For anyone who hasn’t read it, I just started Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard Feynman. It’s pretty fantastic—not much about rationality—but it’s quite funny. He tells one story of how he made his fraternity brothers at MIT look really dumb. One of them asked if French curves were made in any special way. Feynman told them that French curves are specially made so that the tangent at the lowest point is always horizontal to the ground. Of course, this is obvious for any point that the tangent (derivitive) at the lowest point (minimum) is zero. But the guys didn’t realize that this was definitional and raved as though Feynman had made a brilliant explanation of French curves.
We teach a lot more calculus in high school in America today than they did when Feynman was a student (my impression is that this changed in the 50s and 60s in response to Sputnik). As a result, the humor of Feynman’s response might not have registered with MIT freshmen in the 1930s the way it would with MIT students (or even high school seniors) today.
(my impression is that this changed in the 50s and 60s in response to Sputnik)
While true, it might give the false impression that the amount of calculus taught in secondary in the States has stayed more or less constant since then. There’s been a giant disaster of other economic incentives and disincentives that has driven what one might call “calcification”, among them the widening gulf between public and private schools, the development of advanced placement classes, updating the GI bill, and so on.
I read Principles of Product Development Flow recently and was very impressed. It gave me a mostly new, significantly orthogonal perspective with which to view the processes resulting in shipped code. The book, summarized, is:
Let’s apply queuing theory to software development!
If you learn nothing else, remember to reduce/control/watch/cost your queue sizes before other things you think are bottlenecks
Translate benefits and costs approximately into dollars. Especially the delay costs of a product sitting in a queue. You will likely be surprised.
Also here are dozens of more fine-grained considerations and interventions like how to push costly variance to someplace less costly, keeping superstar developers at lower load so they can firefight at whim, and the fact that variance isn’t always bad like it is on a factory floor.
I’m currently about half way through Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature”, and I’m enjoying it very much, though I’m taking the exact numbers with a grain of salt after seeing some criticism of his scholarship that looks solid enough to me.
I fill my phone with books. (So yeah, I’m paying £20/mo for an MP3 player and book reader that occasionally annoys me with phone calls.) Mostly nonfiction.
I’ve just finished Actually (the last collection of essays and reviews) by Christopher Hitchens. A doorstop, a lot of which is still available on the original magazines’ sites. Patchy—quite a lot was clearly dashed off in half an hour after a boozy night out, and he was brilliant but skated by on brilliance rather too often—but ultimately worth ploughing through. I would recommend the curious start on better Hitchens (god is not Great, Hitch-22, Letters To A Young Contrarian in that order) where he wasn’t phoning it in.
The nice thing about books of reviews is pointers. So right now I’m on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, the 2007 Penguin edition with a lengthy intro by Hitchens. The book is a doorstop-sized travelogue of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, a subject I have little interest in; I’m bothering only because a literature fan like Hitchens raved about it. And so far it’s page-turningly good.
I’ve also just finished the audiobook version of god is not Great, read by the author. A book so clearly written to be read out loud. If you liked the book, I most strongly recommend the audiobook. Even if you dislike audiobooks, as I do.
Non-Fiction
For anyone who hasn’t read it, I just started Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard Feynman. It’s pretty fantastic—not much about rationality—but it’s quite funny. He tells one story of how he made his fraternity brothers at MIT look really dumb. One of them asked if French curves were made in any special way. Feynman told them that French curves are specially made so that the tangent at the lowest point is always horizontal to the ground. Of course, this is obvious for any point that the tangent (derivitive) at the lowest point (minimum) is zero. But the guys didn’t realize that this was definitional and raved as though Feynman had made a brilliant explanation of French curves.
We teach a lot more calculus in high school in America today than they did when Feynman was a student (my impression is that this changed in the 50s and 60s in response to Sputnik). As a result, the humor of Feynman’s response might not have registered with MIT freshmen in the 1930s the way it would with MIT students (or even high school seniors) today.
He clarified in that section that he knew that the people he was speaking to were familiar with and had taken calculus.
While true, it might give the false impression that the amount of calculus taught in secondary in the States has stayed more or less constant since then. There’s been a giant disaster of other economic incentives and disincentives that has driven what one might call “calcification”, among them the widening gulf between public and private schools, the development of advanced placement classes, updating the GI bill, and so on.
Sorry. I’ll get off my bete noire now.
I read Principles of Product Development Flow recently and was very impressed. It gave me a mostly new, significantly orthogonal perspective with which to view the processes resulting in shipped code. The book, summarized, is:
Let’s apply queuing theory to software development!
If you learn nothing else, remember to reduce/control/watch/cost your queue sizes before other things you think are bottlenecks
Translate benefits and costs approximately into dollars. Especially the delay costs of a product sitting in a queue. You will likely be surprised.
Also here are dozens of more fine-grained considerations and interventions like how to push costly variance to someplace less costly, keeping superstar developers at lower load so they can firefight at whim, and the fact that variance isn’t always bad like it is on a factory floor.
I’m currently about half way through Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature”, and I’m enjoying it very much, though I’m taking the exact numbers with a grain of salt after seeing some criticism of his scholarship that looks solid enough to me.
I fill my phone with books. (So yeah, I’m paying £20/mo for an MP3 player and book reader that occasionally annoys me with phone calls.) Mostly nonfiction.
I’ve just finished Actually (the last collection of essays and reviews) by Christopher Hitchens. A doorstop, a lot of which is still available on the original magazines’ sites. Patchy—quite a lot was clearly dashed off in half an hour after a boozy night out, and he was brilliant but skated by on brilliance rather too often—but ultimately worth ploughing through. I would recommend the curious start on better Hitchens (god is not Great, Hitch-22, Letters To A Young Contrarian in that order) where he wasn’t phoning it in.
The nice thing about books of reviews is pointers. So right now I’m on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, the 2007 Penguin edition with a lengthy intro by Hitchens. The book is a doorstop-sized travelogue of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, a subject I have little interest in; I’m bothering only because a literature fan like Hitchens raved about it. And so far it’s page-turningly good.
I’ve also just finished the audiobook version of god is not Great, read by the author. A book so clearly written to be read out loud. If you liked the book, I most strongly recommend the audiobook. Even if you dislike audiobooks, as I do.
.
I’ve been recommending it. I think it would appeal to most LessWrongians.
.
Not that I can think of—that’s why that book was so much fun.
Ha! Never heard of it, but yes, I suspect I would :-)
.