What I’m reading

Chad Taylor on how to write a novel. Trust me, but especially trust him, it’s harder than it looks. As perhaps this shows.

Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour has a doozy on copyright.

The Fundy Post has been blogging a bit about architecture: now he fails to swell with civic pride.

BK Drinkwater has a new job which seems to preclude much blogging, but here he covers the intersection between maths and politics, i.e. the fairness of voting systems. FPP isn’t fair. Well, who knew? Money quote in the Tim Gowers paper he cites:

Now a commonplace in probabilistic combinatorics is that the binomial distribution is highly concentrated about its mean.

Oh, go on, it’s easy enough to follow and you’ll probably like the conclusion.

Andrea Donderi ponders the middle ground between “Fuck you” and “Welcome” here. There is a further discussion here, elaborating the distinction between Ask culture and Guess culture.