixed” by watching old carpets being shampooed.

This is being used in context as evidence that we maintain our ability to pay attention. Conclusion: we’re cooked.

annie mueller on rituals

2025-09-23T00:00:00-07:00

Rituals? I can’t stop myself. They’re so good. Absolutely breathtaking. Humanity’s finest work, perhaps. They make no sense. It’s all about beauty, about made-up meaning, about art. Rituals add unnecessary, arbitrary extra requirements to a simple action. Light a candle first. Kneel. Wear a certain outfit. Carry flowers. Make this shape with your hands. Take off your hat, or put it on. Not that hat, the special one.

Pick up your feet in a car crossing the state line so you don’t drag it with you. (Be grateful, people of Vancouver and Portland, for my family’s care in this matter. Imagine the logistical nightmares otherwise incurred.)

graphic design for all the in-world advertised brands in mario kart

2025-09-21T00:00:00-07:00

I think I’ve pointed to Elliott before. This video does itself to the point of absurdity. (Watching it, I found myself pretty sick of heavyweight fonts, somehow, but the graphic elements were largely far better than I’d’ve expected)

optimalism (parody)

2025-09-19T00:00:00-07:00

This is all done by a Quirky Personal Site Haver (really: don’t miss the main site!) but this subsite is more pointed at a lot of content you’ve surely come across before:

I’m Kit Anderson, productivity geek, entrepreneur, father of three (startups, that is), and soon-to-be the first self-made trillionaire (haha just kidding… but maybe?). This is my website where I write about my efforts to lead a productive life, the OPTIMAL life.

The clean sans serif is brutal.

It’s impossible not to think a lot about these themes in my job – or better said, it’s impossible for me partially because of how little reflection people are willing to cop to at work. My favorite thing is obviously related, my affectations… but a lot of people are hitting it at too kneejerk a surface-level, particularly when they bring in their understanding of economics. Even partially-articulated, I trust the vision of a Borges-informed Neocities-site-haver more.

teach the history of history to defend it

2025-09-17T00:00:00-07:00

In short, science classes pair a description of our best knowledge at the present with a story of discovery of how we came to know what we know now, with the clear implication that this method is how we will continue to discover new things.

By contrast in history this same story (we call it historiography – the history of the history) doesn’t generally attract sustained attention until graduate school. Students learn the names of rulers and thinkers and key figures but they rarely learn the names of historians. Likewise, instead of being presented with a process of historical discovery they are given a narrative of human development – it is not until advanced undergraduate courses that they begin to engage meaningfully with how we know these things. In my own experience the exceptions to this were almost invariably stories about the knowledge-making achievements of other disciplines – archaeology and linguistics, mostly – rather than narratives of historical investigation. So it is not surprising that many students at those introductory levels come away assuming that the narrative is pretty much fixed and has been known and understood effectively forever.

I went to an International Baccalaureate school for high school and while that was generally a mistake, boy I loved that they gave us historiography. If you are bored in a class you can do mental backflips to ascend to new heights of being-irritating. “But wouldn’t a post-revisionist object to your characterization there as overly driven by…”

On the other hand, I found the focus on great scientist narratives offputting in every science class I ever took. (Not that Devereaux’s wrong – I’m just contemplating how this is best done)

better via worse (easy phone tweaks)

2025-09-15T00:00:00-07:00

If you make your phone interface more annoying to navigate, you use it less.

The combination of this color theme and this photo background: profoundly unusable! I am not good at remembering what I am doing in the middle of completing routine steps, even when the steps in question are “navigate to your time-wasting app”, so introducing the extra friction of “open up the search and type in the name of the app” is enough to decrease how much I end up doing it¹.

I also replaced my normal browser button with a shortcut that opens the browser then opens my flashcard app on top of it, with the idea that it takes no time to do a couple flashcards before going off to noodle around on the internet. This one’s been slightly less successful since I started unconsciously navigating to the browser via the open apps. I’ll start trying to close the browser after use and we’ll see how that goes.

Did you know that ADHD runs in families? Haha no reason to bring that up, my debilitating personal incapacities are actually a sign of moral failure ↩

comment culture: it’s worse than that, even

2025-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

16 years of commenting has made me zero friends. That scares me. All of that social activity with zero ROI. At first, I thought that I needed to change my commenting habits, and, you know, try to make connections. But the more I considered how to make friends in comment culture, the more I realized that it wasn’t just my own social ineptitude. Comment culture has a problem. Systemically, it produces an internet of strangers.

This is making a point about comment culture taking your social energy and throwing it into a black hole, with no value to turning strangers into weak ties, turning weak ties into strong ties, or maintaining strong ties. And that is all true!

I would submit that it’s worse than waste: commenting for an audience, you learn habits that are actively counterproductive in proper social interaction.

For instance: the value I’ve found in asking questions in average Internet comment sections is… little to none. People don’t tend to get what you’re getting at with questions, which makes sense, since you have nearly no shared context. Rather, it’s better to figure out what your clever little thing is you can toss in; if others “like” it, it’ll filter to the top, and if they don’t “like” it, it’ll filter to the bottom and not bother anyone.

However: this is a terrible set of instincts to develop if you actually want to have real conversations with people! Your clever little thing can’t be ranked down in a linear conversation, so you’re taking up airspace and making it about you and your thing – and with people worth talking to, we should all be asking way more questions! (I need to write up my notes on this book I read that argued that, because I think it’s been unfairly maligned)

mailchimp has secret rss

2025-09-11T00:00:00-07:00

As an example, I recently wanted to subscribe to the RawTools newsletter. When I went to their newsletter subscription page, I noticed that their URL looked like this: https://rawtools.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3&id=4ff553ba3e
If you can find a URL from a Mailchimp email campaign in a format like this, you can usually use it to get its respective RSS feed.
There are 3 pieces we need in order to find this list’s RSS feed, and all of them we can find in this URL:
us11 - This appears to be the Mailchimp server location associated with the mailing list’s account
u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3 - I think this is a user identification code? Not sure. We need it, though! id=4ff553ba3e - Again, not 100% sure what this is; possibly a list id? We need it too, regardless ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Once we’ve got those pieces, we can use them to construct our RSS feed.
A Mailchimp list’s RSS feed looks like this:
https://[SERVER LOCATION CODE].campaign-archive.com/feed?u=["u" CODE]&id=["id" CODE]
The campaign-archive and /feed parts are the important parts that need to be switched out here.
So, we put all those pieces together, and end up with the following feed URL: https://us11.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3&id=4ff553ba3e
Then, adding that into an RSS reader app gives us the last few campaign emails that were sent out from that list, as well as allows us to be notified of future emails without it cluttering up our email inbox.

I thought I’d found one of these before but there are none currently sitting in my blogroll. Hope it’s useful to someone!

idle game: teashop

2025-09-09T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve pointed to Jillian’s website indirectly before, but go and enjoy this idle game! It’s short, sweet, features cute pixel art, and there’s a neat “night” mechanic where automations turn off.

take the three-question wason test, then come back

2025-09-08T00:00:00-07:00

There are four cards, a simple rule, and all you’ve got to do is to work out which cards you need to turn over to see if the rule has been broken. That’s got to be easy, right? Well maybe, but the Wason Selection Task, as it is called, is one of the most oft repeated tests of logical reasoning in the world of experimental psychology.

Three questions.

Only click on this and read after you've taken the test! I swear it's fast.

According to Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, the results of the Wason Selection Task demonstrate that the human mind has not evolved reasoning procedures that are specialised for detecting logical violations of conditional rules. Moreover, they claim that this is the case even when these rules deal with familiar content drawn from everyday life.

However, they argue that the human mind has evolved to detect violations of conditional rules, when these violations involve cheating on a social exchange. This is a situation where a person is entitled to some kind of reward only if they have fulfilled a particular requirement (for example, you can enter a particular nightclub only if you’re over the age of 21). Cheating involves taking the benefit, without fulfilling the condition for the benefit. Cosmides and Tooby have found that when the Wason Selection Task is constructed to reflect a cheating scenario, subjects perform considerably better than they do with the standard test.

Okay, so, obviously invoking evolution is a little silly here. Who’s to say this is a matter of hardwiring rather than what people have practiced?

Still, there’s something very interesting.

In biology, anthropomorphism bad.

In science, the use of anthropomorphic language that suggests animals have intentions and emotions has traditionally been deprecated as indicating a lack of objectivity. Biologists have been warned to avoid assumptions that animals share any of the same mental, social, and emotional capacities of humans, and to rely instead on strictly observable evidence.

You might reason about it: we don’t want to project our own social dynamics onto situations where they’re not fundamentally present, because we’ll project too much and miss what’s going on. Seems fair enough.

But in this case, taking the social out of the same reasoning task makes many unable to pick their way through it.

This suggests to me that various anthropomorphized lenses can help us with cold hard logical problems, especially if we can pick them up and put them down.

The version of this that I’ve found people able to use at work is “adversarial” thinking. Every computer science education handwaves a bit that you ought to be able to do this kind of reasoning, sometimes for worst-case analysis or more commonly for security. You can walk people through this a bit and get to interesting insights.

(Fake example that may make this seem slightly more concrete to software engineers if absolute nonsense to everyone else: Yes, I know that this service is only invoked by three trusted internal callers, and yes, they’re all supposed to be reasonable – but think with me. If you wanted to, could you create load with some attributes that would ruin the async workflow distribution’s performance characteristics? (Some method is discussed.) (Ahh – and could we end up with some amount of that by accident if the upstream caller had a failure in such-and-such way and were resubmitting XYZ?))

But: I think adversarial reasoning and thinking about cheating probably isn’t the only way that social reasoning can help when you’re manipulating endless cold logical abstractions.

My senior year in college, a friend and I were thoroughly and delightedly obnoxious about calling components / interfaces / entities “boi”. “The session state boi.” “The parser boi needs it.” “Ahh but this update will need to touch the factory bois as well.” I can’t say that that must have been fun for others, but… Thinking about the different pieces of code like mammoths in a David Macaulay drawing handing off various tasks to each other makes it easier for me to remember what they all do and how they interact.

Is that embarrassing? Is it something to suppress like a field biologist’s anthropomorphization of a troop of meerkats?

I think it shouldn’t be. I’ve no idea today how to leverage it to be more effective, but there’s a powerful amount of brain that you get to work with for social reasoning, and finding ways of getting it to kick on seems valuable.

everything is burning (literally)

2025-09-05T00:00:00-07:00

One of the first material scientists I spoke to about making things that last for thousands of years offered a compelling insight: “Everything is burning, just at different rates.” What he means is that what we perceive as aging is actually oxidisation, like rusting. When we imagine materials that may last for thousands of years, most people think of stone or precious metals like gold – because they don’t oxidise readily. But even bodies can be preserved for millennia if stored in the right chemical environment, as the mummies of Egypt demonstrate.

“Everyone is dying” didn’t go far enough.

(I didn’t find the rest of this piece that compelling, but enjoy the excerpt!)

hadn’t read borges’ poetry, already in love with a line from the preface

2025-09-03T00:00:00-07:00

Poetry is no less a mystery than anything else on earth. One or two felicitous lines can hardly stir our vanity, since they are but gifts of Chance or of the Spirit; only the mistakes belong to us. I hope the reader will discover something worthy of his memory in these pages. In this world of ours beauty is quite common.

only the mistakes belong to us: somewhat tongue-in-cheek effacement, finding our identity in our imperfection
something worthy of his memory: Borges had to do a lot of his work from memory because of his eyesight. Memory, of course, a huge theme in that work. But more simply: we should all be trying to memorize more poetry! I will look to see if there’s something from this that I must attempt.
In this world of ours beauty is quite common: I saw my mother recently and flipped open an Orthodox book of hers and it had this line arbitrarily on an arbitrary page about how good exists as a real thing, but evil only exists in the moment (paraphrasing poorly) and it was a wonderful – image? schema? posited nature of things? – to sit with for a moment, to feel out and allow to reorient one’s sense of the world. This feels like another good one of the same kind though I can’t quite articulate why. Perhaps I should compile them, my own little rejoinder to the Jenny Holzer installation past which I commute

I am really tempted by math academy

2025-09-01T00:00:00-07:00

This is a review of a manifesto associated with a learning program.

I thought, “I have a deep understanding of trig, and so if faced with e.g. sin(-θ), I can visualize the triangle in my head and realize that it’s equal to -sinθ. I will re-derive these identities from scratch during a test.” But it never really worked out that way. This is the trig equivalent to decoding a sentence letter by letter on the fly. It takes a lot of memory and brain power, and you can’t spot these patterns in a problem if you don’t know the identities. I always felt it was unfair when a solution relied on a double angle identity “trick.” My virtuous and pure, unmemorized knowledge didn’t seem to be sufficient during the exam.

A confession: this is exactly how I dealt with trig, and I did the best at it (in a little pond way), and I now remember zero trig beyond soh-cah-toa. I loved this at the time in the kind of demeaning way in which you see a border collie satisfied by running through nylon tunnels in correct sequence.

…’t build with potential bricks. You have more ingredients available to you at the grocery store than anyone in history, but you can only cook with what’s in your house. You can’t be creative, synthesize things, make connections, without the requisite knowledge. Recall the sweet satisfaction of spotting a reference in a book; you can’t make that connection if you aren’t familiar and comfortable with the referenced text. I wish my teachers had explaine…

This is a very cute metaphor. Curate one’s mise en place!

…edge graph a Math Academy course The Math Academy Way of teaching is to provide a very tight scaffold with small steps when students are first introduced to a skill and gradually remove it when practicing so the student does more on their own and must use recall. If a student is unable to come to the correct answer, [either the student is lacking in care for execution or] requisite skills are not understood. The Math Academy software knows the skills that make up each type of question and can find problem areas and target reviews of that material. It’s with the example of the as…

I have long held the belief that the reason why people who are obviously clever in other areas still fall off at math is not because mathematical thinking is some special kind of cognition for which some people lack aptitude, but because it is

far, far, far more dependent on a deep tacit chain of prerequisite knowledge than other typical coursework
easy for smart children to fake their way through without real understanding

Faking your way through can accommodate about ~5 years of A/B grades before the house of cards collapses on a missed three weeks of pre-algebra. Every single piece of math you learn in a standard course sequence, even through differential equations, is intuitive and obvious, provided only that you have all of the prerequisite material fully internalized.

However, we

a. don’t typically make explicit the chain of prerequisites, and

b. can’t efficiently test for that true understanding and internalization

Math Academy seems to me to be much better off than most methods because it’s at least tackling a. Being so grounded in worked examples means that I’d expect it to do less well at giving people a conceptual framework to internalize beyond instrumental application. Maybe that’s fine for clever meta-thinkers who can’t help but start generalizing and abstracting, but I do wonder if students find themselves needing to tie in aids for that. (Seems surmountable though probably at odds with their emphasis on crisp testable efficiency)

I have only anecdotal evidence for the following, but: There is a kind of personality, particularly in the emotionally immature, that is intolerant of uncertainty, of things-that-happen-without-a-reason. This personality thrives in math because it drives one to root out one’s own weaknesses in prerequisites when one recognizes that quiver in the gut of something not quite making sense. This requires drive! In a group education setting, it has to be done at the expense of social cohesion; everyone else may be making facial expressions that indicate they understand what’s in front of you, so are you going to ask your stupid-sounding question? In addition, there was very little acknowledgement in the math education I received from schools that real intuitive mastery might not be necessary to receive high test scores on worked examples… it takes some atypical motivation to overrule the proof you’ve been given of your own adequacy in order to go back and actually become adequate.

In the real world outside of carefully sequenced human-made topics, “it really do be like that sometimes” (IRDBLTS) is often the superior prior. Students with more observational personality types that tend to look for broad patterns and don’t feel anxiety around chasing down corner cases may not pin down their own missed prerequisites as successfully, but these other strategies often work better outside of math. In my ideal world, certainly we help coach students toward being able to recognize their own missing understanding, to pay attention to these meta-signals, but where it can be as crisply codified as in math, surely something like Math Academy’s automation makes sense?

I suspect a great deal of divergence between “math” and “non-math” people to be driven by this kind of interaction between personality and typical instruction rather than by cognitive aptitude.

…e the competence to be creative. Learning takes effort; if your practice is too easy it probably isn’t effective. Pedagogical methods that feel hard to students are most effective, and methods that students enjoy are least effective. Learning styles are fake, which …

Implicit in the measurement of efficacy is that this shows that when we can test people forced to drag their way through pedagogical methods we can see a return on investment from unpleasant effort. I suspect there are hard-feeling methods that suffer from more and from less student disengagement as a result of their arduousness. (Medications with side effects so unpleasant as to cause most patients to discontinue them may have high efficacy via their intended mechanism, but it’s hard to argue that using them’s effective in the broad sense) This doesn’t contradict the general conclusion, but it does suggest necessary extension.

Ugh, reading all this… I miss the kind of brain exercise that math occasioned. If someone had an equivalent program structured around the same manifesto but targeted at leetcode-style programming interview bullshit, I could justify that time expenditure easily. Going back to math that isn’t directly tied to OR stuff at work seems like a decadent hobby¹.

Is “decadent” an odd word for a project of self-improvement? Well, it captures the disapproval I mean. I ought to be spending my energy on things like scheduling dentist appointments. If I am to allow myself to spend it on thinky nonsense, it really ought to either be useful to me at work, or to help round out my existence from work (see: 90% of this site). Math is too obliquely work-adjacent to qualify under either arm. ↩

animal crossing letter generator sparking typeface epiphanies

2025-08-31T00:00:00-07:00

The styles that defined Sailor Moon personal shrines and Cardcaptor Sakura LJ icon edits and so forth reached me before Animal Crossing (I was dropped out of college before meeting the latter) and are probably most formative in my sense of what letterforms are unpresuming-appealing, cute-appealing, etc. But I think when it comes to roundedness in letters that’s all AC!

(Big rec GT Maru Mono for terminal aesthetic, btw - I prefer moderately high contrast light mode, so I go for sort of magical-girl colorful, and the cutesy roundness is good for not looking like that.)

the US auto industry didn’t collapse, just the Detroit one

2025-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

I don’t know how much we ought to trust this source but I’d definitely believed the included myths without any sources at all, so this may be of interest to others.

…ers, just slightly higher. [2] So much for Myth 1, the persistent notion that the American auto industry has collapsed. With output at all-time highs and employment hardly lower than in the time before NAFTA (the biggest globalizing event for the auto industry in recent decades), the evidence goes hard in the other direction.

…ss the rest of the country. So globalization couldn’t kill Detroit because Detroit was already dead. Or at least dying. And it really was a story of decline in Detroit almost exclusively. From 1950 to 1980, auto employment even in most of the Rust Belt states expanded. The gains in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois exceeded those of any southern state. If not globalization, what dro…

…000 workers to just 30,000. The Big 3 were not avoiding all unions. In a 1950 speech about Ford’s new investments to the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce, Henry Ford II praised Buffalo labor leaders as forward-looking, and Buffalo itself as “the place where an organization can get work done — where good production cooperation is possible.” It was specifically the local unions of Detroit that compelled the Big 3 to find new places to set up factories. The decentralization trend acc…

I’m sure there are people who’d dispute this story as well, of course. I miss the days of being able to chain together responses in blog posts.

bill my books to the CIA

2025-08-27T00:00:00-07:00

The ILC developed a database of tens of thousands of dissidents living in the Eastern Bloc and carefully targeted the books it sent. Paris became a critical hub where travelers could load up; the Librairie Polonaise, a venerable Polish bookshop, let visitors take several volumes for free on their way home. Its manager sent a bill to the CIA, which by the mid-1980s was covering half of the store’s inventory.

If you were a billionaire with quixotic political opinions (let’s ignore the actual awfuls) and you wanted to do this in a contemporary way, what would your method be? YouTube sponcon? It’s hard to imagine books having an impact now…

maternal devotion in the velvet spider

2025-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

Female velvet spiders exhibit a remarkable type of maternal care unique among arachnids. Upon the birth of her brood, the mother spider liquefies her internal organs and regurgitates this material as food. Once her capability to liquefy her insides is exhausted, the young sense this and consume the mother.

Animal biology seems to have an asymmetric ability to generate horror rather than affirming metaphors.