This is a repost of something I wrote on Facebook back in July, when most adults were vaccinated and we were on the way down from a smallish summer Delta wave.

Imagine the past year and a half hadn't happened, and imagine a new disease emerged with today's Covid case rates (which are high, but currently falling, and include a large number of ( Read more... )

I am thinking of moving away from LiveJournal, possibly to a blog on Wordpress or Substack or some such.

LiveJournal have broken cross-posting, which doesn't affect me directly, but does put another nail in LJ's coffin and mean even fewer people will be hanging around here.

A few months ago I was getting  excited about the kind of logic puzzles where it looks like there's no way to extract the information you want, but it can be done with the right clever insight ( Read more... )

I discovered/invented/reinvented a time management tool (it's quite likely it already exists, but it was new to me).

Last week I felt I had too many tasks to keep track of, so I made a simple Excel sheet showing the tasks and their start dates and deadlines:


( Read more... )

Recent-ish books: sci-fi

Project Hail Mary - Andy WeirThis is by the same author as The Martian, so I was very excited to read it ( Read more... )

Three recent anecdotes about drastic failures in buying goods and services ( Read more... )

This post is for discussion and solutions to the hard logic puzzles in my previous post. I recommend reading that one first, especially if you want to think about the puzzles without spoilers.
( Spoily puzzle solutions )

These have in common that they can sound impossible at first description, even (or perhaps especially) to seasoned puzzlers and/or people with some mathematical knowledge. In all cases, if I were presented with them for the first time and asked "either do this or provide a proof that it's mathematically impossible", I'd be inclined to start working ( Read more... )

Remember the riddle about the prisoner who rubs his hands together until they're sore, uses the saw to saw a plank in half, puts the two halves together to make a whole, climbs out of the hole to escape, then shouts until he's hoarse, gets on the horse and rides home?

What that riddle does to words, There Is No Game does to the scenery and ( Read more... )

A mortgage adviser wanted to know our disposable income. We weren't sure how to answer, and the more we tried to drill down into what he meant by it, the more confusing it got. The concept seems to rely on two assumptions, both of which I disagree with: 1) that there's a clear binary division between needs and wants, and 2) that this corresponds to ( Read more... )