Rosio Pavoris a blog

There are some posts that probably don’t suck, for a variety of reasons. Here are some of those. The ones in bold are my personal favorites. More favoriter than the others that are also my favorites, I mean.

Collected Essaylets

• On Kanji
  I’m not sure why I took two years of Japanese.
• On Internet Slang
  This is why I hate you.
• On Gay Marriage
  Legally. IANAL.
• On Armistice Day
  And why you’re remembering it wrong.
• On Hate Crimes
  Legal theory, as thrown together by someone who loathes lawyers.
• On Apathy in Politics
  Politics is civilisation.
• On Defining Species
  What?
• On the Historicity of Jesus
  If my name were Saul I wouldn’t change it to Paul.
• On Fitness Landscapes
  Look! 3D graphics!
• On Compulsory Voting
  It’s a really straight-forward argument, but a lot of people seem to miss it.
• On Character Encoding
  Probably the only thing I learned in class in the first semester, and most of it is stuff I looked up later anyway.
• On Moderate Christianity
  I don’t get it.
• On Abiogenesis
  Only took three months to get around to writing.
• On the Fine-Tuned Universe
  Probably a bit better than my first take.
• On Just-So Stories
  And why they really do have value.
• On Special Relativity
  I think that’s right.

Religion

• Religion rant!
  The first thing I ever really wrote on religion.
• I don’t understand weak atheists
  I do understand “agnostic in principle, atheist in practice”, though.
• Consider this…
  In which I go on about religion a bit more.
• On extremism
  Shoddy theorising~
• “Deconversion”
  A personal story.
• Atheism vs. Agnosticism
  In which I use the word “epistemological”.
• “Darwinists are fundamentalists too!”
  Middle ground fallacy~
• Why I am opposed to religion
  The comments are especially worth reading.
• Agnostic in theory, atheist in practice
  In which I repeat Dawkins, only with more direct insult.
• Revisiting a classic
  The last thing I want to hear about that goddamn banana.

And the rest

• Raven Project
  Because voices are important.
• And now for something completely different.
  Instant classic!
• Ils sont fous, les Romains.
  I speak Latin. I’m better than you.
• Non-Darwinian selection
  I could’ve worked this into an essaylet. Probably I will eventually.
• A Brief History of Us
  I’m a modern-day Carl Sagan~
• The double-slit experiment
  Particle wave, particle wave. Does whatever a particle cave.
• Descartes’ Theorem
  Everyone likes geometry.
• Philosophy of Higher Education
  I loathe the free market.
• The breakdown of simultaneity
  More special relativity.
• Misunderstanding Natural Selection
  And why it doesn’t drive evolution.
• Evolution and Abiogenesis
  And why it doesn’t make sense to claim one has nothing to do with the other.
• I made a science
  The power of the Darwinian process.
• Grapheme
  Flashcard-based revision software.

Series

• Weird Creatures
  1. Axolotls
  2. Leafy Sea Dragons
  3. Desert Locusts
  4. Koalas
  5. Leafcutter Ants
  6. Fig Wasps
• Cryptography Basics
  1. On Hash Functions
  2. Symmetric and Asymmetric Encryption
  3. Block and Stream Ciphers
  4. Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
  5. Block Cipher Modes of Operation
• AI Is Easy
  1. Search trees are easy
  2. Heuristics are easy
  3. Optimal search is easy