Thursday, May 13, 2010

What I’m reading

Chad Taylor on how to write a novel. Trust me, but especially trust him, it’s harder than it looks. As perhaps this shows.

Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour has a doozy on copyright.

The Fundy Post has been blogging a bit about architecture: now he fails to swell with civic pride.

BK Drinkwater has a new job which seems to preclude much blogging, but here he covers the intersection between maths and politics, i.e. the fairness of voting systems. FPP isn’t fair. Well, who knew? Money quote in the Tim Gowers paper he cites:
Now a commonplace in probabilistic combinatorics is that the binomial distribution is highly concentrated about its mean.
Oh, go on, it’s easy enough to follow and you’ll probably like the conclusion.

Andrea Donderi ponders the middle ground between “Fuck you” and “Welcome” here. There is a further discussion here, elaborating the distinction between Ask culture and Guess culture.

3 comments:

Keri H said...

Well, having tried twice to post a comment to fragile Chad's site, I dont think I can be bothered doing it a third time.

Suffice it to say that
-yeastifying words - and characters- really isnt all that difficult; that truly hard work is completing something when you are in deep pain (I think of Robin Morrison), and a scattershot of Wow!Arntmythoughtsooodeep!
is truly offputting.

Chad Taylor said...

I think all writers are fragile, Keri, although it would be a mistake to take levity for same. Sorry you were unable to post on my blog - if you want to email me directly I'm at the email on my profile: chadtaylornz@gmail.com

Keri H said...

OK Chad - & I will email you. Suffice it to say that I was trying to avoid obvious chad-type wordplay...