Occam’s Shaving Cream

And other joy-sparking nuggets

I have accumulated a bunch of false-start drafts over the last few weeks that all feel slightly joyless to me, and require injection of a dose of fun to be publishable by my standards. My standards have nothing to do with insight, quality, seriousness, six-sigma typo elimination, or exhibition of skill. My main “standard” as such is that if I didn’t have fun writing it, you won’t have fun reading it. So I don’t hit publish until I feel I’ve had some fun.

So instead, I thought I’d share some snippets from recent thinkings and elsewhere-postings that did feel like fun. Nuggets that sparked joy, to use Marie Kondo’s term.

Here’s one that had me chuckling:

Occam’s Shaving Cream (alternately: Profligacy Principle):

Entities must be multiplied needlessly.

I came up with this as an idle follow-on thought to what is by far the best joke of my joke-making career: Occam’s razor, now with six blades and a soothing aloe strip.

I tweeted that several years ago, and lots of people liked it, including William Gibson. Occam’s shaving cream first occurred to me as a funny related phrase, but then it occurred to me that it’s actually a good term for all the transient scaffolding of theorizing that gets washed away when you’re done.

The idle thought turned seriously useful recently. Under the higher-gravitas name of profligacy principle (by analogy to parsimony principle, another name for Occam’s razor) it turned into a load-bearing concept for a thing I just wrote for another project. It won’t be published for a while though.

Jurassic World Rebirth review

I watched my first movie in a theater in more than a year. Jurassic World Rebirth. It’s one of my favorite extended universes so I had high hopes. They were partly dashed.

Not entirely joyless, but mostly so. Glad to see the mossasaur finally get more than a cameo. Didn’t like the stupid baby yoda dinosaur. That felt more than a little cynical.

Raptors and T. Rex bits felt like minimum viable guest appearances. And the final boss this time, the Distortus Rex mutant, I thought looked a little too lamely like the alien from Alien. And whaddya know, that WAS apparently the inspiration. It’s lamer than Indominus Rex from Jurassic World. And Jurassic World: Dominion at least had an unexpected final boss (the locusts).

Highlight was interesting use of mist, reflections, and underwater shots. The best dinosaur special effects are done in the first 20 minutes (mossasaur+spinosaurs vs boats).

The human plot was an unexpectedly threadbare and lame affair, strung through warmed-over familiar set pieces and trademarked franchise beats like distracting the dinosaur by waving a flare, adult-kid relationship repair, switch to open a gate on the wrong side. The only new (and unused in the plot) world-building elements seem to be winding down the world, but do plant seeds for better plots.

The trailer suggested a much better story than the movie delivers. I thought having better actors (ScarJo+Mahershala Ali) and a grittier premise (mercenaries as main protagonists) would give us a noir installment, but nope. Same old.

Dominion had a way better plot.

Overall: Watch if you want 5 minutes of spectacle on big screen, otherwise wait for a long flight or streaming.

Stupid Jokes

I’ve been practicing making stupid jokes. Here are a few I posted recently on various socials. Substack Notes is probably the best place to follow me live these days, and where I post the most. If you can find the feature that is. Substack makes it weirdly hard and confusing. I’m also on Bluesky and Farcaster, but don’t post as much there. All three places lack the freewheeling shitposting energy of the old Twitter, but they’ll have to do for now until the world stops ending.

• Easy Indian recipe: To make mutter paneer, sauté some cubed paneer and then mutter at it for 10 minutes.

• If you attack someone for the AI they use rather than the substance of what they say, it’s called an ad botinem.

• “Such a waste of talent. He chose mutual information over actual information; in this discourse a mistake nearly everyone makes. Mutual information is the meme that looks vacuous and cringe after ten years, actual information is the quantum-resistant cryptography that remains unbroken till the end of universe. I cannot respect someone who does not see the difference.” — Frank Underwood

  

• If you don’t know what you’re doing you have your head up your ass. But if you have your ass up your head, you’re doing godly ouroboros regeneration, transcending your old self.

• When you post about how much of a klutz you are it’s called bumblebragging

  If it’s about your disorganization it’s jumblebragging.

• AI doomers: Omigod, it’s achieved sentience and will turn us all into paperclips any minute now!

  waiting…waiting…

  Protocol people: “Next item on agenda, Deathstar Improvement Proposal DIP 3328: Be it resolved that the unsupervised planet-targeting system without Type II overrrides shall be included in the next Deathstar OS hard fork. In addition, be it resolved that Killswitch activation threshold will be raised from 3/7 to 5/7 sigs in the governance contract. Do we have a second for the motion?”

  “I second the motion”

  “All in favor say Aye!”

  “Aye!”

  “The Ayes have it”

• Discovered a trick. You can make designed things sound more impressive by adding the word structure.

  Fee —> Fee structure

  Force —> force structure

  Aesthetic —> aesthetic structure

  Argument —> argument structure

  Design —> design structure

  Story —> story structure

Mediocre Aphorisms

I’m also back at my old game of making up mediocre aphorisms, though it’s not quite back to the level of I was indulging in on Twitter back in the day.

• Better to have side character energy in A plot than main character energy in B plot.

• Anything you suck at can be a form of therapy if you squint.

• If you were doing something before it was cool, you were probably doing it wrong in some way that you’re still in denial about.

• Tragedy is about what you cannot undo. Horror is about what you cannot unsee. Terror is about what you cannot prevent.

• When in doubt, ask: “What would a mediocrity do?”

Helicopter Signal

John Neil made this bat-signal type AI image, to tag me on some thread, based on what has now been my stable online helicopter avatar everywhere for five years. I’m adopting it and officially endorsing it.

If anyone needs to tag me for my opinion in the future on anything, I will require this image to be attached to the tag 😇

An Interview

This interview I did with Uncommons on my protocols work was a lot of fun. Published in 2 parts. Use translation to read. If you read Chinese, I’d be curious to hear your reaction to the original.

Part 1 Part 2

Done over Zoom in English but then translated into a written interview in Chinese, which I then had to translate back using Google Translate to read. A very “the meat is willing, but the vodka is bad” type experience (for those old enough to grok that reference), but much better. The retranslated voice isn’t quite the way I talk or write, but the gist of what I said is correctly captured.

Abundance Definition

The Abundance people (an annoying new Democrat political faction) have been annoying me, so I made up my own reclamation definition: abundance is always having a way to continue the [infinite] game.

It features in the same thing where I used the Occam’s shaving cream idea.