Random Thoughts

  Anyone in Cambridge need a programmer? I'll give you £500 if you can find me a job that I take. CV at http://www.aspden.com I make my ...

I wonder why religious conservatives are mostly synonymous with capitalism supporters ? I mean arent most religions inherently socialistic...

(in answer to a redditor confused about the seed-oil hypothesis) You shouldn't believe things at all. There are lots of different ideas...

  From AskReddit : People who don’t reply until days later, why? I get asked this all the time, so here's my answer in written form for ...

A gentleman on the cambridge subreddit is annoyed by his neighbour throwing stale bread into a public garden. My reply: I found that when I...

Scott Adams wished his father dead: ( https://www.scottadamssays.com/i-hope-my-father-dies-soon/ ) And this paragraph stuck out for me: If y...

r/scifi asks us: "What are your alltime top five science fiction novels" https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/upaxq8/what_are_y...

Turns out Group Theory's really neat, with lots of pretty diagrams and cool intuitions and beautiful theorems. (Disclaimer, only gone as...

I have over the last few months derived great pleasure from the blog of Bret Devereux, an academic historian interested in military history,...

Epistemic Status: Ravings Importance: Easily the most important problem in the world. If we can escape the proof of doom, we will likely als...

The Onion spoke wisely: https://www.theonion.com/cdc-announces-plan-to-send-every-u-s-household-pamphle-1848354068 And in response someone o...

Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that a man had very mild flu symptoms, but thought nothing of it because he'd had the flu vaccin...

  Stolen from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta )

I want to share a link to the following delightful paper: Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening ...

Like most rationalists, I do not identify as a rationalist.  Nevertheless I notice that that movement has grown to the point where there are...

An interlocutor recently spoke disdainfully of Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings about Quantum Physics. The relevant excerpt is: like the in...

I have recently been really impressed by some of the people struggling to reconcile the Word of God with the evidence all around us, which d...

  (Question I) A train is speeding down a track towards the point where seventy million terrified people are tied across the line. Their...

I got my vaccine. Apparently AstraZeneca are making the stuff on a non-profit basis, and getting a lot of shit for it from various quarte...

I have numbered the elements I have charted the stars in their courses And I know why they choose their paths I know the weight of the ear...

The other day I found myself writing a python one-liner to emit a sed invocation to modify a bash script to run a series of comby invocati...

I am late to this party, I am ashamed of my inattention. But over the last few days I have been reading with increasing concern. It appear...

Hand sanitizer is worth its weight in gold these days, but the popular brand Purell is just 3 parts ethanol to 1 part glycerin. Both these...

A reddit comment that got a lot of upvotes, so posting it here. Will probably come back and turn it into a proper essay at some point ...

I have a friend who's a parish councillor. He was telling me recently how they had paid £10,000 (half their annual budget!) to hav...

Anyone in Cambridge need a programmer? I'll give you £500 if you can find me a job that I take. CV at http://www.aspden.com I make m...

I would like to recommend 1p mobile as a source of mobile phone PAYG: https://www.1pmobile.com/ They've been my principal phone prov...

Someone recently said, sarcastically, on reddit "Of course no one decent has ever worked for a company." The problem with doin...

I joined a choir, and I decided I wanted to learn to sight-sing from scratch (*). After about six months (**) (practising most days, I got...

I'm for some reason finding it impossible to leave comments on my own blog. Which is why I haven't replied to recent comments. Thank...

Scott Alexander speaks to us of the mechanisms of oppression: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-o...

I've just donated $100 to MIRI  ( https://intelligence.org/ ) I don't understand why I've just done it. It's a patheti...

If everyone became more frugal, would GDP per capita permanently drop as a result in the long term? (Someone on reddit's AskEconom...

Anyone in Cambridge need a programmer? I'll give you £500 if you can find me a job that I take. CV at http://www.aspden.com I make m...

What if I was so convinced I was right that I started a 'Rational Thyroid Treatment Corporation'? Actually there wouldn't be a...

I've been thinking, and writing, about The Impossible Question of the Thyroid for some while now. I came up with what I thought was a ...

I've made a couple of recent blog posts about hypothyroidism: http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/thyroid-hormones-chron...