I'm so excited to welcome you to the 2021 edition of The Conflux, my yearly blog post review! This post is for everyone, whether you've a loyal subscriber or just learned about Chromatic Conflux today.
In it, I will link to and reflect on every blog post I've written last year. I think this is the best way for you to go through the archive of this blog.
While I haven't published that many blog posts in 2021, I feel they're the highest-quality posts I've put out so far — maybe being off a weekly schedule gave me the freedom to focus on and filter them a bit more. Maybe I've improved at writing. Or maybe it's just random chance.
My posts are eclectic enough that there are probably some you'll enjoy and maybe some you won't. So click the ones whose blurbs you find interesting, scroll past the ones you don't, and enjoy!
Let's do this!
I often joke that the target audience of Chromatic Conflux is clones of myself, and...well, the future version of myself is a bit like a clone, right? TL;DR: Hi Future Jacob!
Hey Past Jacob. You can't talk to me. I don't know why I'm writing this.
Last year's edition of The Conflux accomplished what it set out to do! I mostly agree with my assessments of each individual blog post. I mean, there are a few things. There always are. But I'm not going to sweat them.
One more thing
I do want to quickly talk about the Year of Attention, which I promised to follow up on around now. It makes a very strong case for a yearly theme. But how did my yearly theme work out?
I definitely made some progress in the area of attention — I think I'm a more attentive person than I was one year ago. Interestingly, the main thing I did was an idea I had after publishing this blog post: on Fridays, I've been avoiding various apps/websites that I've recognized as time sinks. (The list is ever-changing, but Discord, YouTube, and Twitter are the main culprits for me at the moment.) But it hasn't produced any monumental changes. I still fall into internet spirals sometimes like I used to.
I don't think I'm going to do a yearly theme per se for 2022. (By the way: I do think a year is a tad too long; if I were to do a theme, I'd be inclined towards a seasonal theme.) But I do want to work to become (a) a more compassionate person, and (b) a person with beliefs that more closely match reality. So those are sort of my two mini-themes for the coming year.
Okay, one more thing
The Conflux 2020 was the first post that I made a logo/thumbnail/image for. The original reason was that the post had no images, and posts display nicer on Wix when they have images. (Edit: This...isn't true, it does have images? However, the images were thumbnails for previous posts, so I presume I didn't want it to be the same.) So I whipped one up in Google Drawings. But then I realized it was fun, so I kept making them! This post started the trend.
One final thing (I promise it's final this time)
The background of all those images, which used to be the strip art for Chromatic Conflux until I came to my senses and just replaced it with white (it makes text hard to read) is "Herunterlaufender Regenbogen" (Descending Rainbow) by Felix Spiske. I want to have credited that somewhere permanent, because when I removed it as the background I also cut the credit.
Click here to read The Conflux 2020. (I already linked it at the top, but I thought it'd be nice to have links at the top and bottom of every blurb, just for convenience.)
I'll link this post at the very bottom too, which I think is a slightly better time to click it given its nature.
The 2020 Election in Retrospective: Part 1 (February 17) and Part 2 (February 24)
My biggest macro-level recommendation is this: Put less stock in the current news narrative.
I've written a lot of bad politics coverage on my blog in the past, much about the 2020 election. Stuff that was wrong, stuff I disagree with, and stuff I just think was worded badly. This post talks about all those posts, and manages to be, if I may say so, very good. If you were to only read one political post on my site (one political two-parter...), this is a strong candidate, perhaps because it sort of encapsulates my other politics posts I regret.
It has flaws. Its metric of how close the election was (how many votes you'd have to change to flip the result) is a touch disingenous; even fairly comfortable victories, it would show as close. That said, I included a chart listing the margins in the tipping-point state, a more honest statistic that I really should have just talked about. However, it also has the election as very close (though less than 2016), so the actual point I was making is essentially unaffected.
I was also going to criticize the post for not truly answering its central question — why was the election so close? — but then I came across the phrase "As if to answer this question." Not "to answer this question." I knew full well at the time the answer was unsatisfying. I didn't have a satisfying one. I still don't.
It's once again time to talk about something vaguely related to this blog post that I want to talk about but don't want to dedicate a full post to
Since the 2020 election, I've stepped back a bit from consuming political news. At the time of this blog post, I thought it was a temporary thing, but I've been continuing on that trajectory. Not to say I don't consume any political news — of course I stay aware of major events — but I'm not following the play-by-play so much anymore.
I used to put politicians' names and other politics-related entries on purpose into the puzzles I made. Now I go out of my way to avoid them. It's just not fun for me anymore.
While the election being over was a catalyst for this change, the underlying conditions have to be right. This change in my life has multiple reasons — Clare Malone and Perry Bacon, Jr. both left FiveThirtyEight (Clare by firing, Perry by choice), and Nate Silver's constantly off playing poker — but I think the real reason might be that after the Capitol attack and everything else that's overtly undemocratic, political news has felt less like a game and more like a sad reality.
Anyway, you should read this post if you're interested in American politics! Otherwise don't.
Click here to read Part 1 and click here to read Part 2 of The 2020 Election in Retrospective.
Onto lighter things.
"shall be wasted with worms may have eaten, even with a sore and full of worms, and have robbed him, that Moab is laid waste; they are, which is of the will, when he was very angry, and his anger was kindled, and he was full of worms, an it putrefied, and that is spoiled; because it shall be wasted with worms; On the contrary, it is extinguished, By the living Lord of slaves had previously with having laid waste, because it shall be wasted with worms, he shall be wasted with worms, then he shall bear his iniquity; be full of worms, and become foul: and Moses was wroth was too much, and the sun of man who is a worm and not" –Google Translate, in its infinite wisdom
At the time this post was written, if you typed worms into English-to-Latin Google Translate, and repeatedly translated the output back and forth, you would have gotten grapes;, then grapes; for the worms shall eat them, and after many iterations of absurdity the text would become the paragraph you see above the image before stabilizing on because it shall be wasted with worms;. It doesn't do this anymore (sadly).
In addition to showing you the full glorious chain, I also talk a bit about why Google Translate fails in this way. It's pretty entertaining. This is also, I think, my all-time most viewed Chromatic Conflux post! Don't take it from me: democracy proves you should read this blog post. (Or, uh...no, that totally checks out. Definitely.)
Regardless, I think it's a fun post!
Once this comic gave me permission to believe grammar was flexible, like fashion, my walls came tumbling down.
This post is about how I used to be really annoying about correcting other people's grammar, and why I stopped. It makes the case for grammar's lack of importance (though I think the arguments I used could have been a little stronger), but it also talks about how the real reason I changed wasn't the arguments: it was a social reason, xkcd's comparison of the grammar police to the fashion police.
I originally planned to make a two-part series about the #1 purpose of language being communication, but I never wrote the second part (at least, not yet) so I decided just to release this post by itself.
This is probably my most linguistics-y post, so if you like that sort of thing, you'll enjoy this one! But of course it doesn't require any prior knowledge about linguistics.
The first mystery: why do polling averages have the race so close? It's California. ... The second mystery: here's a list of all the Democrats that are running. Why do none of them have literally any political experience? ... Oh, and the third mystery: why is this even happening? ... Newsom didn't commit any obvious crimes, and is still relatively popular.
So I did end up writing another politics post, because the California recall situation was so weird at the time. It was relatively well-written, though the thesis hasn't aged well at all. Whatever the reason the polling average was so close (weird SurveyUSA poll?), keeping Newsom ended up getting (yawn) 62% of the vote, just like the Democratic choice always does in California. Not a great look for the polls. Still, I don't think I was wrong per se to put some credence in the polls, so based on the information I had, I suppose I defend the post. I was suspicious of what the polls at the time predicted.
Even before the recall, I would go on to publish an update to this blog post, which looks better by comparison.
Coverage of the other two mysteries was also fine, though on the second one, I think this Astral Codex Ten post (published a few days after mine) does a bit of a better job.
As far as my posts go, I wouldn't really recommend this one, but it's not a dumpster fire.
This post is about Google Translate, and about the California recall, but separately.
Two things happened: I was informed that grapes; for the worms shall eat them no longer worked, and the California recall polls started looking normal. These happened at around the same time, so I decided to make them one post, despite them being unrelated. In retrospect, should this have been two posts? Probably.
It's still pretty short overall, and each half is worth reading if you read the earlier post. Not much else to say.
If you haven't heard, I created a puzzle book, Best of Puzzles for Progress, and you can buy it at tinyurl.com/best-of-pfp! Profits will be donated to anti-malaria charity Nothing But Nets.
It's true. I made a puzzle book! This book was a huge project of mine that I invested so much effort into, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. I've probably advertised it enough by now, but I think it's the best thing I made in 2021!
The blog post itself is short and sweet (though it includes some "advance praise" nonsense I had to put in to make a joke in the book work). I linked the post a fair bit when giving people information about the book, though I also tend to directly link to the Barnes and Noble link where you can directly buy it, tinyurl.com/best-of-pfp.
Triangland (technically, the Triunited Kingdom) is a place much like our own, but with one major difference: instead of squaring numbers, people triangle numbers.
Triangland is one of my favorite blog posts ever, and it's also one that readers have seemed to like! If you have a good relationship with math, you should read it. I should write more math blog posts.
The full story is that, about a year ago, I became randomly curious about what math would be like if triangular numbers were the default instead of square numbers. And I was able to derive a triangular quadratic formula, which I thought was pretty cool! Then I forgot about it.
Recently, I took a class on how to use Manim, a beautiful math animation software developed and used masterfully by the YouTuber 3Blue1Brown. The class was very project-oriented, and triangular numbers occurred to me as an option. I hadn't committed to doing it, but I chatted with some other people about it, and they seemed very interested. Therefore, I made some Manim pictures about triangular numbers, and they were beautiful enough that I thought it was worth converting this into a blog post for you all.
It was only when I sat down to write the blog post that I really decided to go all-in on the flavor of a fictional place called Triangland. I settled on that name so I could make the Triunited Kingdom pun, which I find hilarious but other people have mostly reacted to with silence. (Despite my non-grammar-correcting ways, I do have this urge now to correct anyone who says "England" or "Britain" to "United Kingdom," even when it makes absolutely no sense.) It also allowed me to make certain notational choices, like using the word "triangling," and using a triangle symbol to represent the operation, that are not conventional at all but provide flavor.
If you think about it too hard, Triangland doesn't really make sense — squares, with their Square Identity and their nice geometrical interpretations and their -1 squared not equaling zero, are clearly a superior choice — but I still think it's fun to imagine. Their quadratic formula is legitimately nicer. And I don't know, maybe their kinematics equations all have triangling in them.
Regardless, I think this was a great post to end the year on.
Thanks for getting all the way to the end!
I'm proud of what Chromatic Conflux has accomplished in 2021. I'm hoping this post doesn't come off as too self-congratulatory: I was more critical for the last two years' editions, and I legitimately believe you all will enjoy reading the year's posts.
If you want to continue going through the Chromatic Conflux archive, here are links to The Conflux 2020, and to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of The Conflux 2019. I hope you enjoy them, and am excited for what 2022 has to bring! Thank you all for your support.
–Jacob
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