Last week I wrote an article that looked into internet copyright and outlined some of the opposition arguments in detail. I am hopefully getting a shortened version of that article published in our school newspaper, the Denisonian — no doubt they’ll shorten it even further. While I do intend to, very soon, write Part II on SOPA, I wanted to publish the shortened version that I submitted for those who just want the general persuasive gist without all the lengthy analysis.

A lot of the websites went dark last Wednesday to protest SOPA. But what is SOPA? What is the deal with this legislation? Why is it so bad? What are the arguments for and against, and what are the real facts when you cut through all the intentional and unintentional misrepresentation? As a part of my personal protest effort, I offer a summary of my research to the bottom of things.

Noticing that I was doing something called NaNoWriMo on my blog, Emily Matthews contacted me by email and asked me to post this essay on my site. Not counting this for my word count, I decided to publish her thoughts on National Novel Writer’s Month.

This is a post I originally wrote for the rationality community blog Less Wrong about how you can improve your creativity by trying to guess the solutions to magic triicks. However, despite it’s reference to and grounding in Less Wrong material, I still think it’s worth also posting on my own site.

Two years ago, I made a fairly good prediction of when Wikipedia would reach it’s three millionth article, only being off by three days. Today, I return with my previous linear model and see how well it fits Wikipedia growth statistics now, offer some additional models, and predict when Wikipedia will reach the upcoming four millionth article.

You may have encountered it on the internet or thought about it yourself, but since Mew and Ditto are both the only Pokémon that can transform, is there any evidence to suggest that they are in fact the same Pokémon? Couldn’t they just transform into each other enough to be indistinguishable? In this post, I look at all the evidence presented to suggest that Mew and Ditto are the same Pokémon and come to a conclusion on the matter.

After writing some serious posts, I want to kick back and write something light-hearted. In this post, I follow a common internet meme and mash the results of random internet sites together to make surprisingly good looking album covers.

Wikipedia recently put out their three millionth article! Today, I analyze how close I was with my previous prediction and offer a new theory on the progress and shape of Wikipedia’s growth, and when we can expect the big four millionth article.

The following is three parts: A conjectured explanation on how Google Images works, an investigation into the previous, and an experiment to see if I’m right. Today I attempt to see if I can trick Google Images and beat them at their own game with a wondrous use of trucks and abuse of search terms. Check it out, trucker.

It seems like Wolfram|Alpha was listening to one of my previous blog posts. I listed quite a few funny things Wolfram|Alpha couldn’t answer, and now it can answer most of them… and more! Check this post out to see how much Wolfram|Alpha has evolved!