Thursday 11 April 2019, 13:27
Uma Musume Pretty Derby (ウマ娘プリティーダービー, hereinafter
UMPD; the first couple words translate as "horse girl") was a hit anime
series in 2018. It quickly became a favourite topic of fan artists on
Twitter and the federated network, largely because of the cute character
designs. It's basically a sports anime, which is not exactly my favourite
style, and it took me some time to get around to watching it, but I finally
did in December and I became interested in a number of questions about the
world-building.
I'm sure UMPD was never meant to be "hard SF" and the writers, throughout
the series, just did what they thought would be cute without regard to
whether it made any sense; but let's see how far we can go on the assumption
that this show actually does depict a consistent world that makes some sort
of sense. What kind of world is it?
Monday 17 December 2018, 03:00
This is the final part of a three-part series on the cognitive deficit in
hypothetical thinking: some people seem unable to handle thinking about a
difference between what is real and what is imagined.
Wednesday 12 December 2018, 21:02
MediaWikiは有名とポピュラーなソフトです。
もちろんWikipediaがMediaWikiを使っています。
その上、多数のサイトはMediaWikiを使っています。
たとえば、僕のタロットサイト「edifyingfellowship.org」でMediaWikiが使われます。
MediaWikiはLaTeXのプラグインあります。
プラグインとLaTeXのインストール時Wikiで数学の植字が出来ます。
でもTeXLiveの全部インストールなら5.7Gが使われます。
小さいウェブサーバのでTeXLiveが大き過ぎるのようです。
このブログでMediaWikiのためにTeXLiveの最小のインストールを考えましょう。
これは「TeX and LaTeX Advent Calendar 2018」の13日目の記事です。
12日目はkn1chtさんです。
14日目はMizukiSonokoさんです。
外の年も記事を書きました。
2014
2015
2016
2017
Wednesday 12 December 2018, 21:01
This is the second part of a three-part series on the cognitive deficit
in hypothetical thinking: some people seem unable to handle thinking about
a difference between what is real and what is imagined. In the first part,
I discussed this deficit as an abstraction. In this second part, I'll look
at some legal and political examples.
Monday 10 December 2018, 03:00
In The
World As If, Sarah Perry gives "an account of how magical thinking made
us modern." She discusses how to define "magical thinking" and suggests that
the diverse things to which people apply that label form "a collection of
stigmatized examples of a more general, and generally useful, cognitive
capacity." Namely, the capacity to entertain false, "not expected to be
proven," or otherwise not exactly true propositions as if they were
true.
Although magical thinking may often be called a behaviour of children
or of those in primitive cultures, what Perry calls the "as if" mode of
thought (I want to also include "what if") is in no way primitive. The view
that magical thinking is for children and the uneducated can and should be
inverted: mastery of hypothetical "as if" cognition is necessary
for functioning as an adult in a literate technological society, and
characteristic of the most sophisticated thinking human beings ever do.
Friday 7 September 2018, 17:33
One way people divide themselves into tribes is over word usage. If one
tribe claims a certain sequence of letters has a certain meaning, and
another claims it has a different meaning, then there are plenty of
opportunities for them to misunderstand each other or each declare the other
Wrong. There may not be a lot we can do about it when there's a direct
disagreement on the one true meaning of exactly one word.
However, human language is more complicated than that. One sequence of
letters may not have just one meaning and in particular, it may be used in
more than one syntactic role such that the different ways of using it have
different meanings. At that point it may not even be right to call it one
"word"; it is two words, with different meanings and also different grammar,
that only happen to share a spelling. And if two tribes use words that
differ in this way, maybe there is some hope of building a bridge between
them by making clear that their uses of the same sequence of letters really
refer to different things and do not need to have identical meaning. That
is what I'd like to talk about here: how different syntax can be a clue to
different meaning.
Saturday 1 September 2018, 06:25
What if our response to homelessness was to have activist marches against
the toxic idea that housing is a right; to lecture homeless persons on how
evil they are for feeling entitled to housing; campaign for their exclusion
from job opportunities, education, and any other path that might allow them
to gain access to housing under their own power; and (for the most
compassionate of us) try to help them understand that not having shelter, is
okay and doesn't make them bad people?
Wednesday 29 August 2018, 10:01
Today I changed the motto on this Web site, and in my email signature, to
read "People before tribes"; it formerly referred to "principles." Where it
appears in Japanese translation, I've similarly changed 理 to 族. The
intended meaning has not changed, but in the years since I started using it,
the former wording has become too easily misunderstood, often as the direct
opposite of what I intended for it to mean.
As human beings we naturally divide ourselves up into groups that
purport to be about beliefs and ideologies, and we tend to hate those
of other groups irrationally and on the basis of entire groups; we are
inclined to lose sight of the fact that everybody is human and everybody's a
unique individual not well described by their group membership. It's
important to pay attention to individuals (people) and to actively ignore
membership in identity groups (tribes). That is what my motto is
about. But it's possible to misread the words if you think that "people"
actually means tribes and that "principles" refers to important
ideas - like the important idea of being blind to identity group
membership, itself.
At the time I first started using this motto, it was obscure and
uncontroversial. Nobody else was writing much about these things.
Unfortunately, there's been a great rise in the popularity of the opposite
of my position in the last few years, and it has become a topic of general
discussion, to the extent that relentless one-sided chanting can be called
any kind of "discussion." I've also become more acutely aware of the
practical irrelevance of the literal content of belief in principles to
groups that claim to define themselves by principles, and I want to talk
about group membership directly when literal belief is not the real issue.
As a result, it has become more important to make sure that I'm not
misunderstood, and although it's a shame to lose the snappy alliteration of
the old wording, this change seems important.
Monday 6 August 2018, 12:59
I'm very interested in cognitive deficits: tasks it may seem
human brains ought to be able to perform, but that at least some brains
cannot. This time around I'd like to say a few words about mathematical
foundations and the ability to understand them. The fact is that there are
some questions - and they're very simple ones - that neither a human brain
nor anything that functions like a human brain can answer. And
understanding that fact is itself a problem that may be challenging for at
least some brains.
Thursday 14 June 2018, 16:15
Project Wonderful, a banner-ad network popular among Web comics authors,
suddenly announced a few days ago that they would be shutting down. I've
used them off and on almost from the very beginning of the system in 2006,
at that time to bring in traffic for my own Web comic and later for some
other projects, both buying and selling ads. There was a Project Wonderful
ad box on this very Web site for several years, now replaced by a permanent
ad for North Coast Synthesis
Ltd.