Edward Edmonds

In Defense of Being 'Too Much': Reframing Pedantry

Abstract

Pedantry's cultural devaluation reflects societal biases against complexity. Its evolution from pedagogical roots (Greek pais/paidos) to modern pejorative usage parallels institutional preferences for simplified knowledge systems. Classical parallels emerge in Seneca's dismissal of periergia ("excessive care") and Quintilian’s critiques—attitudes mirroring today’s equation of precision with pretension. H.W. Fowler’s observation that "My pedantry is your scholarship" demonstrates context-dependent judgments of meticulousness. Modern anti-pedantry employs logical fallacies that devalue expertise while promoting ideological polarization through oversimplification. This analysis contends dismissing pedantry sacrifices intellectual rigor, urging recognition of precision as vital engagement with complexity.

PDF

https://secure.ue.internxt.com/d/sh/file/4631b189-0732-4d9c-a506-c9053a3b9411/3cce5ab05b9078ca4c29b8babc60c3ce6c2b165a0d756ad6c373ca666839a831

Common sense

I love how common sense went on vacation a few years ago and now we go on vacation to see it and enjoy it.

The Book of Disquiet

"I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect."

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Disquiet

Is Human progress an illusion?

The idea of progress rests on the belief that the growth of knowledge and the advance of the species go together—if not now, then in the long run. The biblical myth of the Fall of Man contains the forbidden truth. Knowledge does not make us free. It leaves us as we have always been, prey to every kind of folly. The same truth is found in Greek myth. The punishment of Prometheus, chained to a rock for stealing fire from the gods, was not unjust.

• https://fs.blog/human-progress-illusion/

Learn C by Building Your Own Lisp

• https://buildyourownlisp.com/contents

facil.io, Web application framework written in C

This is dope. I have a small hobby project I was going to do in Go, htmx, and hyperscript, but now I might do it in C.

• https://facil.io/

Vely

Vely is a general-purpose framework for rapid development of high-performance software. It is especially well suited for web applications. It's Free Open Source (under the business-friendly Eclipse Public License 2 (EPL-2)).

Vely is declarative and functional, with single-line statements performing entire tasks. It's simple to design, write and maintain applications.

Decades of adding energy-intensive abstractions on top of programming languages led to increase in complexity and decrease in performance. Vely applications are 100% native, high-performance and low-footprint without interpreters, virtual machines, or byte-code schemes.

• https://vely.dev/index.html

Lagrange Gemini Client

If you want to surf Gemini you'll need a client that understands the Gemini protocol, there are a lot of clients out there and I believe there are plugins to enable the protocol in popular browsers. But I use Lagrange, it's written in C and looks great.

• https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

It also has light themes.

Speaking of nostalgia

Things like this make me smile. There is some good stuff in Geminispace.

• https://geminiprotocol.net/

Kagi search engine

I come from the old Internet. My dad was on BBS before the WWW and as a kid I got to share that experience with him. I also remember when the WWW formed and searching the web using Netscape and having a website up and running with some HTML back before CSS. Even though the web was a lot smaller it was a lot bigger and growing up I was exposed to so many ideas. There is no need to go down the rabbit hole shit show that is Google Search. At the same time, I get it - bills to pay - or something like that.

Kagi is pretty dope. There is a free tier and you can pay for some other nifty features. But their lens feature and search experience so far is pretty nostalgic and I can find things without post fixing my search queries with "reddit" lol

Twitter was valuable because people would share links. You could find interesting stuff once you sifted through the BS. It was sort of a hack for lack of a good search engine. But I shouldn't have to sift though bullshit and ads to find stuff - that would be like going to the library and all the books were wrapped in duck tape and you had to remove the duck tape before you could read it. Slight exaggeration but sometimes it doesn't feel like it.

• https://kagi.com/

Legibility

Legibility is a constraint that obfuscates our senses.

• Mirage
• Phantoms

It creates an interface (involuntary filter) between ourselves and ecology.

Unlike a prism that reveals the complexity of light shining through it - legibility is like tinted glass; only silhouettes and shadows.

(list test)

A Focus on Fixation, Van der Loos

Fixatives can be crosslinking like formalin or coagulating like acetone. Crosslinkers conceal antigens, requiring epitope retrieval. Coagulants preserve antigens. Longer fixation reduces staining but signal amplification can help. Cryostat sections are not a "gold standard" since proteins are lost during post-fixation. Formalin-fixed paraffin sections retain proteins better. Terminology should distinguish staining sections vs intact cells. Test antibodies on intact cells and cell blocks before staining tissues. Fixation impacts epitope availability so optimal protocols must be determined empirically. Cell blocks can provide controls when differential staining is not possible.

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17852085/

Learn math from start to finish

• https://youtu.be/pTnEG_WGd2Q?si=x-ba3VHKl_clZq-C

Excellent list of math books from beginning through undergraduate.