This post has been a long time coming, but it's finally here now.

Where did Pine.blog Go?

Pine.blog has been officially deprecated and deactivated. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about this deprecation please send an email to support@skyrocket.software.

Can I Get My Data?

I believe that all active users were given appropriate notice and time to remove their data, but if you feel the need to contact me about your data (i.e. your feed subscriptions) please get in touch.

It's Been Fun

Pine.blog was developed in 2017 as a side project and continued to receive regular updates and even a native app (with a planned macOS app) in 2019. However, over time the situation with Pine.blog never improved to the point of achieving profitability or sustainability with its increasingly complex development. As well, over time my desire to build/maintain and the outlook for social media apps in general diminished and I didn't feel the fire burning in my heart to work on it any longer.

The app had at one point a decent userbase, and one that, if the fire still burned bright, perhaps I would have continued to develop for, however that was not the case.

I met a number of amazing people building this app and learned a ton about how the open web works both technically and socially.

So long Pine.blog, it was fun while it lasted.

For those of you out there who still use RSS, and in particular NetNewsWire, I've put together a workflow in Automator that can take the currently selected article and generate an audio file of the spoken text.

I never will wrap my head around AppleScript's peculiar syntax, but regardless I've made the workflow file available for download below.

I typically use this with Overcast which allows me to upload files to listen on the go.

Like most people, I want to read more articles than I actually do and this is little script will hopefully help with that.

It might take a while to complete, based on the length of the article, and it saves the final audio file to your desktop.

(warning you do need FFMpeg installed)

⬇️ Download Here

In the proceeding five centuries, humanity has made incredible progress in discovering and understanding natural laws. Starting in the sixteenth century, the Early Modern Period, colloquially known as the Scientific Revolution, catapulted humanity into the modern era. Today our knowledge of nature's inexorable laws extends from the largest possible structures in the Universe to the smallest physical components that construct all of reality.

However, a study of the history of science makes it clear that we did not build up this knowledge from either the top down, or the bottom up. We started in the middle. Presumably, humanity discovered the "simplest" laws first (i.e. we picked the low hanging fruit), but this assumption begs the following question:

If nature's various laws at different scales are built up and atop of the laws at lower scales, why and how is it that nature conspired to the laws found at our human scale the easiest to understand?

A Strange Nadir of Complexity

Quantum Field Theory (QFT) predicts the behavior of nature's most fundamental components. Notoriously, the subject is incredibly complex. General Relativity, the modern theory of gravity, goes the other direction. It predicts the behavior of matter at the largest scales. And it too is famously difficult to understand and work with. Both are inventions of the advanced mathematics of the twentieth century and both require nearly a decade of dedicated work to understand and manipulate.

Yet, we can and do teach Newton's Laws to high schoolers.

Photograph: Cambridge University Library/PA

Mathematics doesn't work this way. Students start with elementary counting and arithmetic, then study geometry, algebra, and a host of other topics in roughly the same order that we discovered them. Physics too is taught in a historical manner, but there—because of the unique phenomenon we're discussing—students must be later told to disregard their previous knowledge when learning new subjects. Mathematics, by contrast, will never instruct students to disregard earlier truths when moving on to more complex ones.¹ Arithmetic is not invalid when learning calculus, in fact the opposite is true. Yet, an intuitive understanding of Newtonian Mechanics is useless and even harmful when discussing General Relativity.

A totally not-controversial attempt to plot the complexity of various domains of physical laws

It's almost as if natural laws have this inherent complexity curve that bends upward toward the ends. If so, then that idea would tend to suggest that we function at the perfect place, where physical laws are at their most powerful (complex enough to allow for complex and emergent phenomena like life) while also being at some nadir in computable complexity.

But why should this be so?

An Anthropic Viewpoint

Perhaps, though I see no direct evidence to support this argument, it is the case that the laws of nature simply appear less complex at our familiar human scale because we are the ones formulating the laws. Thus the rules by which we construct these laws are somehow intuitively complementary to our human intuitions about the workings of the Universe at that same scale.

Newton's Laws are convenient for describing earthly motion and humans evolved on earth, hence our mathematics bakes in some of our innate intuition about how the world works.

This explains how, when phenomena are more distant from our day-to-day experience, their physical and mathematical descriptions become increasingly complex and non-sensical.

However, this anthropic approach sheds no light on precisely what sorts of intuitive principles we've baked into our mathematics and, looking at the commonly-used ZFC axioms which underly much of modern mathematics, it's hard to see exactly what "human intuitions" can be found there, at least from my perspective.

Wondering Aloud

For now, it remains something of a mystery to me exactly why this phenomenon of the strange dip in complexity exists. I'm sure that I'm not the first to see or wonder about this curious case, but I'm also not sure precisely how to search for or investigate this topic further. If anyone knows more or can recommend a few papers or a book on the subject, please get in touch.

These days I think a lot about thinking, and I'm often reminded about something CGP Grey said many years ago:

The single thing that changed me the most was keeping a paper notebook and writing down my thoughts and simply looking back at that notebook on a regular basis... it's so simple but it comes down to increasing communication between past, present, and future you. That's what helps you direct change in yourself over time.

This quote has really stuck with me over the years and hopefully I can adequately explain why.

The Matter of the Mind

The brain is a miraculous and wondrous thing, but however fantastical its capacity, it has never been possible to keep everything we experience, know, understand, or wish to remember in our heads at once. Hence, we record such things outside of our brains if we wish to someday recall them. We use calendars, notebooks (and books in general), videos, memes, smart phones, sharpie-covered-forearms, and all manner of other non-brain spaces to jot down and persist our ever-fleeting thoughts. The brain's space is very limited, especially given the demands of our modern world, and while it is fast to recall information (usually) it is easily overwhelmed and must depend on more durable forms of memory for concrete details or in-depth analysis.

Sounds a lot like computer memory, doesn't it?

Image credit: mine

Well, the analogy goes deeper! Indeed, if one needs to add more system memory to a computer, we add more RAM: a slower, yet more expansive pool of memory. When this overflows, we can swap to disk or write files which we later come back to. The same is true—almost literally and by design—in ourselves.

Where the Mind Resides

The question of where precisely does our mind reside? has dogged humanity for millenia, but if one takes the idea that the mind is able to be comprised of things outside the body then it only makes sense that our smartphones, notebooks, and other physical media we interact with are a core part of our own minds. These media are slower to recall information from and require constant upkeep to avoid losing, degrading, or fragmenting—but so do all forms of computer memory and storage. Notebooks must be constantly upkept to stay relevant, digital files backed up and properly organized, and books must be catalogued and their core tenants bookmarked, dog-earred, or otherwise recorded for later reference.

No, my desk isn't normally this cluttered.

Thinking of the world in this way, even other people become a form of our own minds: we share information with others who later remind us of what we said. It's an incredibly lossy and error-prone medium, but it is an important one and perhaps the oldest form we know.

When thinking of the world in this way, the idea that one wouldn't want to keep notes, organize files, record memories, take pictures, and scrawl every meaningful thought on whatever was around to record it seems strange to me. By choosing not to record one's thoughts, one chooses to succumb to a natural form of memory loss: the default form of human dementia.

Obviously not everything is important or worth recording and one cannot always know in advance what will turn out to be important later, but if it feels important or insightful, write it down. Then, critically, come back to it later. That last step is important, because information lost or unread is just a scribble of ink on the pressed pulp of trees.

I think I've accidentally created a honey pot for badly behaved AI bots. Let me explain:

A while back I created a joke website called the HyperWebster after the theoretical, infinite dictionary containing all possible thoughts expressible in the english language. I got the idea from this old Vsauce video. I put it together in an afternoon, posted it on HackerNews, it went no where, then I forgot about it. Nothing eventful there. Anyway, the site is still up if you want to try loading it, but you might have a problem.

See, for the past month it's been getting slammed by bots from all over the internet trying to read or clone the entirety of human thought. (You can't say they're not ambitious little bots!)

Here's a screenshot of the site in case it's not up when you read this.

At first I suspected a poorly coded botnet was to blame for this rush of traffic and a quick check of the logs confirmed that, indeed, hundreds of different IP addresses were hitting the site all at once browsing similar pages. Since this site is isolated to its own server and not hosting anything important, I figured I'd let the bots eat their fill of my infinite dictionary and ignore the problem. After all, I'd only noticed the issue because my uptime monitoring system alerted me that the site was a little slower than normal. The traffic spiked at a few hundred requests per second, but eventually it did indeed die down and things returned to normal.

However, that's where the funny part begins.

An Infinite HoneyPot

If you check out these logs you'll notice that the User-Agent string might sound familiar. Indeed, Claude isn't alone either! Amazon, Claude, and several other big boy bots are currently consuming the HyperWebster in the vain hope of understandin all possible written thoughts! I guess I expected more from the tech giants than to fall prey to a simple procedurally generated website, but alas this is apparently too much to ask.

I do not have a takeaway from all this, at time of writing the requests are still pouring in (at a few dozen per second). However, it is very funny.

Good luck, Claude. We're all counting on you.

It happened again! I love it when my interests align.

Not too long ago, Veritasium released a fascinating video on the physics of rainbows—which you should totally watch. In that video they discuss the mechanics of how light waves of differing wavelengths refract in water droplets to form various kinds of single and double-banded rainbows. The video is a pitch to get the viewer to question their prior knowledge of how rainbows work and then it uses that question to dive in to the deeper physics of light that explain an otherwise common phenomenon.

Source: Veritasium

What I didn't expect to find, was that rainbows are not just interesting mechanistically, but that they were a particularly insightful topic of discussion for medieval scholastics when debating the importance of scientific experimentation itself!

Beware, we're going deep into the weeds!

The Issue of Experiment

In order for this to make any sense, we need to dive a bit into how ancient and medieval peoples (and some modern historians thereof) understood their world.

Medieval scholars were not idiots, as some might sometimes conceive today. They had a very nuanced and complex way of understanding and classifying the natural world. The trouble is that it is a very different method of understanding than we use today and that can be very confusing for us moderns to understand. Particularly we have to consider the role of experimentation in ancient and medieval natural philosophy, which was heavily influenced by Aristotle (aka the Stagirite).

I think this quote from Dr. Peter Dear sums the prevalent understanding up pretty well:

"For Aristotelians, by contrast, the philosopher learned to understand nature by observing and contemplating its ordinary course, not by interfering with that course and thereby corrupting it."

– Promethean Ambitions, William Newman. p 240 Footnote 8. A quote by Peter Dear from Revolutionnizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions

Now, you might ask yourself: why did they think this way? What reason could the ancients and medievals have for such a strange seeming conclusion? Well, consider this quote from Antonio Perez-Ramos.

"What is the point...of making or constructing something in order to gain insight into Nature's mysteries if we posit from the very start that no productions of human technology can remotely equal or even approach the essence and subtlety of natural processes?"

– Promethean Ambitions, William Newman. p 241 Footnote 9. A quote by Antonio Perez-Ramos from Bacon's Forms and the Maker's Knowledge (Emphasis mine).

This assumption, made axiomatically for centuries, is critical if one is to understand this branch of ancient and medieval theory. And while it is true that not all scholars of the time believed such things (as we will see) it is true for many. As such it is/was a prevalent view in the works of many historians as well, a phenomenon that Dr. William Newman calls the noninterventionist fallacy.

The noninterventionist fallacy [is the idea] that the Stagirite and his followers were fundamentally nonexperimental or even actively opposed to experiment, because experimentation involved intervention in natural processes… Indeed, in [this] view, avoidance of artificial intervention was a necessary consequence of the Aristotelian conception of natural science. Since Aristotle defined an object's "nature" as the sum of its regularly occurring properties, any attempt to isolate the object from its normal environment could only interfere with its nature. Since experiment relies on precisely such interference… it becomes ipso facto useless in Aristotelian natural science.¹

- Promethean Ambitions, William Newman. p 238-240 (Emphasis mine).

However Newman argues that this fallacy is just that: a fallacy, and that his colleagues (historians of science) should not interpret all medieval or ancient sources this way precisely because Aristotle himself didn't follow the noninterventionist mold, and neither did a very studious set of his later disciples.

The Solution in Rainbows

Theodoric's epic diagram! He and Veritasium were on the same path with their visuals.

One of the examples of ancient and medievalist scientific experimentation comes to us from the writings of Aristotle himself and his later followers.

Aristotle wrote extensively about how rainbows could be formed by the splash and spray of an oar, and later writers like Albertus Magnus and Robert Bacon experimented with making rainbows from glass vessels, spray, wet rags, and more. Albertus "used vessels filled with water to replicate the individual drops of water in a rainbow," and a wet rag to "produce a fine mist and the attendant spectrum."² Albertus then proceeds to replicate Aristotle's experiments with the oar.

However the culmination of the experimentation on this topic has to be the work of Theodoric of Freiburg who wrote in the first decades of the fourteenth century.

Theodoric managed to use the experimental techniques that we have already described to prove that the rainbow came about from a double refraction and a single reflection within each drop of water. He even managed to explain the formation of the common secondary bow in terms of a double refraction and a double reflection (fig 5.1).

- Promethean Ambitions, William Newman. p 244

What's more, this idea that all Aristotelian natural philosophers denied the usefulness of experiment is refuted by none other than a medieval scholar himself, Themo Judaei when discussing the merits of scientific experimentation and its regard to rainbows and their accompanying halos.

Likewise it must be known that it is said in the title of the question: "just as the rainbow or halo etc.," because it is difficult to know well the composition or manner of composing metals, just as it is difficult to know the way of generating the rainbow. And unless we knew how to make or see the rainbow and its color, as well the halo, by means of art, we would hardly be led to an understanding of the rainbow or the halo—and how they come to be thus.³

Quaestiones, Themo Judaei. Question 27.

He goes on to discuss the relevance of this knowledge to experimentation via a chemical method of making gold, but that is another story.⁴

Without wishing to turn this into a writing & pen blog, I did want to talk a little more about the kit I use these days, if only because I figure some readers out there might find it interesting or useful.

For a long time, I bought several different kinds of notebooks—and pens—looking for the right fit for my needs. Eventually, I landed on a setup that I'm very happy with.

A Good Notebook

When it comes to notebooks, I have a set of firm criteria and a wishlist of nice-to-haves.

As some readers might know, I'm left handed and that heavily influences my criteria. I want a notebook with a spine that is thin enough to impact my writing, but at the same time is thick enough to have a meaningful spine presence on a shelf such that I could label the spine and read it. I have a lot of books and notebooks and being able to find things on the shelf quickly matters.

I tried hardbound book blanks (which look amazing on the shelf), but they're a pain to write in because of the thick spine. After that I tried super thin notebooks, but they don't have enough shelf-presence for a spine label and, importantly, they are so thin that they don't contain enough meaningful space for the notes I want to take. Topics spread across volumes and that makes organizing hard.

I tried so called Executive or Professional Notebooks, these are lovely to look at and hold, and they're great on the shelf, but they're just too big to be easily portable. I like to have a notebook with me at all times and these are simply too big for that.

Just a few of my notebooks.

That's when I found my solution, a solution that'd been staring me in the face for a long time.

It's silly to think that my perfect notebook is the simple composition book, but I think it might be. They're super cheap (often only 50¢) and the colored covers (which formed the foundation of my early schooling organizational system) are very useful. They're thick enough to have a good spine, but lay flat on the table. There's enough pages for a meaningful amount of writing, but not so much that filling it feels like a monumental task. I can carry two or three at once in my bag and they're very light and the covers are slightly waterproof—a welcome feature for the occasional coffee spill. The only real downside is that the low price point means that the paper quality is very bad. Personally, I've found that you can offset some of this by choosing the right brand, but it's a fundamental flaw. Still, I'm using them and love them.

What's in a Pen?

I'm not going to discuss pencils here, even though I use a lot of them, simply because Ticonderoga pencils are great and you can just use those.

When it comes to pens though, I have more nuanced thoughts.

Years ago, I preferred gel pens, but they suck for left-handers. The ink dries so slowly that it coats the hand in black smudges. From there I moved on to a hodgepodge of ballpoints and never really found one I liked.

For a while I used a branded metal ballpoint pen from that my Dad took home from work (one of those corporate perks). These felt great in the hand, but they were not great writing implements—and they exclusively came with blue ink, which was a huge detriment. Blue ink sucks.

Photo: mine

Years back, I went to Japan on a vacation with some friends. There I bought a cheap notebook and pen from a convenience store on a whim and then proceeded to fall in love with the pen I randomly picked up there. I've used them ever since and while they are cheap, they write extremely well and, crucially, the fine point and particular ink dries very quickly. No smudges on the page, or on my hand! It's a great pen for left-handers. Now, I prefer a very fine point, so that might be a turn off for some people, but I do recommend these pens.

In other places I use my fountain pens, though I've basically stopped using my dip pens just because they're a hassle. I still love my fountain pens but those Zebra Sarasa pens have stolen my heart.

If you're reading this and you have other suggestions to solve these same problems, I'd love to hear them.

Also, like I mentioned in my previous post, I've started a newsletter. If you like this post and want to get future posts delivered straight to your inbox, then subscribe!

I'm a few years late to the trend here, but I've gone ahead and set up a newsletter for those of you that are interested in getting these posts delivered direct to your inbox.

I personally use an RSS reader, though I realize that I'm a dying breed these days, but I don't want to exclude anyone who wants to see my posts but just isn't into RSS.

This has been a long time coming, so I'm happy to finally have it done. You can subscribe to this post and all my upcoming ones at the link above.

Don't worry, nothing is going to change here. I'm just adding a new way to follow this blog. There's a lot more to come and I promise you, it'll be exciting stuff.

You should subscribe :)

Over a year ago, I switched to writing entirely in cursive and wrote at length on the techniques and methods I used to re-learn it. This post is an update to those earlier two in which I will dive into the beautiful process I've undertaken trying to develop a personal style for my handwriting.

I still write a lot and I'd estimate that well over 95% of that writing is in cursive. Doing something so much and with deliberate intent will doubtless improve one's skill but, countering that progress, is the speed at which I write. So my writing ends up looking a bit like a doctor's scrawl—if a bit more legible.

Photo: mine

Adding Personal Flair

However, the lovely thing about writing by hand is that the skill is incredibly personal. Letterforms are standardized and designed for speed and ease of use, but nothing says you actually have to use all of them as designed. I have always loved how older (1800–1950s) style writing looks and so I wanted to try to emulate those forms where possible. As well, several capital letters are tricky to write consistently and I do not mind occasionally lifting my pen at the start of a sentence. Important too, I changed some letters because I don't like how they look in their standard form.

This led me to abandon several letter forms like the H, F, T, A, and both versions of the letter Z in favor of simpler or more stylistic alternatives.

Photo: mine

These changes make my writing feel like it's actually mine. It's a strange feeling, coming from the world of digital type, but the letters you write can be truly yours if you invest the time to make them so.

Technical Changes

What may be more difficult to notice is the changes I've made to how I hold and push the pen. These changes help me better emulate the style I prefer but they also make it much easier to write for longer durations. Older styles of writing focused on larger letterforms and swirls because the hand wasn't the primary mode of pen-transport; instead the whole arm was involved! This was largely because your arm gets tired more slowly and so a style like that is more suited to jobs where you'd be writing all day.

As well, the authors of handwriting styles are almost always right-handed, something I can never truly escape. Writing left-handed involves deciphering and deconstructing the motions and techniques for writing and reconstructing them in a way that works for you. I end up pushing my pen left-to-right at an angle far more parallel to the page than before—where as a right-handed person would drag their pen the same way. Along with this, I try to use my arm and shoulder to move my pen more often than not and these techniques combined lead to gaps in some letter forms as the pen is not intended to be used this way, and it slants the letters more steeply.

A larger sample of my writing related to a recent blog post on narrative action.

Click to view a larger version. Photo: mine

Legibility Concerns

No doubt there are readers who are currently thinking: your writing is completely illegible! What good is it if I can't read it‽ Well I have two answers to that question:

First, my writing is primarily for my own consumption and so it matters little to me if others can read it, I certainly can. But secondly, one thing I've found fascinating is that by learning to read and write cursive as I have, even with a modern or personal style, I have a lot less trouble reading other people's handwriting than I did before!

I personally love this YouTube channel: Objectivity, where they trawl through the Archives of the Royal Society and read old writing, and a common joke in the videos is that only Keith, the Head Librarian can read any of the letters they pull out. However that's not because he's some expert in handwriting, it's because he's used to doing so! I find myself no longer struggling as much to read the same kinds of letters now that I perform the daily practice of deciphering my own handwriting!

So in short, things go well with this little quest of mine. It's been a long road to get here, and tons of ink has been spilt to make it so, but I still recommend it, for no other reason than it feels good to have done.

I love reading and watching non-fiction because it never answers a question without raising many more. The process of learning and discovery is a never ending quest to slay the hydra. Every severed head—every answered question—only brings with it more heads to slay. This all brings me to an insight that occurred to me the other day after rewatching a Veritasium video on the discovery of the Principle of Least Action—for like the fifteenth time.

Perhaps narrative structures, stories, also obey this same principle.

Action, Briefly Explained

For those who don't know about the Principle of Least Action, you should watch the video—it's great. But in short, Action is a concept in physics. Specifically, it's the combination of mass, distance, and velocity, the minimization of which seems to underpin the motion of all objects in the universe. Action alone seems to determine the trajectory of objects in space, that is the path they take as they move.¹ In our modern theories of physics Action is fundamental, and Nature seems to do her best to minimize the expense of it.

A visualization of all possible paths a particle might take as it moves. Photo credit: Veritasium

Of all the possible paths that an object could take as it moves, it seems that objects in free-fall motion always move along the specific trajectory which minimizes the Action.

Narration viewed as Action

In writing there is a principle called Chekhov's gun, which states simply that:

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

The point is to rid your story of extraneous elements. Detail must serve a narrative purpose; it must be justified. In a way, this is similar to the Principle of Parsimony (a.k.a. Occam's Razor) which is commonly paraphrased as, "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred." As a writer, your job is to craft a world and a narrative that fits disparate information together into a seamless whole. The better story is the one which requires fewer assumptions by the reader and omits extraneous information. This might be otherwise phrased as crafting a "tight" story. A tight story with a good ending is one that minimizes the information required for a reader to find the narrative and its completion engaging, one that ties up loose ends, and one that gives the reader the feeling of satisfaction and closure.

Grand Unification?

Stories exist in an abstract space with many more dimensions than our familiar 3-D space would allow me to depict. However the story is still singular, it follows a well-defined path traced by its words through this space and my argument is that the "ideal path", the one which the author ought to prefer when writing, is the one which minimizes the Action in that space.

To be clear, I do not have a rigorous formulation for this idea, it's an idle musing after all, but upon reflection it seems to comport with my intuition about good writing. Perhaps a thought experiment will help.

A (Totally Rigorous) Proof

Consider two points on the Plane with the X & Y dimensions quantifying some range of values for narrative structure: say the amount of world-building in a scene vs the progression of the story over all. Moving "up" on this chart means adding more backstory, while moving "right" is progressing the story.

A point in the story begins at point A (at page α) and moves to point B (at page β). Photo credit: Veritasium

Now, the story will likely have many, many more dimensions than this, but stay with me.

The story itself then is a curve which connects the two points at a given page count. This curve, or the path of the story as it moves through pages, can take many forms. However the one it should take under the principle above is the one which minimizes the Narrative Action (which we have not, and will not, formally define).²

Now consider altering this curve by adding additional detail about the world. This detail is by definition unnecessary to the story because the minimal path exists from point A to point B as defined above. Therefore that detail would only increase the total Narrative Action and should be removed.³

In this way, the writer should emulate Nature in her effort to minimize all information in their story which is not required to attain the desired effect. Obviously the hard part is actually intuiting the true path that does this, but I'm not here to tell you how to be a good writer, that's too hard. Still, these ideas do seem connected, or perhaps that's just me.