What's New

• The weblog is back. [August 2004]
• The weblog is on an extended hiatus, until I take the time to sort through some issues involving the interaction of PHP, mySQL, NFS and our recent system upgrade. (Basically, it had no right to work before this!) Not so coincidentally, there's a new paper: "Blind Construction of Optimal Nonlinear Recursive Predictors for Discrete Sequences", with Kristina Lisa Shalizi, cs.LG/0406011 [May 2004]
• If you sent mail on Thursday or Friday, it may well have vanished in the blackout. Also, my santafe.edu address is now definitely gone. Please send mail to cshalizi at umich dot edu. [16 August 2003]
• Put online the code for CSSR, the causal-state reconstruction algorithm Kris and I developed. [8 August 2003]
• A weblog, just in case I was tempted to ever get any work done. [18 April 2003]
• Added a manuscripts in preparation page for my research. [11 April 2003]
• Three new reviews:
  • Andrew Ilachinski, Cellular Automata: A Discrete Universe
  • Jack L. King, Operational Risk: Measurement and Modelling
  • A. N. Shiryaev, Essentials of Stochastic Finance: Facts, Models, Theory
  and a profile of Myron Scholes for Quantitative Finance. [5 April 2003]
• My paper with Cris Moore has graduated to e-print status. And Dave Albers and I have finished revising our paper, in response to someone who's even more vicious a referee than I am. [29 March 2003]
• Spring really does starts on the equinox. [21 March 2003]
• DSL and a wireless base-station at home: if not bliss, then a very advanced degree of happiness. [10 March 2003]
• Finally bought my own domain name, bactra.org. The old site now forwards there, and all URLs should redirect automatically. For the moment, bactra.org in turn forwards to the CSCS site, but I Have Plans. Let me know if anything's broken. [8 January 2003]
• Anniversary! [31 December 2002]
• Snow. [2 December 2002]
• New tech report: "An Algorithm for Pattern Discovery in Time Series," with Kristina Shalizi and Jim Crutchfield, cs.LG/0210025. [26 November 2002]
• New town, new job. [4 September 2002]
• Flying cross-country with a cat would be more fun if her drugs worked. [3 September 2002]
• Packing your life into boxes really is more fun when professionals do it for you. [28 August 2002]
• Two pre-preprints: " What Is a Macrostate?," with Cris Moore, and "Symbolic Dynamics for Discrete Adaptive Games," with Dave Albers. [13 March 2002]
• We are married. [31 December 2001]
• Got a new laptop, which has more capacity than the cluster I was using when I started these pages. I am geekishly content. [3 December 2001]
• The Afghan Crisis and the Case for American Action [30 September 2001. I can't believe I've started a letter-writing campaign.]
• Caved in and added a personal information page. [21 September 2001]
• Seven new reviews, some more than a year old:
  • B. Roy Frieden, Physics from Fisher Information: A Unification
  • Kirill Ilinski, Physics of Finance: Gauge Modelling in Nonequilibrium Pricing
  • Wendy Kaminer, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety
  • David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium
  • Joel Keizer, Statistical Thermodynamics of Nonequilibrium Processes
  • Rosario N. Mantegna and H. Eugene Stanley, An Introduction to Econophysics: Correlations and Complexity in Finance
  • Chris Thornton, Truth from Trash: How Learning Makes Sense
  [12 June 2001]
• Deleted guide to Madison bookstores, since it was 4+ years out of date, and, now that I don't live there any more, it wasn't going to get any better. [10 May 2001]
• Passed my oral thesis defense; I'm done with school. [4 May 2001]
• Causal Architecture, Complexity and Self-Organization in Time Series and Cellular Automata. Critique my dissertation, eh? [20 April 2001]
• Complete re-design of front page. Most of its content has been spun off to new pages. You may actually be able to find things now. Please tell me if I've broken anything. Added a page on my research, my CV and my statement of research interests. [10 March 2001]
• Palm pilots beat actual memories all hollow. [14 June 2000]
• Lecture Notes on Probability, Statistics and Stochastic Processes for the 2000 Complex Systems Summer School. Four hours of lecturing, on four hours of sleep, is a much more energizing experience than might be thought. [7 June 2000]
• Six new book reviews, of seven books:
  • Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene
  • Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System
  • John H. Holland, Keith J. Holyoak, Richard E. Nisbett and Paul R. Thagard, Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning, and Discovery
  • Ian D. Lawrie, A Unified Grand Tour of Theoretical Physics
  • Jeannette Mirsky, Sir Aurel Stein: Archaeological Explorer
  • Frederic Prokosch, The Seven Who Fled
  • Annabel Walker, Aurel Stein: Pioneer of the Silk Road
  [30 April 2000]
• Added latest SFI Bulletin article: Modeling Markets. [29 April 2000]
• Twenty-five new book reviews, of twenty-seven books, since last count:
  • A. C. Atkinson and A. N. Donev, Optimum Experimental Designs
  • Dana H. Ballard, An Introduction to Natural Computation
  • Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture
  • Avram Davidson's Afterlife: The Avram Davidson Treasury, The Investigations of Avram Davidson, and The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil
  • Edward Dolnick, Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis
  • Marco Dorigo and Marco Colombetti, Robot Shaping: An Experiment in Behavior Engineering
  • William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origin of Twentieth-Century Thought
  • Mary Gentle, A Secret History: The Book of Ash, #1
  • Andy Goldsworthy, Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature
  • P. J. Grady, Maximum Insecurity: A Matty Madrid Mystery
  • Paul H. Harvey and Mark D. Pagel, The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology
  • Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes
  • Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
  • M. Hassan Kakar, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979--1982
  • Gary King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data
  • Leszek Kolakowski, Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal: Essays on Everyday Life
  • Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division
  • John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language
  • Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe
  • Christopher Norris, Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical Theory
  • Thomas E. Ricks, Making the Corps
  • Daniel H. Rothman and Stéphane Zaleski, Lattice-Gas Cellular Automata: Simple Models of Complex Hydrodynamics
  • Ariel Rubinstein, Modeling Bounded Rationality
  • Bruce Sterling, Distraction
  • Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women
  [26 November 1999]
• Added Homo reciprocans: Political Economy and Cultural Evolution. [26 October 1999]
• New paper, with Bill Tozier: "A Simple Model of the Evolution of Simple Models of Evolution" (adap-org/9910002). Forthcoming in JWAS. [15 October 1999]
• New paper, with Jim Crutchfield: "Computational Mechanics: Pattern and Prediction, Structure and Simplicity" (SFI Working Paper 99-07-044). Your one-stop source for the mathematical foundations and intellectual affiliations of computational mechanics. Submitted to Communications in Mathematical Physics. [12 July 1999]
• Fifteen new book reviews, of sixteen books, since last count:
  • Margaret Alic, Hypatia's Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century
  • Caleb Carr, The Alienist
  • Jeanne Cavelos, The Science of the X-Files
  • Karen Rose Cercone, Blood Tracks
  • Diane Coyle, The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
  • Harald Cramér, Mathematical Methods of Statistics
  • Greg Egan, Distress
  • John H. Gillespie, Population Genetics: A Concise Guide
  • Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris (eds.), Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence
  • Wim Kayzer, "A Glorious Accident": Understanding Our Place in the Cosmic Puzzle
  • Michael J. Kearns and Umesh V. Vazirani, An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory
  • Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice to a Young Investigator
  • S. Robert Ramsey, The Languages of China
  • Harry Turtledove, Between the Rivers
  • V. N. Vapnik, The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory
  • H. Peyton Young, Individual Strategy and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions
  [11 May 1999]
• Wisconsin mirror dead. [10 May 1999]
• Wisconsin mirror down. Dunno why. [13 April 1999]
• Added The Primordial Goulash, since the treeware version has now printed. [11 March 1999]
• People using back-hoes around here are always so careful of buried fiber-optic cables. [3 February 1999]
• Losing a friend is never pleasant; but to Stanford? [2 February 1999]
• Seven new book reviews:
  • Philip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature
  • Greg Bear, /
  • Stephen Budiansky, Nature's Keepers: The New Science of Nature Management
  • Gary William Flake, The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
  • Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays
  • Philip Morrison and Kosta Tsipis, Reason Enough to Hope: America and the World of the 21st Century
  • Jorma Rissanen, Stochastic Complexity in Statistical Inquiry
  [1 February 1999]
• Ten new book reviews:
  • Joseph Kanon, Los Alamos
  • Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society
  • Wil McCarthy, Bloom
  • Deborah Mayo, Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge
  • Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800--1900
  • William Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles and the Frailty of Knowledge
  • William Sargant, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing
  • Robert Serber, The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb
  • Jonathan Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
  • Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach
  and a drastic revision of an old one, Edwin Hutchin's Cognition in the Wild [28 October 1998]
• First paper accepted for publication. [24 October 1998]
• Madison site finally brought back up to date, mostly. I'll be mirroring changes made to the Santa Fe site there (or here, depending on where you're reading this) every week or so. [20 October 1998]
• Added eight book reviews:
  • Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging
  • Daniel Dennett, Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds
  • J. L. Heilbron, Geometry Civilized
  • Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild
  • Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
  • Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle
  • Jill Paton Walsh, Knowledge of Angels
  • David Stannard, Shrinking History: Freud and the Failure of Psychoanalysis
  and a title index to the reviews. [31 August 1998]
• Added links to my first Real Scientific Paper, my first paid article, and my favorite version of "Like a Prayer". [6 July 1998]
• Nothing becomes Roswell, New Mexico, like the leaving of it. (I just hope the picture comes out well.) [1 July 1998]
• Tex'd up notes for my lectures on computational mechanics [24 June 1998]
• Server in Madison hacked by spamming cretins. Files on server temporarily restored from backups dating to late 1996 --- not my idea. (Everything's still there and up to date, just not connected to the server.) In the future, if things go down at the usual address, try http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/. [12 June 1998]
• Spent a week back in Madison for the graduation of my protege. It's good to see lots of green things, open water, and not a single string tie. Currently digging myself out from under your accumulated e-mail. [22 May 1998]
• Eight new book reviews. [13 May 1998]
• Time's winged chariot drawing near dep't.: interviewing high school seniors for an alumni association scholarship. [11 April 1998]
• Seven new book reviews, review page re-organized, subject index added. [25 March 1998]
• Review of Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (eds.), Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler [13 March 1998]
• Moved to Santa Fe: "a friend is someone who'll help you move; a good friend is someone who'll help you move 2000 books." There are too many dogs here. Green chile bagels are Bad and Wrong. Homepage updated. Great Things in the works. [20 February 1998, summarizing about a month.]
• Reviews of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes and Jacques Badoz, Fragile Objects: Soft Matter, Hard Science, and the Thrill of Discovery, Martin Gardner, The Night Is Large: Collected Essays, 1938--1995, Mitchel Resnick, Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds, Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, Aurel Stein, On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks: Brief Narrative of Three Expeditions in Innermost Asia and Northwestern China and Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire.
• Reviews of Valentino Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, J. B. S. Haldane, The Causes of Evolution and Auguste Dick, Emmy Noether, 1882--1935 [all finished 12 October 1997, most older than that]
• Review of François Roustang, The Lacanian Delusion [18 August 1997]
• When the power goes down on everything, having the root password can be very handy. [10 August 1997]
• Updated homepage; consolidated student evalutions [9 August 1997]
• Reviews of Paul Teller, An Interpretive Introduction to Quantum Field Theory and of Anne Becker, The Transmutation Notebooks: Poems in the Voices of Charles and Emma Darwin [8 August 1997]
• Review of G. C. Lichtenberg, Aphorisms [6 August 1997]
• Review of Nemeth and Stadler (eds.), Encyclopedia and Utopia: The Life and Work of Otto Neurath (1882--1945) [1 August 1997]
• Just discovered that all my pages are blocked by CyberPatrol, under the categories "SexActs Cult" (see Censored by Censorware, which lets you search for blocks on your favorite domains). I can't begin to say how flattered I am. [14 July 1997; thanks to Mitch Porter for alerting me to this.]
• The Communications Decency Act is dead! Long live the ... [26 June 1997]
• It must be summer again, we've had another power outage. [17 & 18 May 1997]
• Reviews of Larry Gonick and Alice Outwater, The Cartoon Guide to the Environment and George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle [5 May 1997]
• I'm back. Somebody please tell me why I ever left San Francisco? [24 April 1997]
• I'll be out of town for a bit more than a month, starting tomorrow. E-mail to the usual addresses, or to shalizi@santafe.edu. [14 March 1997]
• Reviews of John E. Roemer, A Future for Socialism. and Donald A. Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things. [11 March 1997]
• Review of David Harry Grinspoon, Venus Revealed. [10 March 1997]
• The samizdata National Security Agency Employee's Security Manual and, on a more serious note, an expanded and updated Cthulhu Hymnal [lucky 13 February 1997]
• The fairly embarrassing student comments on my fifth semester of teaching. [22 January 1997]
• Four new poems, except that two of them are old: "Autumn Light", "The Emperor of the Last Days", "Strange Sort of Homesickness", "Three Snapshots from October". [28 November 1996]
• Change of system administration, which is, in some ways, worse than a crash. The web-server for this cluster still doesn't twig "file-sharing" or even "emacs", but at least it's been re-introduced to the concept of "user directories", so that after only a few weeks these pages have resumed their accustomed place. Everything should be where it was when the new administration decided to "make the cluster more stable". This physics department --- which couldn't possibly not give a damn about whether half its graduate students have computers they can use --- is evidently too poor to maintain its main cluster: please give generously. [27 October 1996]
• Complete crash of entire system; machines turned off, some of them emitting smells like melting plastic, on 16 September. Partial resurrection today, after heroic measures by sysadmin. Most mail is probably lost. Send mail to shalizi@phys-next1.physics.wisc.edu or shalizi@math.wisc.edu.spam if no other address works. [18 September 1996]
• Yet Another Power Outage. [8 June 1996]
• I passed my prelim., no doubt because of mis-placed pity on the part of my committee. Now I just have to find a dissertation to write; and take classes until the university thinks I'm a "resident". [7 June 1996]
• The long-awaited student comments on my fourth semester of teaching. [3 June 1996]
• Is the Primordial Soup Done Yet? based on my talk of the same title to the local Chaos and Complexity Seminar, on quantifying self-organization, especially in cellular automata. [19 May 1996]
• Summer, starting sometime between 10 am and 12:30 pm. [17 May 1996]
• Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, probably still with mistakes. [3 May 1996]
• It is, finally, spring. We had a very nice thunderstorm and a black-out. Remain calm. When the Powers That Be come down upon me like a ton of bricks, you'll know about it. [19 April 1996]
• A month-old review of Paul Krugman, The Self-Organizing Economy, which somehow never got announced. [18 April 1996]
• Three essays by Mencken [16 March 1996]
• Review of Keller, Arm in Arm [15 February 1996]
• Mourning is over. [12 February 1996]
• Review of Quine, Mathematical Logic [10 February 1996; embarrassing error corrected, 12 February]
• A list of all the members of Congress who voted against the Telecom Reform Act, and information on how to get hold of the over-whelming majority who voted for it. [9 February 1996]
• The U.S. Congress passed, and the U.S. President signed into law, the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, censoring the Internet and turning the telecommunications industry over to the monopolists. ("Did you ever have your constitutional rights declared null and void? You will.") Forty-eight hours of mourning, and then "War and the knife." [8 February 1996]
• The Powers That Be took the cluster down for a one-day hardware upgrade. There was a partial resurrection yesterday (29 January), and They hope to have most things working again by 2 February. Some mail was probably lost, some is just deferred until they can get all the machines talking to each other. Mail to shalizi@phys-next9.physics.wisc.edu or shalizi@phys-next8.physics.wisc.edu shows up pretty reliably.
• Student comments for my third semester of teaching. [17 January 1996]
• When going south to escape some of the worst of winter, it is important not to get in the way of massive blizzards. (And don't get me started about accounting.) I got something like 1200 pieces of e-mail over the break; it'll take me a while to dig out. [16 January 1996]
• Review of Schutz, Geometrical Methods of Mathematical Physics [12 December 1995]
• Bertrand Russell, "Vagueness" [14 November 1995]
• Met a second person known only from e-mail. Significantly less trepidation; missed connection for lunch. [11-12 November 1995]
• Uncompromising war on the enemies of HTML and the Web! Homepage pessimized for Microsoft Internet Explorer. Looking for a good pessimization for Netscape --- BLINKing the whole thing is much too annoying. We will not be stopped by Gates, Andreesen and their 2.5 million criminal x-Soviet Armenian henchmen! [1 November 1995]
• Going to a strange city to meet someone known only from e-mail: a first. [21 October 1995]
• pointcom.com claims my philosophy page is in the top 5% of the Web. I'd be more flattered if the reviewer hadn't written that he couldn't tell if I knew what I was talking about. ("Badges? We don' need no steeken' badges!") [19 October 1995]
• Gottlob Frege on Iguana Bondage. [26 September 1995]
• Bertrand Russell, "On Denoting" [25 September 1995]
• Someone thought enough of Without Style or Grace to copy it, and slap their own copyright label upon it. As he has now deleted the offending files, and apologized, I've deleted the link to his home-page and his name from here. [Brought to my attention, 21 September; removal and apologies, 3 October 1995]
• University lost all net connections to the rest of the world over the weekend --- or perhaps it was the other way around. In an apparently unrelated application of Murphy's Law, this cluster went belly-up at the same time. Now (Monday morning) all better. [11 September 1995]
• Daniel Bell on The Cultural Contradictions of Newt Gingrich and Hans Magnus Enzensberger on Molecular Civil War. You pays your money and you takes your choice... [23 August 1995]
• The caravan has finally come in, and with it the Bactra Review. [21 August 1995]
• My Pornographic Career, or how I got hit on 59,065 times in eleven months. [19 August 1995]
• If, Dear Reader, you are ever invited to move a futon, two solid wooden tables, six bookshelves, a dozen concrete blocks, all your clothes and somewhere around a thousand books, all in six hours of a bright, hot, muggy, already miserable summer's day, by yourself: decline. [15 August 1995]
• If you have any links to my old files at phenom.physics.wisc.edu, please change 'em over to their equivalents here, at www.physics.wisc.edu. [12 August 1995]
• Outline & graphs for my talk in Math 833 today [11 May 1995, to be expanded]
• The creature who decided to warn me against the tricks that could be played with an open terminal, by playing tricks with an open terminal, has been shot. [18 April 1995]
• A tiny Zen collection, consisting of a sermon and some koans ---

  Question: "Whenever there is any question, one's mind is confused. What is the matter?"
  The Master said: "Kill, kill!"

  [31 March 1995]
• Julien Offray de la Mettrie: or rather a first version of his Man a Machine (footnotes to be added later) and the eulogy on La Mettrie by Frederick the Great. [31 March 1995]
• A Cthulhu Hymnal re-organized and greatly expanded, with help from Anders Sandberg. [21 March 1995]
• New and improved notebooks, broken into easy-to-swallow bite-sized thunks, and dated for freshness. [That is, I've broken it up into its individual entries, the most recent ones at the top of the list. 16 March 1995]
• Richard Dawkins on "Viruses of the Mind." [10 March 1995]
• Pictures. [25 February 1995]
• Peter Medawar on "The Future of Man," and the relations between genetic and mental evolution. Also his "Biology and Man's Estimation of Himself" [25 February 1995]
• André Siegfriend, Germs and Ideas, another instance of memes avant la lettre --- 1958 in this case. [25 February 1995]
• Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." [24 February 1995]
• "net.burning," a warning against the Communications Decency Act of 1995 now making its way through the Senate (S. 314). If this abomination becomes law, it will be illegal --- two years in prison and $100,000 fine illegal --- to send anything "lewd, obscence or indecent" by telecommunications, and the carriers would be held liable as well. This would turn ever telecom carrier into a censor, and kill the net as we know it. This bill must be destroyed. [20 February 1995]
• The semi-official homepage of the UW-Madison Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar. ["Semi-official" meaning, known to and assisted by the seminar's organizers, but not vetted by them, much less the administration. Responsibility for all errors, etc. 25 January 1995]
• The anonymous comments of my students on my teaching last semester. [20 January 1995]
• The World, the Flesh and the Devil, J. D. Bernal's inspired 1929 prophecy. (Well, it seems to have inspired Sterling's Schismatrix, anyhow.) It gives me the creeps when it doesn't make my blood boil. [21 December 1994]
• Notebooks totally alphabetized and partially revised; I expect to finish the job tomorrow. [17 December 1994]
• "The Quick Buck Becomes Quicker," by Heinz Pagels. [6 December 1994]
• "The Library of the Amazon," by Timothy Ferris. [5 December 1994]
• "Targeting the Stoned Cyberpunk." A marketing report for the Lollapalooza festival. Parts of it read like a leftist social scientist or "critical theorist" à la Marcuse; parts of it are just cynical common sense; all of it is imbued with the desire to wring money out of some of the more addled members of my generation. This --- supposedly public domain --- excerpt stolen from Harper's. [3 December 1994]
• A review of Wired and HotWired from Hyper-Weirdness by World Wide Web. (Summary: They're hyped, insufferably pretentious, hypocritical fashion rags --- which happen to run good to excellent articles: read those, and let the rest go hang. 2 December 1994.)
• Go on vacation for a week a find a hundred and fifty pieces of mail, three bills, a very unhappy credit card, and a physics department unsure if I want to be employed come January. I am dead to the Web until the Real World (so-called) is under control. [29 November 1994] [It's under control. 2 December 1994]
• Mitchell Porter pointed out that "Medawar" has two A's. I have fixed this and resigned all claims to being a thinking radish. [29 November 1994]
• New articles from The Economist, including one on Generation X, which qv. [21 November 1994]
• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man [21 November 1994]
• No way to treat the mind, the latest (1993) New Scientist article on so-called nootropics and smart drugs. [Summary: "Clinical trials have yielded some drugs which may be of help in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease." Beyond that, there is no good evidence of anything better than java, and no reason to think real smart drugs should exist. 14 November 1994]
• William James' essay on Great Men and their Environment, which anticipates Dawkin's memetics by the better part of a century. [14 November 1994]
• A paper from the Santa Fe Institute on International Finance as a Complex System. [13 November 1994]
• Bertrand Russell's essay On Youthful Cynicism [13 November 1994]
• The first chapter of Chuang Tzu. [11 November 1994]
• Stop Making Sense, perhaps the world's only post-structuralist card game. [6 November 1994]
• A very bad joke in I'll Put Down What I'm Doing [6 November 1994]
• My own poems [1 November 1994]
• Sections of the homepage named for ease of reference [1 November 1994]
• Links to unfinished works and rough notes added to I'll Put Down What I'm Doing [1 November 1994]
• Oblivion Her Poppy [Written in early September, announced 1 November 1994]
• Revisions to Your Final Exam [1 November 1994]
• The Aleph Anti-FAQ [1 November 1994]
• The Story So Far, in HTML for the first time [1 Nov 1994]
• This What's New page [1 November 1994]
• Isn't That What He's Paid For in my home-page. Hire me, please? [1 November 1994]
• An alphabetical table of contents of finished works [1 November 1994]
• A listing of works-in-progress in the new homepage section, I'll Put Down What I'm Doing [26 October 1994]
• On Chomsky: A "Study in Total Depravity" [9 October 1994]
• My notebooks [3 October 1994]