Obscene

I was trying to locate an official list of books banned in India when I encountered this early ’90s article from the CSCS archive- Irrational application of the law apart, the very purpose of imposing bans, that are almost never revoked, appears defeated in the face of the fact that there is no comprehensive list [...]

On Rand, and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan

Some people are “rejoicing” over the news that Rand accepted government handouts (social security, medicare etc) in the last few years of her life. Apparently, the scum indulging in such schadenfreude expect laissez-faire capitalists to be true to their principles: refuse government benefits, and not make use of government-funded infrastructure, even if they have paid [...]

They sat, they surveyed, and …

From Shannon’s 1950 paper [pdf] on programming a chess-playing computer- … this approximate evaluation f(P) has a more or less continuous range of possible values, while with an exact evaluation there are only three possible values. This is as it should be. In practical play a position may be an “easy win” if a player [...]