A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, consciousness, computer science, etc.
Twenty years ago, at fifteen years old, I discovered cycling. Ever since, endurance sports—first cycling, then running—have been among the defining practices of my adult life...
I just finished rereading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian —a third read, after reading it twice about ten years ago. The first time was a…
In the middle of a dream filled (as dreams are) with impressions, moods, little fleeting scenes, I had a few moments of waking-style verbal thought...
There's something exciting about the way that, as you visit a new place, the abstract incrementally gives way to the specific. Paris goes from being an idea...
I missed the first part of eighth grade. When I came back, all my friends told me excitedly about the new kid Namara—someone whom I would…
The lambda calculus (or λ-calculus) is a formal system with fascinating ties to modern computation, particularly functional programming...
In chapter two of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, an extended set of exercises deals with Huffman encoding. It's fascinating...
I’d always heard about the power of Lisp macros, which let you extend the language by rewriting code on the fly. You call macros just like…
In Horizon, Barry Lopez writes, “A species is not so much a permanent thing as a point on the developmental line of that thing through time.” People, too, are fundamentally four-dimensional...
Ideas are abstract, immaterial, in principle immortal. Objects are mutable; objects degrade and scatter; they crumble at our touch. Not one…