Once again, I’ve been remiss in posting entries, so here’s a smattering of stuff that I’ve recently found to be of interest around the web:

• After a long hiatus, Less Wrong (Eliezer Yudkowsky) finally updated the ongoing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfiction work with a few new chapters. I actually didn’t care that much for the Hermione-centered SPHEW arc that immediately preceded this latest update, but the newest arc is totally mindblowing. Chapters 80 and 81 together constitute probably the greatest crowning moment of awesome in a courtroom in anything I’ve read. My only worry is that this ratchets the epic up so high it’s hard to see how this version of Harry Potter can have any kind of normal Hogwarts life after this.
• In the same vein, I’ve started reading the Sequences on the Less Wrong site. It’s a series of essays on rationality with the explicit aim of teaching you how to refine your way of thinking. It involves plenty of logic and math and absolutely no crackpot fuzzy thinking.
• The in-thing du jour is the Hunger Games series. I haven’t read the books and have no real interest in watching the movie but this did remind of the much earlier Battle Royale story which I’ve always wanted to check out. So I started reading the manga. Not quite as good as I imagined, but much more brutal than I expected.
• I’m always a sucker for entertaining anecdotes about creative and/or smart people and this page on the Math Overflow website turned out to be a treasure trove of them. Here’s one of my favorites:

One of the most common and popular Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) stories is of a student coming to Wiener after class and saying, “I really don’t understand this problem that you discussed in class. Can you explain to me how to do it?” Wiener thought a moment, and wrote the answer (and only that) on the board. “Yes,” said the student, “but I would really like to master the technique. Can you tell me the details?” Wiener bowed his head in thought, and again he wrote the answer on the board. In some torment, the student said, “But Professor Wiener, can’t you show me how the problem is done?” To which Wiener is reputed to have replied, “But I’ve already shown you how to do the problem in two ways!”

Dick Swenson, who was at MIT in those days, tells this variant of the story: Wiener showed the kid the answer twice, as just indicated. Then the student said, “Oh, you mean…,” and he wrote the answer (and only the answer) on the board. Wiener then said, “Ah, very nice. I hadn’t thought of that approach.”