devmacrile

Yeah the process always struck me as just as much a barrier to exit as a barrier to entry (maybe even more so).

And the obligatory Alan Perlis epigrams (usually one makes it on a list like this!): http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html.

Awesome!

Mainly just improvise on the guitar (and primarily warm acoustic vibes during this pandemic):

* https://soundcloud.com/devin-riley-763462550/sunday-brunch

* https://soundcloud.com/devin-riley-763462550/frassled

Great thread, thanks for sharing all.

bute

Nice! Really like "When You\'re In Town".

If we are talking blitz though there is an argument to be made for the trickiness of the knight's geometry. Forks abound and no time to calculate.

John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (Aspray) is a great historical account and details many of his other contributions (e.g. game theory, automata, but especially meteorology).

+1 on Mathematics, Form and Function

Would recommend reading everything in Collected Fictions.

That is basically the mission statement of Software Carpentry (https://software-carpentry.org/). They have a _ton_ of great material for those in scientific computing wanting to improve their software engineering skills.

Possibly because the U.S. provides the "best high school education in the world.. It's just a shame you have to go to college to get it."

-- Alan Kay, some anecdote I forget how to locate

Yeah - this is a very good point. At a certain point, the scale of economic activity has to bump up against the finite scale of ecological dynamics upon which it is dependent. As long as negative externalities are treated as such - something "external" - markets cannot be expected to efficiently allocate resources w.r.t. human welfare.

The idea of and faith in economic adaptation as described in the parent (price/demand dynamics) is greatly dependent on the assumption of underlying ecological stability (from which sufficient timeframes for adaption and resource alternatives are provided).

In his lecture series on Bach, Robert Greenberg discusses temperament quite a bit and I found it fascinating. He relays all these descriptions that Bach had of different keys that are basically lost on us now as we cannot refer to the specific tunings he utilized (and thus cannot hear a lot of the music he wrote as he wrote it).

He also makes the claim that equal temperament became wide spread _because_ of the piano specifically - not just to sound the same in every key, but to sound the same on each piano. And so equal temperament would not have saturated European music until the early 19th century when the piano became ubiquitous. The reason being (as mentioned) that many other instruments can be tuned by the musician on the spot, whereas a piano requires some standardization.

This is a beautiful comment - thanks for sharing.

FWIW I have not watched House, but that episode is referencing an actual technique developed by V.S. Ramachandran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_box). His book Phantoms of the Brain is fascinating and you may be interested in reading it (even though you are just deploying his work as a metaphor here).

The NYT had a great piece a few years back of a similar bent but w.r.t. oranges: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-th.... Definitely influenced how I think about this type of issue and is worth a read as well.

Publishing raw data itself is definitely a good start but there also needs to be a push towards a standardized way of sharing data along with it's lineage (dependent sources, experimental design/generation process, metadata, graph relationship of other uses, etc.).

Exactly. It's a meaningless and even misleading analogy.

If forced to draw a comparison, you could maybe talk about the energy dissipation of a single neuron and compare that to, say, the energy dissipation of a single transistor. And in that case, considering a human brain is powered by something on the order of 10^10 neurons, the energy efficiency of the brain comes out looking pretty good.

Keith Johnstone has a nice passage in his book Impro where he likens adults to atrophied children (which applies to hobbies of a more artistic bent):

"If he believed he was a transmitter, rather than a creator, then we'd be able to see what his talents really were."

"We have an idea that art is self-expression - which historically is weird... Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticized not only for his lack of skill, but for simply being what he is."

This was circulating around HN a few days ago: https://github.com/facebookincubator/xar