munichpavel

Ken Ono, one of the authors, is the mathematician behind the University of Virginia women's swimming team's dominance in recent years, including world records and gold medals.

https://news.virginia.edu/content/faculty-spotlight-math-pro...

> "What are your best memories from your youth?"

as an over 30 year old, that's easy, and they fit with this post:

1. Playing jailbreak with neighbors 2. A marathon ultimate frisbee game in Valley Forge National Park that went 2hrs without a single goal 3. Playing capture the flag with my youth group

I like the buffet analogy. It is a good example of "choice architecture" a la Cass and Sunstein from "Nudge". Nudge is one of a number of works arguing that we factor in more than economically rational criteria--such as marginal cost of going backwards in the buffet line--when making decisions.

While Cass and Sunstein argue for government action in framing healthier choices, this post puts the onus on us to a.) recognize that information consumption involves choices, and b.) be more active thinkers consumers of information.

I am currently leading a topic group at work on code documentation in AI development. I was already planning to skip the lists of dos and don'ts, as well as the usual best practice language, but maybe I should just refer everyone to this gist and Naur ...

I fully agree about the role of an expressive test suite. One of the key insights of Kuhn as cited here is that a "theory" of gravitation requires examples like planetary motion and pendula. A UML Activity diagram can help to convey the application domain globally, but a good suite of unit tests helps me understand the micro-domain of a code base.

Very cool! My daughter is getting interested in robotics, and we recently got an Arduino starter set. This won't be our next project, but it will get us building more!

Same for me for history. I didn't hate it, but I find history much more interesting since high school. A big change for me with respect to history of science and technology was reading Thomas Kuhn's "Structures of Scientific Revolutions".

A related passage from Socrates' Apology: "Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing