THE ROAD TO SUBSTACK

I've copied most of my online work to Substack. The Substack platform may have plenty of faults and foibles, but like-it-or-not, over the last two years it's exploded as the online place for political comment. It's taking the place once occupied by Twitter, which - renamed as X - has become a horror-show mouthpiece for Elon Musk. In fact Musk is the main reason for Substack's own explosive growth, thanks to a mass-migration of US academics and commentators displaced by his 2025 DOGE shenanigans. An attraction for such digital refugees is that Substack provides the means to get paid for podcasts and essays, though I'll not be charging for my own stuff. I've also established a presence on BlueSky, which was explicitly founded as a progressive replacement for Twitter - however it lacks the big guns and tends toward being inundated by cats and anime.

    GO TO MY SUBSTACK NOW     

    GO  TO  MY  BLUESKY NOW   

WEB SITE MAKEOVER

For several decades I deliberately left my website looking very boring, out of some misguided notion of seriousness. Then today I thought sod it, I'm going to make it a bit silly, in the vain hope of attracting more clicks...And here it is 

NTROPIC MUSINGS

One of my more obscure hobbies is messing around with mathematics via Python programming, and I’ve recently completed a strange project connected to the Champernowne Constant Cn. It started with simply writing a Python prog to generate arbitrary chunks of C₃₆ – that constant in base-36 number system, which enables a simple encoding of English text since all the alphabet letters become valid digits. Having written this I calibrated its execution time in Pydroid 3 on my Intel 12th-gen Core i3 CPU, and learned that my own name ‘dick_pountain’ would take around 20,000 years to arrive if all printed to the screen, while Hamlet’s Soliloquy would take 2 million years. (Obviously I didn’t find these ridiculous times by actual execution, but rather calculated their positions in C₁₀ using the formula P(n)=1+k=1∑d−1​9k⋅10k−1+d(n−10d−1) and then extrapolated from shorter test samples.) 

This set me to thinking that the position of a text fragment in C₃₆, or C₁₀ for that matter, says something about the uniqueness of that fragment. Now another, earlier, project of mine was a program to ‘cheat’ at Wordle (to which I’m addicted) by ranking the uniqueness of 5-letter words using the frequency distribution of alphabet letters in English. Having those frequency tables from that project at hand. I decided to combine the two projects: for any text T, find its position in C₁₀ (using a simpler ASCII encoding for convenience), then calculate the sum of the uniquenesses of all the separate words it contains and take the ratio of those two numbers. Since they can get very large indeed a lot of ‘log10ing’ is required even in Python with its huge floats. The ratio, which I’ve dubbed the text’s ‘ntropy’, might or might not mean something, but I’m damned if I can figure out what…