Why Blog?

-
Why on earth should someone devote their time to writing a blog? The lure of fame and fortune (hah!) is probably a reason that some do it, but even if I was willing to play roulette there the multiple times a day posting schedule would be way more work than I'm willing to put up with.

So why blog? In the first place I do hold some hope that maybe someone out there is going be be entertained by what I'm writing, and perhaps if I'm lucky even enlightened. In the second, I don't feel that I tend to get enough practice writing from day to day and this seems like a good excuse to get more.

But the real reason, the one that actually provoked me to start, is the worry that I have too strong a tendency to keep whatever thoughts I have bottled up inside my head and that without the discipline of putting thoughts into words I'm letting my brain get flabby. Its one thing to idly consider "could I be wrong?" inside my own head and quite another to send words out into the hostile abyss of the internet. That's what I'm looking to you for, dear readers both real and imagined, challenging gazes to get me to be more careful in my thinking. Well written critical comments would be nice too, but starting out here expecting people to actually comment seems distant and almost arrogant.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Various Ukraine topics

-
This is just a collection of some thoughts I've had about the recent conflict. Seeing it coming People had been worried about a Russian attack on Ukraine for a long time.  I'd worried that it was imminent a year ago with the last big massing of Russian troops on Ukraine's borders.  And with the massing this year I was more than just worried.  Going back to my predictions on  this Metaculus question  I was putting an invasion at even odds a month before the invasion but from the 13th of February until the invasion launched on the 23rd rapidly became convinced that the invasion was actually going to happen.  But while I can brag about being ahead of the curve in terms of predicting that there would be an invasion I was terribly wrong about how it would proceed and on the night of the 23rd I was afraid that the multiple axes of incursion and forward air drops would throw the defenses into confusion and rout.  Oops. Looking back at information from before the 23rd that still st
Read more

Book Review: Power, Sex, Suicide

-
Image
  Introducing the Mitochondria “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” - Variously attributed Everybody learns something about Mitochondria in grade school.  That they are an organelle inside your cells.  That they let your body break down sugar and create ATP using oxygen in a way that’s far more efficient than fermentation without oxygen.  That’s clearly an important role, when we’re drowning, say, and can’t get the oxygen needed for aerobic respiration we die.  However, they’re a lot more than that too.  Mitochondria used to have independent bacterial lives charting their own fates.  That their existence came to be so enmeshed with their hosts is arguably the most unlikely but important event in the history of life on Earth and has some implications. Pump and Dump Aerobic Respiration Essentially all life lives by extracting energy from a difference in the concentration of hydrogen across a lipid membrane.  Let’s say you’re a mitochondria or a bacteria that lives off of
Read more

Seveneves and the Roche limit

-
For an author it's important to get things that the reader might find hard to swallow out there and dealt with as soon as possible.  I didn't really enjoy Neal Stephenson's last book, REAMDE , past the halfway point because too many improbably occurrences had piled up and my suspension of disbelief didn't recover.  By contrast his newest novel, Seveneves , seems to be doing an excellent job of getting the improbable stuff dealt with quickly and I've been enjoying the book without any hangups.  I've only gotten through chapter 7, acknowledged, but I've got a feeling I'll continue to enjoy this one. But of course the second improbable of the two things gives me a chance to talk about some physics I find interesting so I'm going to dissect what I think Stephenson gets wrong.  Not because I think the author is a bad person or wrote a bad book but just because I think the physics is nifty and reading this prompted me to share it. The basic setup of th
Read more