Welcome to my website! Here are some quick links to get started.
Short pieces to get a taste of the style and themes I've been writing about recently:
Introductions to sequences of blog posts:
[3000 words] Autobiographical sequence [1 – Earliest Memories][2 – The Birth of Venus][3 – Playground Dynamics][4 – The Long, Long Walk Back Home][5 – The Great Paralysis][6 – My Teacher] By 1964, a couple of years longer than it should have taken, [the famed mathematician John] Conway finished his PhD thesis, which explored a modest byway of set theory. …
[1700 words] Autobiographical sequence [1 - Earliest Memories][2 - The Birth of Venus][3 - Playground Dynamics][4 - The Long, Long Walk Back Home][5 - The Great Paralysis][6 - My Teacher] If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends. And if you …
[1500 words] [Part 3 of the Autobiographical Sequence] [1 - Earliest Memories][2 - Birth of Venus][3 - Playground Dynamics] Scene 1 I am in the southern playground of Hawthorne Elementary school -- an open, cement-paved square. There's a group of kids playing together by the monkey bars. I'm off to one side. My thoughts swing …
[5500 words] Autobiographical sequence [1 - Earliest Memories][2 - The Birth of Venus - A Eulogy to Youth][3 - Playground Dynamics] Said the demi-divinity Disenchantment to the boy Bao-yu: "The reason I like you so much is because you are full of lust. You are the most lustful person I have ever known in the …
[2000 words] So... I've read a lot about it. And this is how I'd sum it up. Insofar as the world was created, God is that which created it.This takes, as its basic metaphor, the act of a person setting out to construct something specific, like a painting or a pot. Insofar as the world …
[900 words] Fundamentally, to be honest... I have no idea. Until further notice: if anyone has any concrete suggestions for what I can do with myself, and it's something I can just do, then there's a better than 50% chance I'll just do that. I wrote the Spinoza thing partly cus I'd been toying with …
[10,000 words] Introduction -- Book I -- Book II -- Book III -- Book IV We've finally arrived at the climax of the book! I won't keep you waiting any longer -- let's get right to it. Preface I pass, finally, to the remaining part of the Ethics, which concerns the means, or way, leading …
Continue reading Spinoza’s Ethics: Book V – Of Human Freedom
[13,000 words] OK! Let’s get right to it! Preface Man’s lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects, I call bondage.For the man who is subject to affects is under the control, not of himself, but of fortune, in whose power he so greatly is that often, though he sees the better for himself, …
Continue reading Spinoza’s Ethics, Part IV: Of Human Bondage
[12000 words] "Affects" are basically emotions. But I think keeping the term slightly technical will be useful. The first half of this piece will remain slightly abstract: "what the heck is actually happening?!!" kind of thing. The second half will finally get more concrete. We'll run through the nature of human emotions, with a bunch …
Continue reading Spinoza’s Ethics — Part III: Of the Affects
