Three-Toed Sloth

Positive-Definite Tab Closure

Attention conservation notice: A link-dump piece, where some of the links were first opened in 2015.

Tabs I have closed recently, which are of a positive and/or constructive and/or cheerful nature:

• The Glorious Stupidity of Fomenko's New Chronology. (Part of what makes this so outrageous is that Fomenko is actually rightly celebrated for his mathematical work.)
• "Always bet on text".
• Teaching nearest neighbor methods led me to talking about Voronoi tesselations in class, which led to me finally asked "who was Voronoi, anyway?", and so discovering Halyna Sen and Rien van de Weygaert's "Life and Times of Georgy Voronoi" (arxiv:0912.3269).
• Similarly, there is an entirely logical path from re-assuring a certain historian that she did indeed understand the equations in Bacaër's chapter on Song Jian and China's one-child policy to listening to International Federation for Automatic Control's Orchestra performing "Smoke on the Water", but I decline to explain.
• Further musical entertainment: the Brooklyn Funk Essential's "The Revolution Was Postponed Because of Rain"
• Speaking of the Revolution that wasn't: "The First Privilege Walk" is an amazing article full of wonders; also of places where I had to roll my eyes at Parenti's unreconstructed Marxist-true-believer-dom.
• Speaking of the Revolution yet to come: "What Do Addison Rae's Critics Have in Common With the Taiping Rebels?"
• "Life in a carbon dioxide world" (via Paul McAuley)
• For living in a carbon dioxide world in a different sense, we might consider building commercially-competitive "junkyard datacenters" from decade-old smartphones. This is very cute, and even hopeful, but the calculations in the paper make me long for carbon pricing with a special fervor. (Also, I hate the way this paper uses the word "compute" with a peevish passion.)
• The eminent probabilist Michel Talagrand tries to make sense of quantum field theory. (I've just begun reading the book, but the handful of people who'll find that sentence exciting need to hear the news.)
• Speaking of QFT: a remembrance and appreciation of Steven Weinberg.
• Speaking of shapers of 21st century thought: Arianna Wright Rosenbluth and the birth of Markov chain Monte Carlo
• Speaking of the shape of ancient thought: "A work of speculative friction"
• Speaking of speaking about your thoughts: "Phobos and Deimos and public speaking" [cf. On Academic Talks: Memory and Fear]
• Adam Elkus uses Norbert Wiener to re-invent the young Marx's theory of alienation (without mentioning "Marx" or "alienation"). Also from Adam Elkus: Vampire Hunting as a Vocation.
• Maciej Ceglowski's "Confronting New Madrid" (I, II) is the best travelogue about seismic hazards and the meaning of America ever. Not that one expects anything less from the chronicler of America's most grandiose, and tasty, imaginary infrastructure.
• David Auerbach's Books of the Year for 2020 and 2021. The fiction recommendations always make me feel provincial and Philistine (not his fault!), but when I'm familiar with the non-fiction works they're uniformly of high quality, and I mine these for my own purposes.

(I am sure that I am forgetting to credit sources for these links, and can only plead for forgiveness.)

Linkage; Psychoceramica; Physics; Natural Science of the Human Species; Mathematics; Automata and Calculating Machines; The Commonwealth of Letters; Biology