I read the Portuguese translation of King Solomon's Mines as a kid I loved it. It turns out it was translated -- very freely -- by arguably the best Portuguese novelist of the 19th century, Eça de Queirós.

Really looking forward to your new book, but weirdly my local bookstore won't let me preorder until Dec 29.

Have you thought of putting together a book of these biographic/scientific essays? I love your clear discussions of concepts with graphical help like the one of the Poincaré half-plane below.

Not an area that I have any expertise in. A challenge with LLMs is that they lack clear boundaries between levels of control (no user mode vs kernel mode). As Selling Harris famously said "Natural language is its own metalanguage." For better and worse.

Reminded me of my closest encounter with volcanic action, Volcán Villarica crater rim August 22, 2006

Had stopped posting on X last few years, restarting here, occasionally

Bravo! Como Português que nasceu e cresceu debaixo de Salazar, e agora US citizen, o absolutismo pelo 1st Amendment é uma atitude muito ingénua relativamente aos golpistas. Elogio a resposta rápida e decisiva do Brasil contra os seus golpistas!

No, elite oversupply rejects desperately looking for an angle and clicks in a precarious business, taught to center on form than on substance since middle school.

I don't mind light in a general audience book, but I lose confidence in the work when it goes past light to wrong in areas I know.

Good narrative, but sometimes garbled discussion of his scientific work (at least in the areas I'm familiar with: mathematical logic and early computing) weakened my trust in the work.

Anachronistic tube images: ENIAC tubes like 6SN7 were octal, not noval.