Below, a few recent highlights. From Hamming, “You and Your Research” (June 6, 1995). The example I’ve given you already is working with the door closed or open. If you work the door closed, you won’t be interrupted and you get your work done. You work your door open, people come by and stop and chat and so on and so on. But I’ve noticed very clearly, at Bell Laboratories, those who work with door shut may be working just as hard ten years later but they don’t know what to work on.

String bending and visual navigation on the guitar Just realized that I want to try to think about the “destination” note of the string bend when playing it, rather than the starting note, which I usually do. What do I mean about “visualizing the destination” of the bend? Well, pretty much what I mean by visualizing any fret on the neck. But because I bend to the destination note and not fret it directly, I tend to focus on where my finger is at, instead of where the note is at.

A few highlights from reading All models are wrong: reflections on becoming a systems scientist; John D. Sterman. This is the paper form of a lecture held in 2002 by John D. Sterman, upon receiving the Jay Forrester award. What is System Dynamics? It can be seen through multiple lens, as: Science: the modeling process assumes hypothesizing, building a model, running an experiment - the simulation of the system through that model, and potentially invalidating the model.

I stumbled upon this paper while contemplating whether it’s possible (and valuable) to build a network representation of technology - eg. which tech requires which lower-level tech, which tech depends on which natural phenomena, how tech shifts over time, what feedback loops are present, … An ill-defined task that remains just a draft, a fun thought experiment; but let’s switch to the paper now. Link: DeepDive: declarative knowledge base construction

WIP notes from reading The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas C. Schelling. Why this book? I wanted to see some real-world use of game theory in the writing of a classic. Thomas Crombie Schelling (April 14, 1921 – December 13, 2016) was an American economist and professor of foreign policy, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control at the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland, College Park. Theory development “We live in an age of exponential growth in knowledge, and it is increasingly futile to teach only polished theorems and proofs.

This is absolute Misc stuff, just a bucket of paragraphs. Digital Fabrication A few days ago I listened to the Neil Gershenfeld episode of Lex’s podcast. It’s extremely inspiring! Highly recommend. A few highlights (please excuse the lack of details): Digital Fabrication, where “digital” is understood not as “binary” computer stuff, but by it’s deeper meaning. The concept is rooted in Vannevar Bush/Claude Shannon/Von Neumann Analog computer age and the transition to Digital as a way to get a grip on accumulated error.

A Chronology of Interpolation: From Ancient Astronomy to Modern Signal and Image Processing. Printed this paper a few weeks ago while I was reading about KZG1, 2, 3 and left it aside. It’s aged enough, time to actually read it. The problem of constructing a continuously defined function from given discrete data is unavoidable whenever one wishes to manipulate the data in a way that requires information not included explicitly in the data.

Sketching a parser for graphviz/dot. Really slow on a ~300 statement input. Got about a 10x improvement by using Left instead of Right-recursion.

A summary of techniques to debug Clojure code via REPL (aka “the interactive console”, the “read-eval-print loop”) and Cider debugger.

The original article by Dijkstra can be found here (pdf). These notes are mainly to summarize my read of the article for future ref.