I'm reading both Boethian Number Theory (De Institutione Arithmetica) and Fundamentals of Music (De Institutione Musica), and it's a good insight into how people conceptualized numbers and their relations/representations. It has a lot of that "continuous function is the one I can draw without lifting the pen off the paper" meets Feynman's lectures flair to it, describing in word or simple drawing what today would have been a formula/proof. They're even less rigorous than expected, but (often enough) very intuitive and demonstrative at the same time. Not always, heaven forbid; when it's muddled, I can spend more time working through a paragraph than an entire pulp novel, but it's easy to see why they were amongst the primary textbooks pretty much until the early modern period. They also tangetially inspired me to read some of the 'lesser' works by Aristotle in the near future, like On Generation and Creation or Meteorologica.

Combined with my earlier readings of Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements, I guess I'm about to finally graduate the Quadrivium ;).

Oh, and yesterday I finished The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion by Daniel McCoy. Good read, covers the basics and goes the extra mile to point out the differences between what we know, what we can't know, and what is just romanticized later/modern vision of vikings and their mythology. The translations/retellings in the second part of the book are a bit too stilted, and it honestly wouldn't take that much effort to improve them, but they certainly aren't bad either.

Apart from work going really well and meeting someone who hasn't given me any red flags or headaches/concerns in 3 months, I've been playing a lot of the OG Fallouts and their mods. It's pretty fun.

Let's make one thing clear: when it comes to puzzles, you have to take them as at best a rough estimate of the ability... of puzzle solving. In chess, I routinely beat people with puzzle ranks in the grandmaster range -- and the cockier they are about it, the wider my smile -- because it's one thing to solve a problem and another to get to those positions by skill. In that regard, it's like training for a marathon exclusively on an elliptical: even if you develop endurance, you'll probably die of blisters and fresh air overdose around 10k. But damn, does it bring me joy to see some numbers improve. I even won a couple games.

From what I understood so far, the (opening) theory is muuuch less rigorous than chess, but leagues ahead of Go's "to win, you have to green-fish blue-fish, red-fish two-fish" bullshit. So much more my speed! Dunno. Maybe I have some bizarre learning disability, but it's clear that the more the game is front-loaded with rules and lingo, the less likely I am to enjoy it. And no, it's not 'Western bias'; I despise Bridge/Whist - possibly the West-est, most English game - for the same reason.

All 16 potato plants produced berries. Because I planted six different types, maybe some of them are (viable) crossbreeds? No idea, but it'll be cool to see if they grow next year. I'm also planning on leaving some potatoes behind on purpose, to see if they can self-perpetuate in an enclosure I made for less dog-resistant plants.

Because there are many unused fields nearby, two months ago I decided to help the wider butterfly population by dumping a couple cupfuls of radish seeds over the area. If it doesn't sound like much - radish seeds are about a third of the size of poppy seeds and grow best when a couple inches apart, so they've been tossed widely and sparingly. Doesn't seem like anyone but bugs noticed, though it looks like most seedpods I inspected were already eaten from the inside by caterpillars and the like. Dunno if those will have a chance to continue, but that's also something to see next year.

If you shuffled the words and were about 1/3 families and nuclear superbreeders, it'd be sustainable even without lye-baer-oons.

Nah, I told you already: we're pretty understanding of this. Hell, we have plurals of collective nouns, like 'the police' (nominative singular: policja, plural: policje), so go and wrap your head around that. It's like Latin, but much weirder and less regular. You're fine.

And good one, but what would we do with whole three lie-bear-ians?

Nah, throwing your vote into the pile matters wherever you are. We recently had a Sołtys (like county-level official for rural areas) election where the difference between candidates was 6 votes (out of 250-someting voters). Sure, it's not the same league, our Sołtys is 47 and kicks ass as a public servant, but may POTUS match her importance and prestige one day. Your vote is no less important than mouthbreather's next in line.

I know how good Poland might look if, say, a POTUS gave you half of Ukraine

LOL, come on, that's basic even by my understanding of geopolitics. Ukraine is neither his/America's to give nor ours to take. Also, combining it with Poland would cause a civil war faster than most of you can spell 'Volhynia'.

So is this a winning move? Vote Biden, elect the prick, hope the VP can score at least a 10 on Glasgow Coma Scale? 'Cause this sounds better than the alternative and less wasteful than independent in your climate. I'm sure mk will 'rebuke' this with some meaningless faux-profound tautology, at least he does that whenever talking to me, but you can use this as... amunition (ba dum tsh!).

Since it's likely Biden won't last four years, due to death or decline, wouldn't banking on strong vice president taking over be a good strategy? That's still a thing and US didn't instate tanistry or some shit?

I'm not saying 'the system' doesn't suck, but it's undeniable that anyone else would have been strongarmed into removing the part even implying/suggesting ET intelligence as a possible explanation for the possibility of the object being a 'pancake' sail rather than rotated oblong.

Would it be awesome to be true? Absolutely. Do we need more data? Yes. Does it require more research? Ditto. Do I want to believe? Hell yeah! But because of the implications of this work, skepticism has to be on the all-time high.

Back when the topic was fresh, I was being dismissive of quite a few rebuttals to Loeb, saying how "adding these 15 parameters gives a better explanation" is a worthless statement on par with "my gf is homeomorphic with a torus, so is Liv Tyler, therefore I'm screwing Arven on the daily, therefore I'm Aragorn." Now? I want to believe, but don't want to be reckless or show any less scrutiny than I'd give to my research, neither on the record nor off. Which I suppose is exactly what you want in a scientist. I just became far more wary of Loeb('s persona) with time.

Hah, no worries, I'm Team Mulder too. And science is probably always a blast, so it looks like an interesting thing to check out for myself. For instance, I looked into chemical, but completely neglected (the applications of) magnetic properties it could have, which is much more my day-job area of interest. I'm just lukewarm on the whole controversy, because Avi "chair of physics at Harvard" Loeb crying foul at the 'physics establishment' is a tad hilarious. If nobodies like am_U or I seriously postulated anything like he did, we'd be keelhauled under the liquid nitrogen cystern, not published. ;)

Ever seen Pt/Mn?

Not really, but maybe it's more notable industrially, considering what you wrote about its mechanical properties. I recall someone from Czechia working on MnPt nanocomposites, but I couldn't see the significance of their work, to put it euphemistically. I guess it could be used as a catalyst, since both manganese and platinum are stupidly robust in that role? Maybe for alcohol oxidation or more generally as a replacement of sorts for metal-carbonyl complex catalysts. I can search more thoroughly if you want, but nothing pops up in my immediate wheelhouse.

I've been trying board games again. Between being pretty good at chess and annoyed into quitting Go, taking time to get serious about learning shogi seems like a nice goal.

Oh boy, what fun two days had it been. And because I'm ahead on work and await responses to a metric bitchload of letters, this week is basically learning how to play and rewatching Star Trek TOS in the background.

So, first of all, my brain is incapable of holding Kanji. I see that "王将" and "飛車" are different symbols, but despite just copying them... I can only tell you that the first one is King because that stylized ][ is the piece I tried to frantically locate amidst the gibberish. No idea what's the other one. A rook, perchance? This alone, knowingly irrationally, makes me want to get defensive and prove I'm not a total fucking idiot.

OK, so use simpler symbols?

Yeah, sure, but then I lag even harder translating the move cheatsheet symbols onto piece symbols. No, I don't know why it's so difficult for me. Yes, it's been annoying me to hell and back.

"Then why won't you use the 'westernized' pieces?"

For the same reason why I wouldn't expect to see even a mediocre chess essay use the author's favourite dinosaur-themed pieces: any literature that's worth a shit uses kanji. I'd rather bank on acquiring familiarity over the years than be forced to unlearn a crutch as an intermediate player.

Oh, there are pieces with move pictograms and simplified Kanji! Happiness and jubilation!

Thank Cthulhu - may his sleep be eternal - someone figured this game's lingo is plenty difficult for bakagaijins fumbling over every little thing, no need to complicate this shit for tradition's sake.

Bitchin', let's do some puzzles!

Did you know everyone begins with 1500 as a provisional rank in all categories?

But wait. I'm approaching this all wrong: everyone sucks at the beginning. That's normal, no need for a bruised ego. Also, learning chess from my father was like surviving Pai Mei and Zhukov, so this should be fun with kid gloves on. Training, theory, and gaining experience by getting my proverbial ass whooped should be the key.

Well then, looks like I'm at least on track with the "ass whoopin', received" quotas.

But you know what? This is legitimately fun, unlike Go, where I'm often more confused by winning a game thought lost than frustrated at losing a game thought victorious. That silly game got me wondering how I can possibly rank 3 kyu (~1700/3rd cat. chess) despite my strategy being little more than "this place could use a stone 'cause, dunno, symmetry or something." Shogi? I already understand why I'm losing.

You don't alloy platinum for anything but jewelry and catalysts, that I know of.

It's not common, but notable in chemistry. You sometimes burn/melt stuff for analysis in Pt/Au bowls because it's known that ceramics could introduce (soluble) contaminants (leeching sodium from glaze, metals and glass 'fluxing' around alumina dust - that level of analytic pedantism). For 'chemically inert' reason, gas-phase synthesis may necessitate piping and vessels made of platinum or Pt/Rh or Pt/Ir alloys, but I can't give you a reaction example off-hand. I also got to use Pt/Nb anode and Pt/Ir 'combustion mantle' (that fine mesh around a flame, like on old-timey gas lamps) in organic synthesis, but the latter was hella niche even by the "Pt alloys in lab" category. And it wasn't used for catalyst either; I needed to cleanly keep the water away with flame, with this somehow being the least stupid setup.

The garbled speech, the replacing of names or objects by unrelated words, the rambling, unconnected thoughts...it's all part and parcel of a man whose gray matter is deteriorating quickly.

From UN translators through John Oliver to people here, folks have been laughing at Trump's speech 'patterns' since around 2015. Why would it matter to anyone now?

I completed the Evil Russian Pushup Program and gotta say two things:

1. It does work. Maybe not 'wonders' - improving from 36 to 53 isn't something to brag about when you're a 20-something - but if you've plateaued and can't/don't want to lift weights, this will give results.

2. Abs to wrists, I've been feeling sore for most of those two weeks. Thank god it stopped today, but I'm only doing the bare minimum this week. Still, I think it was worth doing.

Otherwise, it's been OK. Normalizing on all fronts.

I'm not discouraging shaking things up or anything, but don't you have a wife, a job, and a shoal of kids on top of bazillion friends and other social obligations? Cutting on memes is always good but unless you're looking at them for hours a day, something valuable will have to go away - at least for a while - to accommodate those creative plans.

Met my summer interns over a coffee. Always four, they are; an all-purpose nerd (my man!), a girl that'll end up running analyst team in ten years, a hard-charger that found a loophole that allowed applying as a freshman who won't know the half of what's going on, and a dude who ought to have picked a different major BuT pHySiCs EaRn GoOd. Well, OK, not quite, but they largely fit those stereotypes without squinting or mental gymnastics, just by relative measures. And mr Freshman has a previous B.Eng in electrical engineering, but you gotta roll for the joke to work. Dunno why they make the guy go through internships, though, he part-times in one of those CAD-driven monstrosities but it's not like admin ever made sense to non-admin people.

Ex called, started doing emotionally manipulative bullshit proclaiming regret, I blocked her number because I've been through that already enough times to know better. Rebounded. Still feel like shit, but it'd be weird if I didn't. Going back to living life at 2,5 speed is fun especially now that I know the difference between being in a detached rush of things and a manic phase.

You know, it'd be interesting if you wrote why you're not writing. Checkmate, bitches! :]

Almost two straight months of relationship drama and bullshit at work. I never wanted to get blind drunk this badly, but know better. At least the first is over and the second is a matter of gaining a bit of distance.

I hope y'all well.

All good points and nothing I could disagree with. Well put. However, I was trying to provide reasons why it feels odd to Poles, 'cause it is honestly a bitch of a language to master. Passion for culture or language is admirable, but perhaps more counter-intuitive than flattering when expressed towards one's own?

By the way, I remember you asking stuff like 'how do you pronounce Ł' back in IRC days, so have some random trivia: you can guess with reasonable certainty someone's (and their parents) upbringing by noting if they can correctly pick tę vs tą (accusative and instrumental of 'this', respectively) because it's one of those rolls-off-the-tongue things that are difficult to correct later in life. I sound weird to most Poles due to aspirating 'ch', which is rather old-fashioned quality retained mostly by the elderly and folks from the rural South-East, and an artifact of being taught the language by my grandparents. Even hardcore philology students do declensions by the ear if they want to get it right, because the rules are like 3rd Latin (long list of rules and exceptions to stem endings and syllables) and Greek (consonant mutation) declension rolled into one, yet are somehow assumed to be understood by 4th graders :P.