December Links and Activities

New: I created a shared workflowy for sharing notes that I take. (I put in some notes on linguistics and neural nets.)

(h) means personal highlights.

• Books I read this year
• Don’t let the energy escape
• A beautiful implementation of Conway’s Game of Life and variants
• Hitchhiking robot meets its end in Philadelphia.
• I’ve started using Feedly to get all the blogs, etc. I subscribe to in one place. (Here’s a list of all the apps/extensions I use.)
• Plover is an open-source stenography engine. Stenography is a way of typing ultra-fast (experienced stenographers can do 200+ words a minute) by “chording” – pressing multiple keys at once. The learning curve is rather steep though.
• Movies: I’ve watched a bunch of movies (free trial of Amazon prime). Here are some I’ve enjoyed:
  • Song of the Sea – beautiful animated film with Irish mythology
  • Pulp Fiction – iconic American classic
  • The Kid – Charlie Chaplin!
  • Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – dark Cold War humor
  • Lawrence of Arabia – Epic, classic
  • Little Women – a heartwarming classic of 4 sisters growing up
  • The Royal Tenenbaums – Wes Anderson humor
  • Astro Boy – Animated sci-fi
• Math
  • Tie a string to the lower pedal of a bike when the pedals are vertical, and pull backwards. Which way does the bike go? Answer.
  • I learned about this through Mathematical Understanding of Nature by Vladimir Arnold – a gem of a book.
  • Math books in dialogue/story form
  • Rosetta stone of Category Theory in physics, topology, logic, and computer science – I found this very illuminating.
  • A mathematician’s New Year’s resolution (humorous)
  • Quanta magazine about math and science
• Rationality
  • Common knowledge and Aumann’s Agreement Theorem
  • Fundamental ideas
  • A rationality/personality test
• Linguistics and related diversions
  • I learned a little bit of linguistics from An Introduction to Linguistics (which also has a lot of nice wordplay!) and Contemporary Linguistics. (notes on workflowy)
  • Lojban is a constructed language that’s designed to be very logical. I went through a few lessons in this tutorial. Some aspects are reminiscent of functional programming (ex. switching the order of arguments). The Haskell Wiki has a page on Lojban. I read a post that claims the analogy Lojban:Haskell::Esperanto:LISP.
  • The Language of Mathematics: because mathematical language is more precise than natural language, it’s a great area to apply linguistics to. It also pulls in ideas from computer science, in particular, type theory.
  • An online book on natural language processing.
• Programming
  • The connection between linguistics and math/programming languages is interesting and underexplored. Here are some discussions/articles I found:
    • Sociology of programming languages (h). See also this.
    • It’s hard to get a programming language to catch on! (Should this be more of a concern? (h)) In Confessions of a used programming salesman, Meijer tells his story of trying to sell Haskell to the masses. He realizes that the “change function”  is (Perceived Crisis/Perceived Pain of Adoption); you can’t just “build it and they will come.” Worse is better (h) is (controversial) assessment of the “failure” of LISP.
  • Learned a little bit of LISP after reading a lot of discussion on Haskell vs. LISP and metaprogramming:
    • LISP vs. Haskell 1 (h), 2
    • On metaprogramming 1, 2, 3
    • Metaprogramming in Haskell
    • Beating the average (with a better programming language, in this case, LISP) (h)
    • Paul Graham’s book On Lisp http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html is a classic.
  • Extensible effects: I’ve read in several places that extensible effects are better than monad transformers (ex. cleaner, faster code), but it seems that it isn’t yet mainstream. A walkthrough of the code.
  • The Monad Tutorial fallacy: In teaching an abstract concept, the examples are more important than the metaphor.
  • I wrote a CYK parser in Haskell.
• Reasons to be Cheerful by Greg Egan (short story) – on being controlled by, or controlling, or own happiness.
• Podcasts
  • Fountain drinks (99PI) – Be thankful for water fountains!
  • Santa for president (The Truth)
  • Left Right Black White (Strangers) – Video games can help you get tenure and make friends!
  • Headspace, Just a little nicer (TED Radio hour)
• On Xunzi (Chinese philosopher) (h) Some excerpts
  Chinese philosophy was remarkably advanced at 300BC. Philosophers were revered in ancient China, and had a large part to play in developing the law and government. Some of Xunzi’s teachings included learning from the masters, the idea that all races are equal at birth and people developed differences from cultural upbringing, the notion that praying to heaven has no effect, and a the idea that all humans have core and irreducible desires, one of which is a desire for social position. The difference between the virtuous and petty man lies in how they achieve it -through loyalty and filial piety, or by impressing others.

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