Coming up on the first year anniversary of the Lux Umbra Dei newsletter, here is a summary of who we are: subscribers, writer and articles.
First, writers here know that Substack supplies us with dashboards that allow us to see who who our readership is. But lest you take alarm, Substack is highly protective of reader privacy and doesn't disclose much beyond what readers themselves provide when they create profiles (and many don't). Profiles are what anyone can view if they click on the circular fields next to your name. Of course some choose not to disclose any information: hence those mysterious “Someone” likes.
Anyway, using the features provided by Substack, but NOT trolling, here’s the data on our readership.
First, there's not many of us, less than a thousand - no 3,000, 10,000, or 120,000 subscribers (like YLE at one point we read). Which is a good thing since if we even had the first four-digit number we might experience a severe temptation to put up a paywall somewhere and try to get some spending cash for our liposuction fund! But being paid would make me feel an obligation to provide some iota of value in return. That's work and we’re kind of lazy! That said, we don't begrudge ANYONE for charging. Writers deserve to be paid. Period. End of story. Except here where because of our shamefully cheesy and low standards We should probably pay You to read this rag! But we’re a little strapped for cash right now, so sorry!
But enough of the sidetrack. Who are we in the LUD community? Well we have a high proportion of academics and outright PhDs in the readership, maybe higher than 15%, which is a pretty high ratio for a non-specialist newsletter, featuring fun, frivolity, fanciful history, and frothy standup humor. If you're anti-intellectual, you're probably in a minority. Beside academics we have a substantial number of subscribers that are themselves writers. Go figure- we’re uncertain what that implies, if anything. James Herriot once wrote that theYorkshire farmers were often bored hearing of another farmer’s successes, but the minute the topic turned to another farmer's catastrophes, their ears would perk right up! Perhaps that's why we have so many writers here- maybe it’s fun to see another writer, Lux, floundering around, making grammar errors by the score, typos by the gross, using the royal”we” and “me” in the same paragraphs!
Our readership is multinational. We have readers on every continent save one. So maybe our lack of a nationality bias works to distribute the subscribership. Of course climate change, logic puzzles and metaphysical musings, are kind of transnational. Maybe even humor is universal as well- at least pratfall, slapstick body-based stuff. I remember a Korean actor, Ji Sang Ryul, who was and is an absolute master of that dying art. We're all so cynical and arch nowadays! But not here! The humor is often well-hidden or maybe it's just not all that funny to anyone but me. As the saying goes: “I crack me up!”
Who is the Writer? Lux aka Michael.. jack of all trades, master of but one. A generalist. Professor wannabe, mathematician in his dreams, logician manqué, class clown without a class. Defrocked monk, Liked Englebert Humperdinck and Tom Jones. Knows the first words and tune of about 500 golden oldies (“My, my, my Delilah..”) but then has to go da da da da da from there. Wears Towncraft shirts purchased at Goodwill. Puts ketchup on everything.
On the other hand in a very narrow specialty at one time he knew as much as about anyone on the continent about the behavior and modelling capabilities of a certain type of cellular automata. It was a joy! He does accept commissions in CA engineering. Want a gas diffusion model in a perturbed medium? How about a functioning multiplexer circuit? Or maybe a traffic flow optimizing model? Or a growth and collapse model for hunters and prey? Competitive pricing. Just send proposals to Cellforge.org.
Oops, looks like I let my rights to that domain name lapse. So no proposals. I'll start up a Substack if they'll let me embed a Java machine and I'll do all proposals for free!
What does LUD publish? It’s an eclectic assortment of mainstream philosophy, modal logic, lots of analysis on paradoxes- especially the Liar and Sorites, Metaphysics, Smullyan and Boolos style logic puzzles, essays on Time, ethics, epistemic uncertainty, aesthetics, the various future histories from the formation of the solar system to millions of years in the future, wars between Ants and descendents of the Ediacarans, the Futurians, genetic modifications and bioengineering, lots of essays on Artificial Intelligence lots of varying conclusions on same. In fact, I believe some of the more original analysis and forecasts on the topic that I have have heard are found here in LUD. Future histories of sociological speculation using the police procedural as a useful vehicle. Essays like Überschwang. and Unutterable Sadness.. that are well nigh sui generis.
There's even some overtly religious writing… in all a veritable trove of essays on a wide range of topics, 233 and counting and we still have almost two months before it's been a year! I highly recommend roaming the archives- there’s very good stuff in there. Or at least I'd like to think so.
So almost one year and counting..no reason not to keep publishing. As was suggested in one of the essays:
Interestingness is a transcendental property of Being.