Would love to read any of the scientific papers that McCarthy supposedly edited diligently, should anyone happen to know of some. Very curious to see what they read like.
Cormac McCarthy was deeply interested in physics and mathematics and was a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, which has a heritage connected with Los Alamos National Laboratory. I don't know a lot about this side of him, only reading about it after reading his last two novels which do show a mastery of physics that really seemed to mirror his master of bridles and guns and culture in the old west. I don't remember reading that he had actually published any of this himself but he was spoken of as intensely curious about physics.
First thing that came to mind when I read this was the quote attributed to Haruki Murakami "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." Turns out this is a quote from a character in one of Murakami's novels, but sentiment stands. Kind of gets to the essence of what "creativity" may be.
Nice post! Enjoy your blog's overall aesthetic too. Perhaps correlation in sense of style, though, as I also used RTK to learn to write Kanji, loved it, and now, ~15 years after that escapade, am kind of in a similar bucket (can write some characters, but mostly just read). I still think RTK great overall method and would do it again!
Also, shoutout to Fabrice, creator of Kanji Koohii -- that was my first foray into SRS back in ~2007/2008, after which I found Anki (pre-mobile).
Wait WHAT?! I’ve been buying ebooks off BookWalker and it’s so annoying. Their reader app sucks and they have these faux-protective constraints like not permitting a “copy” function on any highlighted text and limiting a book to no more than 50 highlights. It’s so silly…
Edit: damn, had assumed you meant maximum nerd mode and that these books were available in Japanese… looks like it’s all English translations. So it goes.
Being lazy here, but would love to know more about how testing for all of these plastics chemicals that are omnipresent is done in a way that ensures the measurement process or tools themselves do not contribute trace chemicals (e.g. lab tech wears latex gloves while handling the sample, whoops, etc).
They go into significant detail about their sample handling as well as documenting potential sources of contamination here: https://www.plasticlist.org/methodology
If you enjoyed this article I’d recommend checking out the book _Moonwalking with Einstein_ by Joshua Foer. Great read and fascinating dive into the lives and practices of individuals that participate in memory competitions.
We automatically do the right thing depending on the situation. The type engine is highly-precise when we generate our own schema. For example, JSON objects and arrays get converted to native struct and array types in data warehouses (e.g. Databricks, BigQuery) rather than strings.
But we're forgiving in other situations where we don't control schemas. For example, we'll automatically convert a source string type to a date when mapping to a Salesforce or Zendesk (or other cloud app) date field.
For someone familiar with the science can you comment on the typical uncertainty/variation in epigenetic age measurement? I love error bars, wish they were mandatory.
Plus one, scrolled through waiting for someone to mention this one.
I don’t typically reread fiction but the poetic style of writing, combined with great scenes and characters makes almost any page worth a reread from time to time.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever find a book as good across so many dimensions…
