Our “luxury” apartment

For the past few weeks, my husband and I have been apartment searching.  That’s right, we’re renters!  Not sure if readers find that surprising.  But when I talk to coworkers, who are of similar economic class, they’re usually shocked to hear that we’re not homeowners.

So why rent, when we’re wealthy enough to afford a house?  One major reason: we hate cars.  We use public transit.  (This is also a shock to coworkers.)

So if you take transit time, and multiply it by our hourly wage, getting anywhere is very expensive.  We can afford it, it’s just time.  But it’s easily worth thousands of dollars per month to live in precisely the right location.  We want a place next to a grocery store, a train stop, and our workplace.  The typical suburban hellscape of single-family residences doesn’t work for us.  When you consider the economics of it, what we want is a good apartment complex.  In other words, we want what they call a “luxury” apartment.

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Link roundup: August 2026

Artificial Life | Emergent Garden (video, 35 min) – A video about simulations that simulate evolution or generate life-like complexity.  He draws a distinction between three kinds of simulations.  In the first kind, entities are given a goal, and they find a solution via genetic algorithm.  In the second kind, entities are given space to wander around freely, and evolve organically.  In the third kind, entities are not explicitly coded, and instead we see life-like patterns emerge from the rules.  I’ve played several games like this (mostly of the second kind), and I kind of want to make such a game, but it’s probably beyond my ability.

The underlying misogyny of grand romantic gestures | The Soak (video, 47 min, via) – I’ve never seen most of the movies discussed, but I’m still familiar.  I think film often depicts grand romantic gestures because they have to convincingly present a romantic entanglement within a very short amount of time.  Perhaps this is not unlike how porn jumps right into the sex, because that’s what the audience is here for.  Narrative justifications aside, I think many people have taken the trope seriously, and it’s damaging to people’s social skills, especially men’s.  Like, public education can’t realistically teach people about respectful dating etiquette, so instead people are left to absorb norms through movies.

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The modal ontological argument

The king of all useless arguments

Arguments for the existence of God are, generally agreed, not very compelling, and irrelevant to any real political arguments associated religion. And the ontological argument is king of the junk heap, as it is especially unconvincing and irrelevant. The ontological argument attempts to prove God’s existence a priori, with all the certainty of a mathematical theorem. Most people would say this is overly ambitious, and doomed from the start.

The ontological argument presents a deep and enduring mystery: who actually says this stuff? Does anyone say this stuff? What’s their deal?

The number of people who advocate the ontological argument is nonzero, but it’s quite rare in practice.  Let’s round down to zero and say nobody actually says this stuff. Theistic readers may proceed unthreatened, knowing that I’m talking about an argument that none of them actually advocate.

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Origami: U4-30 floral ball

U30

U4-30, designed by Kazutaka Naka

I folded this from someone else’s origami book, which was in Japanese.  I don’t know why it’s called U4-30, although I know the “30” comes from the 30 sheets of paper it’s made from.  Perhaps this is the sort of technical name you come up with when you’ve designed lots and lots of variants.  Yes, it was an entire book of roses and floral balls (Origami Rose & Kusudama).  It’s very nice, so I think it deserves an entire book of variants.

It’s a curler unit, meaning the units are attached by twisting them together.  I used three slightly different shades of red, which gives it a subtle texture without creating contrast between the different units.

Does everything have an explanation?

My husband described to me a version of the cosmological argument based on explanations. Everything in the world requires an explanation. Since the chain of explanations can’t go on forever, there must be an ultimate Explanation for it all. And that Explanation wants us to stop being gay. At least, that’s how I assume the rest of the argument goes. I don’t actually care.

We were joking about this, because the argument imagines that there is a cosmic pointer from each object to its explanation. But the very idea of an explanation is really quite squishy. What even is an explanation? It depends on social context.

So I dug up an old abandoned blog draft on the subject of explanations.

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The efficient fencing problem

Back in the day, I used to post math puzzles, similar to how I post origami today. Today I’m revisiting a problem that I never fully solved.

Problem statement: There is a square patch of grass, with sides of unit length. Using the shortest length of fence, block all straight paths that cut across the grass.

I did not create this puzzle, but I am not sure of its original source. The riddle once appeared on the (now defunct) wu : riddles website, under the title “Samwise and Gandalf”. In this version of the puzzle, Lord Sauron has an underground telephone line that cuts a straight line somewhere through a square plot of land. Samwise doesn’t know where it is, so he intends to uncover it by digging up the perimeter. But Gandalf tells him that there is a more efficient solution. What’s the best Sam can do?

The impressive thing about this puzzle is that you can go through many iterations of finding better and better solutions. Afterwards, we’ll consider a hexagonal patch of grass, and other shapes.

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