The Curious Engineer

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Locklin on science

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

In which I explain things interesting, remarkable or silly.

ScienceAI / MLHistoryEssays / personal

’10’15’20’25
Posts
287 from 13 Mar 2009 to 15 Oct 2026
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monthly (22 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 16

  1. LLMs are not AGI (though some have internal monologue)
  2. Developing immunity to propaganda
  3. Q3 books 2026
  4. The tools of Dan Gelbart
  5. Warfighting ability
  6. Statistical picture of Quantum Mechanics
  7. Progress: real and Potemkin
  8. Q1/2 2026 books
  9. Bouncing droplet “quantum mechanics”
  10. FAUB robot program failure
  11. Beyond Quantum with Khrennikov
  12. Very small engines
  13. Post money Silicon Valley Lotharios
  14. Coding assistant experience
  15. Conditional probability: an educational defect in Physics didactics
  16. Optimizing for old battles

2025 23

  1. Winter Q4 2025 books
  2. Don’t go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales
  3. The first AI bubble
  4. Wacky fun physics ideas
  5. Things that should be considered essential vitamins but aren’t
  6. Stochastic computing
  7. Pre-Dreadnaughts: an aesthetic appreciation
  8. Further examples of group madness in technology
  9. Best quantum computing paper of 2025
  10. Summer Q3 2025 books
  11. A-5 Vigilante
  12. Biological anomalies 2
  13. Exercise science is not science
  14. Variable beta decay
  15. Q2 Books 2025
  16. Reversible computards: classical and quantum
  17. More grad school stories
  18. Entropic gravity
  19. Q1 2025 winter books
  20. Examples of group madness in technology
  21. Some interesting open problems in technology
  22. Winter 2024 books
  23. HG Wells was awful in every way

2024 30

  1. Towards a new kind of science and technology
  2. Fall 2024 books
  3. Lush: my favorite small programming language
  4. Outsourcing your thoughts
  5. False pregnancy, canine and otherwise
  6. Late summer/early fall 2024 books
  7. Amateur astronomy update pt 3: newb shopping lists
  8. Marketing 101
  9. Crazy but likely health ideas
  10. Really dumb “health” headlines
  11. Amateur astronomy update pt 2: insights and notes
  12. Amateur astronomy update pt 1: new hardware
  13. Summer 2024 books
  14. Prediction markets are vile midwittery
  15. I’m a scientist, I don’t believe in anything
  16. Spring books 2024
  17. Planning of invention 3: Westinghouse Gas Turbines
  18. Grad school adventures
  19. Dune 2: Life of Brian with Space Mexicans
  20. The problem with tech journalism
  21. Saving the world and “passion” is bullshit
  22. Against the nerds
  23. Post-quantum gravity
  24. More suspect machine learning techniques
  25. Pre-spring 2024 books
  26. The Birthday paradox as first lecture
  27. Yet another bookpoast early 2024 edition
  28. SBIR funny papers part 1
  29. Patrician entertainment: 70s British-TV
  30. Unix ETL tools are better than you

2023 36

  1. Further books for December
  2. Various marketing hysterias in machine learning
  3. Obscure luxuries
  4. Calling a bureaucrat by its name
  5. Computers reduce efficiency: Case Studies of the Solow Paradox
  6. Raumpatrouille Orion: Teutonic Star Trek
  7. Current year US military is hilarious
  8. Some more books, mostly optics
  9. How to win big in the supplement industry: also a Fisking of Huberman
  10. Zwicky’s morphology of innovation
  11. Paleontology and fungi
  12. Godzilla
  13. September books are best books
  14. Georges Lemaître, Father of Big Bang theory
  15. An aphorism for each of the greatest aphorists
  16. Historical censorship attempts and shifting elites
  17. Standards: a ratchet of progress
  18. Death of the physical library
  19. Yet further books July 2023
  20. Famous encounters
  21. Renaissance Books
  22. “Human Accomplishment” by Charles Murray
  23. Chesterton’s fence applied to the engineering of physical objects
  24. DjVu and its connection to Deep Learning
  25. Further books (May 2023 )
  26. Foxhound
  27. Management consultants as Soviet apparatchiks
  28. Silly Con Valley Camp Followers and other Weirdos
  29. Sonoluminescence
  30. How to be a technology charlatan
  31. Yet more books (March 2023)
  32. Quantum computing shorts
  33. More book notes (Feb 2023)
  34. Anomalies in the calculations of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron
  35. Technological and Scientific blind spots
  36. Ancient Apocalypse reviewed

2022 19

  1. Medical history books
  2. The Caio Duilio class: torpedo boat carrier and battleship
  3. Yet more book works and days (Nov 2022)
  4. Michael Lewis: I wonder what FTX shenanigans he was up to
  5. rando Q vs J thoughts
  6. Classic books on the NPC
  7. Aggregating experts: another great ML idea you never heard of
  8. More books on how the world turns (Sept 2022)
  9. The dropout
  10. Poking holes in Bell’s inequality: E.T. Jaynes possibly clearing up some mysteries
  11. Littoral combat ships are moronic
  12. Things the US establishment got wrong about wuhan-coof part 2
  13. Astronomical anomalies 2
  14. Ruling engines and lapping the ultimate screw
  15. From ancient Gears and Screws to Quantum Mechanics
  16. George Kennan, a quick review
  17. Managerial failings: complification
  18. My pal Niccolo interviews …. me
  19. BAP books on love and war reviewed

2021 33

  1. Biological anomalies
  2. A review of “The Man Who Solved the Market” (and “the Captain”)
  3. US public health problems which are more serious than Corona-chan
  4. America Against America: the Chinese de Tocqueville
  5. Dune: Villeneuve makes a Villeneuve movie
  6. Fun with complexity theory
  7. Michael Pollan is a public menace
  8. Books which inspired Robert E Howard
  9. He was too good for this earth
  10. Observations of n00b amateur astronomer
  11. Things the establishment got wrong about wuhan-coof
  12. Edison was better than Tesla in every way
  13. Malice, stupidity and brain melting microwave ray guns
  14. Why everyone should learn the slide rule
  15. Open problems in Astronomy
  16. Muh government flying saucers
  17. Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math
  18. Great physicists: Pyotr Kapitza
  19. Office chairs are a scam
  20. The Physicists: a history of a scientific community in modern America
  21. Obvious and possible software innovations nobody does
  22. Planning of invention 2: lessons from Sidewinder and China Lake
  23. Technology winter continues
  24. Humble tokamak physicist owns generations of cosmological wankers
  25. Outer limits predicted ipotato twitter mobs in 1963
  26. Russian empire aerospace refugees
  27. Texas energy markets: several bad ideas
  28. Planning of invention part 1: Burton Klein and Dynamic Economics
  29. RNA memory hypothesis
  30. The Fremen are Chechens: “Sabres of Paradise” as inspiration for Dune
  31. Psychedelics are a waste of life
  32. Why quantum mechanics (and electrical engineering) uses complex numbers
  33. Woo for its own sake

2020 12

  1. Just as good alternatives to big-five theories of personality
  2. “Bit Player:” desecrating the memory of Claude Shannon
  3. Secrets of a successful shut in
  4. Data is not the new oil: a call for a Butlerian Jihad against technocrat data ding dongs
  5. On Leaving the Bay Area
  6. William R. Corliss and open problems in science
  7. Open problems in Robotics
  8. On cultures that build
  9. Automotive memories
  10. Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
  11. Shitty future: Bugman design versus eternal design
  12. Ten predictions for 2030

2019 6

  1. The Fifth Generation Computing project
  2. Golden age experimental physics memories
  3. Ave Atque Vale: Marty Halpern
  4. Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism
  5. AI is not eliminating jobs
  6. Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit

2018 3

  1. Machine learning & data science: what to worry about in the near future
  2. I don’t want to work on your shitty blockchain project: especially you, Facebook
  3. Dynamite Cruiser Vesuvius

2017 5

  1. Decoupling from fakebook
  2. “AI” and the human informational centipede
  3. Technologies which did not live up to the hype
  4. Please stop writing new serialization protocols
  5. How to shoot down a stealth fighter

2016 11

  1. Predicting with confidence: the best machine learning idea you never heard of
  2. The Leduc ramjet
  3. My favorite photo of this wacky election
  4. The Future ain’t what it used to be
  5. Atlas data structure: columnar NoSQL for Kerf
  6. Numeric linear algebra code: an appreciation
  7. On beating roulette: part 3
  8. String Interning Done Right
  9. Tatra 603: wacky commie hot rod
  10. An introduction to Kerf combinators
  11. Timestamps done right

2015 3

  1. Putin’s nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto
  2. An introduction to Kerf
  3. Advice to a young social scientist

2014 8

  1. Notation as a tool for thought: Wavelets in J
  2. Optalysys and Optical computing
  3. Neglected machine learning ideas
  4. Can the Su-25 intercept and shoot down a 777?
  5. Quantifiably unsane: Vessyl
  6. Michael Lewis: shilling for the buyside
  7. Bad models and the end of the world
  8. Anatomy of a Fusion press release

2013 14

  1. The most beautiful rocket
  2. Shannon information, compression and psychic powers
  3. Soviet interceptors: the power and the glory
  4. Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages
  5. On the Empire of the Ants
  6. Mormon nuclear fusion
  7. NSA scandal notes
  8. BTC bubbles
  9. The largest computer ever built
  10. Search engines for grownups
  11. The enigma of the Ford paradox
  12. Kickstarter: muppets threaten lawsuits!
  13. Kickstarter: muppet graveyard part 2
  14. Kickstarter: muppet graveyard

2012 12

  1. Nano on the pink sheets: anatomy of a pump and dump
  2. A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity
  3. Not all programmers are alike: a language rant
  4. Bad engineering journalism: reporting on “3-d printing of guns”
  5. The Mars Science Laboratory is a Rube Goldberg contraption
  6. 30 open questions in physics and astronomy
  7. Energy storage and green technologies
  8. HFT using neutrino physics: Stats Jackassery
  9. Why I don’t like TED talks (or TEDx or whaddeva)
  10. The B-58 Hustler
  11. Gene testing; neat things and some stats jackassery
  12. On the F-35 debacle

2011 25

  1. Yet another stab at explaining the debt crisis
  2. Only fast languages are interesting
  3. On genocidal environmentalist space aliens
  4. Great thinkers: Eudoxus of Cnidos
  5. Academia versus industry
  6. Why Michael Lewis Annoys the Bejeepers out of Me
  7. The age of steam
  8. What is a bubble? (econophysics, part 2)
  9. In which I have a laugh at economists: whistling at the abyss
  10. Good riddance to the Space Shuttle
  11. In which I weigh in on the Dawkins Elevatordämmerung
  12. Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
  13. On beating roulette: part 2
  14. On beating roulette: part 1
  15. Conservation laws in the Ising universe: Econophysics breakthroughs
  16. Anglo American heavy bombers of WW-2
  17. A quick middle finger at “the cloud”
  18. the early supersonic age: the F105
  19. The Airship: an aesthetic appreciation
  20. What Would Captain Kirk do?
  21. Does anyone at The Atlantic understand statistics?
  22. British engineering
  23. The arguments against HFT
  24. Google as fat Elvis
  25. How hackers ruin everything with computers

2010 14

  1. Quant ideas to save the financial system
  2. Investments for dummies
  3. Spotting vaporware: three follies of would-be technologists
  4. What is wrong with this picture?
  5. Nano-nonsense: 25 years of charlatanry
  6. Robert L. Chapman: Mighty Market Mencken
  7. The compass rose pattern: microstructure on daily time scales
  8. The Atlantic: tool of the oligarchy
  9. The economist; staffed by statistical buffoons?
  10. You’re smarter than you think
  11. Da plunge
  12. To learn about the future, study the past
  13. Music, molecules and misanthropy (econophysics part 1)
  14. U.S. energy independence: hard numbers

2009 17

  1. A peregrination on the nature of money
  2. The problem with Lee Smolin and physics
  3. In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”
  4. applications of financial ideas to everyday life
  5. Myths of technological progress
  6. a bestiary of algorithmic trading strategies
  7. Icons of engineering quality: part 1
  8. The three stooges of the high frequency apocalypse
  9. Is physics the same everywhere, at all times?
  10. Nassim Taleb: clown of quantitative finance
  11. Patented trading systems: cleaning the Augean stables
  12. Wolfram Alpha, Semantic Web, and back to the pre AI winter future
  13. Choose your weapon: Matlab, R or something else?
  14. The bias ratio: lousy at fraud detection
  15. I hate cold fusion reporting
  16. The problem with financial journalism: journalists
  17. Bernie versus Benford