David R. MacIver's Blog

There’s an idea that has been bouncing around in my head for about a year that I keep revisiting and trying and failing to make work every couple of months.

A new phrase has entered into the local dialect of the discord I run recently.

There’s a trick I’ve used twice now, and I figure any trick worth using twice is worth writing up.

I got myself into a bit of a mess trying to explain why a particular result was true the other day, so this is my write up of a proof.

This post is inspired by a recent conversation with Amber.

A concept I’ve found very useful in the past is what David Chapman describes as velleity: A “velleity” is a wish so weak that it does not occur to you to act on it.

As is traditional when trying to recover from a drought of writing, I’m going to write about not writing.

I’m in the process of trying to derust my maths skills, so I’m going to try posting about mathematics every day for June and see if that helps.

One of my… I don’t quite want to say guilty pleasures.

Please note: This will contain some spoilers for the entire Wheel of Time series of books and up to the end of Season 3 for the show.

People often talk about needing to be better at saying no.

There’s something I deeply believe, and only very erratically manage to follow through on, which is that there’s a huge amount to be learned by studying something more than it seemingly warrants.

So, Dave and I went to Cambridge recently to visit Dani Clode at the neuroplasticity lab.

A recurring theme recently has been doing things because they need to doing, regardless of whether you currently feel like doing them.

There’s a type of depression that I’ve written about before where it feels like a restriction of the possible.

“Focusing” is the name for a basic therapy skill coined by Eugene Gendlin.

Sorry, still on different ways to calculate the sum of the first n integers.

In my last post I talked about the problem of working out \(\sum\limits_{i = 1}^n i\).

There’s a story repeated so often that it’s a cliche of Gauss’s mathematics teacher setting the class the task of adding up the numbers 1 to 100, supposedly to waste their time and give them a break, only for Gauss to almost immediately give the correct a…

Friends and family often ask me what probabilistic programming is.

I was reading up on Markov Chains today, as one does, partially reminding myself about them and partly filling in some gaps in my knowledge.