Unfinished Thoughts

A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, consciousness, computer science, etc.

Personality

30 April, 2022

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...

Details

20 December, 2021

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...

My Friend Namara

25 May, 2021

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…

Exploring the lambda calculus

27 February, 2021

The lambda calculus (or λ-calculus) is a formal system with fascinating ties to modern computation, particularly functional programming...

Huffman Encoding

10 October, 2020

In chapter two of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, an extended set of exercises deals with Huffman encoding. It's fascinating...

Threading Macros in Scheme

02 October, 2020

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…

World Lines

25 January, 2020

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...

Objects and Ideas

07 December, 2019

Ideas are abstract, immaterial, in principle immortal. Objects are mutable; objects degrade and scatter; they crumble at our touch. Not one…

Madness, Rack, and Honey

09 June, 2019

I just finished Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of lectures about poetry and art in general. It’s an amazing book...

Crucibles of Mystery

17 May, 2019

After years of hearing Barry Lopez mentioned alongside some of my favorite writers—Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold—I finally began to read him…