Ben

Around 2017 My friend's new girlfriend worked on what she called “chatbots”. I was surprised, I remember people wasting time in school computer lessons in the early 2000’s by playing with online chatbots that threw out lines from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy more or less at random. Say...

Ice Cream Elo Lets say that normal-quality ice cream is 100 points of enjoyable in some arbitrary units. You, as the consumer of the ice cream, do not have perfect precision. In a single-shot test, you can tell that 100 is better than 80. In a blind test, you will...

I recently posted about doing Celtic Knots on a Hexagonal lattice ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tgi3iBTKk4YfBQxGH/celtic-knots-on-a-hex-lattice ). There were many nice suggestions in the comments. @Shankar Sivarajan suggested that I could look at a Einstien lattice instead, which sounded especially interesting. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_problem . ) The idea of the Einstein tile is that...

I recently messed about with Celtic knot patterns, for which there are some fun generators online, eg. https://dmackinnon1.github.io/celtic/ or https://w-shadow.com/celtic-knots/. Just as addictive to doodle as the 'cool s' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S) but with more cool. However, everyone knows that its cooler to tile a plane with hexagons than squares. So I...

I think that most people underestimate how many scientific mysteries remain, even on questions that sound basic. My favourite candidate for "the most basic thing that is still unknown" is the momentum carried by light, when it is in a medium (for example, a flash of light in glass or...

This summarizes a (possibly trivial) observation that I found interesting. Story An all-powerful god decides to play a game. They stop time, grab a random human, and ask them "What will you see next?". The human answers, then time is switched back on and the god looks at how well...

Some silliness based on recent discussion of quantum suicide and the redaction machine. Bob found himself, quite suddenly, in a chamber walled with hexagonal plates of gleaming copper. Claire welcomed him back to life, and gave him some clothes. "So, where am I?" asked Bob. He thought he remembered Claire...