I'm leaving on a cruise for spring break, and so will effectively be without Internet until Sunday, March 23. I don't plan to update Faults in that time, though I do hope to get some writing done and have some things to post when I get back. (This is a minor lie; I've got one more post to push out the door later today.)

But, the prospect of being a week without things to read being approximately as appealing as vacationing in the Third Circle of Hades, I'm bringing substantial reading material along. And, because I have a blog and an itch for publicy, here's my reading list (or at least, my carrying-along-like-a-comfort-blanket list):

Fiction

• A Wizard Alone, Diane Duane (Young Wizards: VI)
• A Wizard's Holiday, Diane Duane (Young Wizards: VII)
• Wizards at War, Diane Duane (Young Wizards: VIII)
• The Eternal Flame, Greg Egan (Orthoganal: II)
• The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson

Poetry

• The Oldest Word for Dawn, Brad Leithauser
• destruction myth, Mathias Svalina
• Selected Poems, Dylan Thomas ed. Walford Davies

Nonfiction for Classes

• Probability and Computing, Michael Mitzenmacher and Eli Upfal
• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Christopher M. Bishop

Nonfiction for Pleasure

• Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, Richard P. Feynman
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
• Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky (pdf)

Online Material

(cached at various levels of recursion with ScrapBook for Firefox)

• Slate Star Codex (all pages and outlinks), Scott Alexander
• My Faults My Own (all pages and outlinks), Ross Rheingans-Yoo
• This also doubles as "most go-to things I'd want to read", since I've outlinked to many favorite elsewhereposts by now.
• My Faults My Own -- editor portal (all pages), Ross

On my flight Boston-Keflavik, I picked up Freakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner. It was a fun read that I highly recommend. But a few things struck me about it, so I figured I'd write them down rapid-fire.

(1) "Despite [his] elite credentials, his approach is notably unorthodox."

I'm not sure what bothers me more: the widespread stereotype that eliteness is inextricable from orthodoxy, or my sinking suspicion that it's not entirely false.

(2) "He is ... an intuitionist."

In mathematics, "intuitionism" is a bit of a dirty word. In layman's term's, an intuitionist rejects the idea that a double negative is a positive, and so considers as invalid the logic:

It's appealing, because disallowing proofs by contradiction of the negation (i.e. the above form) means that every proof of "X exists" necessarily gives a mathematical construction of X. By contrast, traditional, analytic logic sometimes produces proofs that some object, logically, must exist -- but no indication of how one might make/find/imagine it.

It's widely derided because basic logical maneuvers are excluded, and so many 'intuitive' results can't be proven at all! As a professor of mine once lamented: "[Luitzen] Brouwer became famous for his proof of the fixed-point theorem, but then he became an intuitionist and never did anything useful again."

Anyway. Words have interesting meanings in different contexts. More recently: a friend and I were having a discussion about Humanism, and eventually realized