News
10/9/2025 13:50 The argument against the existence of a Theory of Everything: All “theories of everything” posit entities or symmetries that are not part of our observable universe, often contradicting well-established empirical reality.
8/9/2025 14:52 giants, standing on the shoulders of: Daniel Stenberg’s amusing and instructive keynote at Open Source Summit Europe 2025 in Amsterdam delivered on August 25, 2025. If you happen not to know that everything you do that is in any way connected with computers, including driving any modern car, depends on open source software, listen to this.
05/09/2025 18:05 Document programming in Typst and LuaLaTeX: some examples
3/9/2025 10:57 Papers retracted for using a copyrighted questionnaire: Another trap for scientists resembling the use of proprietary software.
02/09/2025 14:25 Einstein’s Tutor in Russian: the Cover: 
I’ve just received the cover of the Russian translation of Einstein’s Tutor.
I’ve just received the cover of the Russian translation of Einstein’s Tutor.
31/08/2025 11:40 Using Typst Today: When You Need LaTeX
29/08/2025 11:37 “Democrat” is not an adjective: If you use “Democrat” as an adjective you’re telling us unflattering things about yourself.
18/8/2025 9:05 doxx: A new terminal program providing a lovely display of (some) .docx files. It’s great to be able to read these files without firing up a GUI monstrosity such as LibreOffice. Inspired by Glow, it can even display a table of contents. Its only defect is the inclusion of an option for “AI” summaries of the document.
15/8/2025 14:51 Catching the moon at the right time with Julia: Wonderful article showing how to use Julia to catch the Moon at good moments for photography, when it is near the horizon while the sky is illuminated by the Sun while the latter is still below the horizon.
29/7/2025 14:37 Moessner’s Magic: A simple and surprising result about sequences.
26/7/2025 14:19 Makie v0.24: “We’re excited to announce the release of Makie v0.24, a major milestone that represents one of the most significant internal improvements to the plotting ecosystem in the past five years.”
23/7/2025 12:01 Viral paper on black plastic kitchen utensils earns second correction: The bad research and reporting that led to panicky discarding of plastic spatulas is shown to have even more defects.
20/7/2025 11:46 New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes: Really interesting exploration of color vision. Follow the author’s advice and watch the video.
18/7/2025 9:52 Seattle Philosophy Club Discusses Einstein’s Tutor: I am honored to learn that the Seattle Philosophy Club will be discussing my book this evening.
16/7/2025 12:00 Alaska’s Nazi Creek renamed after 80 years, following advocacy by son of WWII veteran: In 2012 I wrote about a town in New Hampshire that had finally, after almost a century, decided to change the name of their “Jew Pond” to something less embarrassing. Today we learn of a town in Alaska that has reached the difficult decision to change the name of their “Nazi Creek” to something a bit more innocuous.
11/7/2025 9:13 It’s Time to Let Go of “African American”: Some good writing in John McWhorter’s rumination about the hoary euphemism: “Again and again we create new terms hoping to get past negative associations with the old ones…But after a while the negative associations settle like a cloud of gnats on the new terms as well, and then it’s time to find a further euphemism.”
7/7/2025 10:28 StaticCompiler - Generating small binaries: Useful notes on using StaticCompiler to generate small binaries from Julia code.
21/6/2025 13:08 Circular, angular, misterioso, Charlotte Zwerin’s film on Thelonious Monk is now on Blu-ray: Charlotte Zwerin’s 1988 documentary, “Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser,” is out on a new Criterion Collection Blu-ray. I used to own a laserdisc of this fascinating, revelatory and disturbing film. The new pressing, a 4k “digital restoration” with “uncompressed monaural soundtrack”, includes a new introduction by the filmmaker and new interviews and essays.
14/6/2025 11:38 Book Review: Einstein’s Tutor by Lee Phillips: My book is reviewed (“fascinating”) in the current edition of Physics Education (paywalled). 
