Patterns, Moods, and Scenes
A not-quite-coherent ramble on a few disparate ideas that I suspect should be related. I haven’t connected all of the dots satisfactorily yet, and maybe there’s not much too it after all. I haven’t decided. Publishing it anyway! I. When I write, I might sometimes play a certain kind of music to change my more »
Homo Ludens III
A last flourish on Homo Ludens, quoting the final paragraphs. I’ve got a few non-notes posts that are about ready to post, so tomorrow I’ll post one schizophrenic piece before moving on to briefly touch on Caillois’ Man, Play and Games. — Huizinga’s conclusions, on the human mind and spirit. In treating of our theme so more »
Homo Ludens II
A wide lens on the rest of Homo Ludens The first chapter was really the entire thesis of Huizinga’s big idea about Play (which was dug into in the predecessor post). The remaining chapters attempt to shore up this thesis by example, looking at the histories and semantics of various cultures and their attitude towards more »
Homo Ludens I
Happy New Year! I’ll be note-taking and synthesizing on play, ritual, and games in more detail. At the end of December I read some early influential works in “Game Studies”: Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Caillois’ Man, Play and Games. They’re the kind of books that are referred to by many and read by few, which is too more »
December 02013
So ends the month of December. 16 posts (13 if you exclude my devblog), adding up to ~16,800 words, much slimmer than November’s 21 posts at 22.4k words. I’ve had steadily increasing traffic, too, although I don’t really consider that a terribly important (or reliable, truth be told) metric. On 17 December I had the more »
Cowpaths
[Last updated on 25 Dec 2013- the newest version is here.] This blog revolves around my interest in organizations and interfaces that change behavior. With that broad topic, I’ve been able to slide around to pretty much anything I’ve read that interests me. I’ve pushed out about 70 posts since I started in late August, more »
Miscellaneous Notes
I’ve almost pulled together enough grist to cut down on the “miscellaneous notes” posts and scribble on something pseudo-consistent. I started writing on Huizinga to publish next week, but I may as well wait for the new year. The rest of the year’s posts will probably be housekeeping (lists of related posts, one last devblog more »
Notes: brains, coherence, wolfram
I. The Brains of Animals Even more animal cognition. I admit to quoting perhaps half of the article here. But the other half is also quite pretty, and worth a read. […] I confess I am astonished at how much mammalian brains resemble one another in their organization, architecture, and complexity. Just as human beings more »
Fitness Landscapes
Two “Edge” responses on a useful idea. Stewart Brand on Sewall Wright’s sketches, above (“Your favorite deep/elegant/beautiful explanation”): The first two illustrate how low selection pressure or a high rate of mutation (which comes with small populations) can broaden the range of a species whereas intense selection pressure or a low mutation rate can severely more »
Probabilistic Minarchism
A survey of Adam Gurri’s conception of Probabilistic Libertarianism and a permissionless society. Taleb’s Probabilistic Minarchism Writer Adam Gurri imagines Taleb’s political philosophy, taking into account his attitudes and arguments from Antifragile. First, he makes a good point here, and one I’d probably prefer to regurgitate when asked about my own ideas of an ideal more »