After a hiatus brought on by tragedy, I'm planning to return to livestreaming tomorrow (Friday) ... and will start with a personal update and AMA. What would people like to ask about?
Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie. I used to have this habit where I learned various programming languages. To challenge my perspective, I chose languages from families and paradigms that were fundamentally different from what I already knew. Occasionally, I stumbled upon greatness. Thinking Forth presents programming as a creative process, and it delivers those lessons in an entertaining and pedagogical way. The book is particularly strong on software analysis and design, but it's the execution and technical writing that brought the book to my top five. This is the book for anyone writing about software — Leo's way is the way to do it.
This book is a beautiful introduction to simulations of natural systems. We get concise prose, clear illustrations, and carefully chosen systems with a guided tour through the math. All done in the Processing language, which is fun and easy to pick up. The reason I like this book so much is probably due to timing. In 2013, I was on the verge of abandoning software development. I was fed up. (That's a story for another time.) Instead, I planned to go into cognitive psychology full-time as a researcher. This book brought back the joy in programming for me. Sometimes, a good book is the book that motivated you.
Tony Fadell brought us the iPod and then went on to start Nest. But there were plenty of failures along the way. One of the best books by a product-minded entrepreneur I’ve ever read.
I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world. Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, that means I’m right and you’re wrong if you don’t.
I think there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years, which weren’t, such as if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum. And if you don’t have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course, is exactly what happens in Iraq.
Far from being the laboratory that brought coal into the home, then, London was actually a laggard — all the more so given it had been buying coal from Newcastle for centuries.
New land can be brought under cultivation (or cultivated more intensively) of course, but marginal gains decrease rapidly (because the best land is cultivated first and because adding more labor to already cultivated land, while it can increase harvests, is less efficient than cultivating new land) and there is a fairly hard ceiling on total production of this sort that was, for the most part, fairly low.
So there are sharp limits to how much extra range an army can get by adding carrying capacity; in practice about a month and a half’s logistics buffer is the maximum that’s possible and even doing that is expensive.
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sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.