Doug got carte blanche to shitpost directly into the Natural Science column. It's a collection of those columns and essays where he just rabbit holes himself into niche corners of interesting ideas and fleshes them out, while also taking shit to the angry academics who mail him criticism:

The diversity of my columns is worth discussing for a moment. On the surface, they seem to wander all over the intellectual map -from sexism to music to art to nonsense, from game theory to artificial intelligence to molecular biology to the Cube, and more. But there is, I believe, a deep underlying, unity to my columns. I felt that gradually, as I wrote more and of-them, regular readers would start to see the links between disparate ones, so that after a while, the coherence of the web would be quite clear. My image of this was always geometric. I envisioned my intellectual 'home territory' as a rather large region in some conceptual space, a region that most people do not see as a connected unit. Each new column was in a way a new "random dot" in that conceptual space, and as dots began peppering the space more fully over the months, the shape of my territory would begin to emerge more clearly. Eventually, I hoped, there would emerge a clear region associated with the name 'Metamagical Themas'

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