This blog is moving to www.yonatanzunger.com. All future posts will go there; all future comments will go there. The existing blog's contents have been migrated.

For those of you who want to keep following me via LJ, I've created zunger_rss.

Amy has a new blog, The Practical Free Spirit. It's all about doing big, crazy things (having a career in the arts, trying to change the world, etc) from a very practical perspective, and I recommend it. Today's post, for example, is on dealing with disappointment.

Sharron Angle is running against Harry Reid (the Senate majority leader) this November. During the primary, she ran as a hard-line ultra-conservative, playing to the Tea Party. Once that ended, she took down her web site and replaced it with one suggesting that she's a moderate ( Read more... )

One interesting aspect of the structure of Fallingwater which I'm seeing much more clearly after building this model is how each level of the building has the logical structure of a "pool." The floor layouts are open and in slightly irregular shapes, with edges and patterns which mimic the flow of water; the connections between levels, both inside ( Read more... )

I'm spending part of this Fourth of July holiday building a Lego model of one of the great works of American architecture, Fallingwater. Building this is a fascinating process; it's from a plan worked out by a professional, and he did an excellent job of conveying a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright's key ideas in the building process. For example, one ( Read more... )

Technical rambly post.

So last night I started reading MWG on microeconomics. One of the things which struck me was their use of a rather artificial-feeling mathematical framework, with consumption being a function of prices (a vector in an L-dimensional space) and of wealth (a single real number). Various bits of math follow from the statement ( Read more... )

It looks like the US may have actually managed to do something which will change the situation in Afghanistan in the long term, not just the short term: discovered large mineral deposits.It's going to take a while to process the potential implications of this. Afghanistan has been an isolated place, ruled by tribal warlords and resisting any ( Read more... )

Physical gender is apparently more fluid than we anticipated. New paper from NIMR: they showed that knocking out the Foxl2 gene from the ovaries of adult mice not only made the ovaries stop working as such, but they switched over and started to become testicle-like. Not actually manufacturing sperm, but they do start manufacturing male rather than ( Read more... )

(Paraphrased, with some modifications, from a comment in jlassen's journal ( Read more... )

I'm going to be attending WisCon this year, and have a fairly interesting schedule -- two panels and a talk:

Defining God (Panel; Sunday, 1 - 2:15 PM, Room 634)
Moderator: P. C. Hodgell; F. J. Bergmann, Chibi-Evil, Richard S. Russell, Yonatan Zunger
Atheists are often asked, "What would it take to get you to believe in God?" The stock response is ( Read more... )