Dasher

February 2026 Reading

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fiction

William Frederik Hermans, An Untouched House (1950)
Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace (1963)
Seicho Matsumoto, Tokyo Express (1958)
Soraya Antonius, The Lord (1986)
Tarjei Vesaas, The Birds (1957)

Non-Fiction

Jonathan C. Slaght, Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China (2025)

January 2026 Reading

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fiction

Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People (1966)
Ailing Zhang, Time Tunnel (2024)
Wladylsaw Reymont, The Peasants (1909)
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980)
Jona Oberski, Kinderjaren (1978)

Non-Fiction

Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, Algorithms To Live By (2016)
Julian Togelius, Artificial General Intelligence (2024)

On The Dyanmics of Attention

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Central Question

In the age of short-form media proliferation, how long do cultural events stay in our collective memory? Do these events follow specific mathematical decay regimes?

Short Answer

The rememberance of a cultural event depends entirely on the event (although we could group it into certain sorts of events). While most events follow a decay law, the exact nature remains highly variable and dependent on both inherent and exogenous variables.

Predicting Maximum Earthquake Magnitudes

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Central Question

Could you possibly build a compuationally light earthquake predicting algorithm?

Short answer

No. Earthquake prediction, especially time predictions is pretty much impossible. However, using aftershock mechanics and regional seismic activity, one could build an algorithm that predicts the maximum magnitude an earthquake could have.

Find out more in my paper below:

Further Work/Challenges

Need more information how the magnitude of completeness changes simulations, the effects using a Weibull distribution vs. a Poisson distribution, and how important are uncertainties in inferred variables.