Three-Toed Sloth

Acknowledgments

1. Some people have been admiring the new math typesetting; that's MathJax, which I was introduced to by Brendan O'Connor.
2. Some people have been crediting me with coming up with attention conservation notices. I got them from Bruce Sterling's old Viridian mailing list, and so far as I know they originate with Chairman Bruce.
3. Most of all, thanks to Sean Carroll and the crew at Three Quarks Daily for awarding In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You second place in 3QD's annual science-blogging competition. This is a pleasant but entirely unanticipated honor for a long, dense, obscure post about esoteric topics, and so I am happy to display their banner:

   Let me very strongly recommend all the other finalists; there's some great writing there, much of it by blogs I'd never seen.

But (since I can't be fed without biting a hand), I do want to contest Sean's claim that I have such a pathological aversion to visual interest that I "use a slightly gray font on a white background, presumably because black on white would come off as too florid". This is a cat* critiquing an expansion of a Hamiltonian/log-likelihood function:

Sean's argument is invalid.

*: Nimbus "Fog" Moore.

Update, 25 July: fixed some mangled sentences, added a link to Sterling's explanation of "attention conservation notice".

Self-centered