Personal media summary, July 2015
I finished reading listening to Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order" (very interesting stuff), and moved on to his sequel, "Political Order and Political Decay" (corresp…
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all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions. They’re entertaining and informative and amusing and above all absorbing, because that’s what the modern web has driven such sites to beIn many wa…
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Many don’t even realize that they’re using the Internet’s infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook video. It’s just an app. https://medium.com/m…
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The NYT seems to be the perfect machine for exposing the uttermost eyerollingist of douchebags. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9991744…
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/content/files/refs/sussman---robust-design-through-diversity.pdf…
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“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” — Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM is alleged to have said around 1943. In a twisted way, this may become somewhat true again. In the future t…
Poetic Engineering
I stumbled upon this by an extremely oblique reference: an essay by Edgar Allan Poe, on "The Philosophy of Composition". Now if you were laboring under the impression that poetry is composed…
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No matter how we try to guide the students’ introduction to language features, the Almighty Search Engine sits ever at the ready, delivering size and complexity when they really need simple answersMay…
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Linux, he says, aims to be a 1970s mainframe, with 100 users connected at once. http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos…
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APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. Edsger W. Dijkstra, “How do w…
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This obsession with mathematics is an easy way of acquiring the appearance of scientificity without having to answer the far more complex questions posed by the world we live in. http://axisofeval.bl…
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Ironically, one of the better-known examples of a proof that isn’t constructive is Brouwer’s proof of his own fixed point theorem, which states that every continuous function on the unit disk has a fi…