Index

  • Chapter 5: Orbiting Jupiter
    Why does the pursuit of technological progress so frequently lead to disaster? Here we explore the concepts around optimization in order understand better why technological utopias can’t last.
  • Chapter 4: A Eulogy for Evangelicals
    What started as an attempt to answer the question, “What exactly do I believe?” turned into an in depth examination of what actually caused me to leave evangelicalism.
  • Chapter 3: Second Truth
    The difficulty with discussing truth is that there are two things we could be referring to. Here I talk about magicians, tables, human souls, and their relationship truth.
  • The Flames of Rebirth: War in Fire Emblem Three Houses
    Few games ever get my brain working as hard as this has. I’d like to share what i’ve come up with.
  • Playing to Win: TicTacToe
    So let’s talk about how to win at tic tac toe. It seems like a simple game, but it isn’t. I have strong opinions about this game, sue me.
  • Warc Extractor
    The most popular thing I have ever made is my warc extractor. Here is just a simple message to those who use it.
  • Chapter 5: A Theory Of Games
    The hardest part about talking about games is simply agreeing on what it is that we are talking about.
  • Chapter 2: A Mathematical Universe
    The thing that got me addicted to knowledge is the idea that fundamentally the world makes sense. Turns out, that concept alone is had to unpack.
  • Chapter 1: Atheism vs Religion
    I’ve always wanted to learn everything there is to know about the universe, but how does one even learn when their own beliefs are suspect. Worse, the alternatives don’t really feel all that better.
  • Re: Barry Bonds Without a Bat
    A quick reply to the SB nation YouTube video, “Barry Bonds Without a Bat”.
  • Udebs: game analysis engine.
    I recently did a presentation on some software that I’ve been working on for the last few years. Code can be found here. https://github.com/recrm/Udebs
  • The internet is too big.
    On March 26 2019, the European union passed the copyright directive — a new, comprehensive set of rules that are supposed move the European copyright laws, written before the internet was a thing, into the digital age. The directive includes two controversial clauses that, depending on who you ask, will either save the internet or ruin it: Article 11 is … Read more
  • Small Worlds, Mathematics, and Humanities Computing
    I did it! I graduated. It’s not perfect, but it is finished.
  • Galatea 2.2, Game Theory, and Romance: A Scientist Pretending to be a Humanist on a Humanist Pretending to be A Scientist.
    This is a paper I wrote for the University of Alberta’s Graduate comparative literature conference. I wrote it mostly on a dare; I didn’t really even know what comparative literature even was when I wrote it. I have a lot of other term papers and essays that I haven’t posted here, but this one is special. There are threads here that I’ve never really explored fully, but that have grown to become foundational to everything else that I do.
  • Does Juri exist? Classifying Existence.
    Defining existence, like many philosophical terms, is a notoriously difficult task. Intuitively it is extraordinarily simple concept, which is a problem. When asked if anything exists anyone can give a quick binary answer: either it exists or it doesn’t. Humans exist, Unicorns don’t exist, black holes exist, and nothing that happens in a dream exists. It should be this easy, … Read more
  • Descartes: Epistemology in Motion.
    Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy that deal with questions concerning knowledge. In particular: ‘What is knowledge?’, and ‘How is knowledge acquired?’. The classical, but not universally accepted, definition of knowledge comes to us from Plato. He described knowledge as ‘True Justified Belief’. Each of these three terms have spawned massive amounts of thought over the … Read more
  • Suspended Disbelief: The Square Root of 2.
    Several thousand years ago the Greeks made a mathematical discovery that rocked the intellectual world at the time. They believed firmly in logic, that any statement logically derived from a true statement must also be true. To doubt this would be to doubt their entire intellectual community, and in some places their entire culture. Pythagoras was a Greek mathematician, as … Read more
  • The Universe and God.
    In high school a friend of mine gave me a challenge. He said that if we as humanity could ever achieve complete knowledge of the Universe, then that itself was definitive proof of the non-existence of God. My religious upbringing was notably upset by this statement, but even more I was upset by the fact that I could not bring … Read more