2023 - To Read

Confronting the catastrophe of the Second World War, four composers produced strikingly different responses.

The brilliant mind who discovered the spacetime solution for rotating black holes claims singularities don't physically exist. Is he right?

The eruption of Vesuvius preserved an ancient library, but rendered its fabled contents illegible. Can AI restore what's lost?

“If this is not what literature is for, what else then?”

I've been thinking about roads not taken lately, wondering whether we should revisit some of them...

One fun way to describe this book: the narrative is a sort of glue which holds together a non-stop parade of Fermi estimates.These results are probably much less surprising to a physicist, but snippets like this are truly shocking to me!

Books are a sequence of "spreads", which have a fixed page number and a fixed page layout (possibly several to accommodate smaller screens). You can scroll continuously or use the keyboard to navigate through spreads. The spreads are contiguously stacked but each has its own URL.

This line of reasoning nicely echoes @utotranslucence's excellent “Becoming a Magician”, which defines extraordinary growth in terms of becoming a version of yourself which seems impossible, even alien. What got you here won’t get you there. https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a-magician/

Absolutely! You've seen many of these, but some favorites from my list:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGCkVHSvjzM- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGCkVHSvjzM- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmGb-jU3uVQ- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW8gWgpptI8- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ-auWfJTts- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0m0jIzJfiQ- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RlpMhBKNr0

Here's a pretty mainstream take, from Ericsson's Peak:

“The Independent Scholar” is a practical and sensitive handbook on para-academia. But what’s most striking is its towering anachronism! It was written in 1993, before Mosaic was available. The internet isn’t mentioned. It’s staggering how much easier things have gotten.

A nice framing from Alison Kidd: knowledge work is a process of being (personally!) transformed by info. Marks on papers around their desk are just the input to this process; the marks which matter are the ones made *on* the knowledge worker. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/191666.191740

Confused: I really do believe that "slow is fake" much of the time… and also that very important parts of my work get better when I get comfortable moving much more. slowly. "It's contextual"—but are there better heuristics?(Reflecting on @natfriedman's thoughtful belief list)

Just rediscovered and uploaded an old incomplete draft of a short book, a 129-page set of notes on: "An introduction to majorization and its applications to quantum mechanics"Uploading for fun. I disavow all knowledge of its contents :-) https://michaelnielsen.org/papers/maj-book-notes.pdf

I'm increasingly interested in "poor-man's BCIs" like these… from my notes:

Commonplace markers! These sixteenth century punctuation marks indicate that readers might want to memorize or copy a passage (ie into a commonplace book).Marks could come from the author, editor, publisher, another reader… really interesting parallels to the mnemonic medium.

This is incredible UI history… I want a collection of all of this kind of history 🙏Like maybe a seminar course on The History of User Interfaces?

Reading the papers on NoteCards (the first networked note-writing system, designed at PARC ~'87), it's striking how many of the problems are still quite live today.https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/29933.30859https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.124.2308&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Little rant about active reading on computers, excerpted from an upcoming letter on my latest mnemonic medium prototypes.

In this 2000 polemic, Rob Pike notices that big new ideas in computing are rarely coming from the research community. "Invention has been replaced by observation." "The art is gone."http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdfMuch still rings true… but on the bright side, we did ~replace WIMP!

The list in @michael_nielsen's great Notes on Creative Context also works well reframed into questions, e.g.- What is it about X that you scared might be true?- What aren't you allowed to say about X?- Why is everybody so wrong about X?https://michaelnotebook.com/creative_context/

Ravi Vakil has some striking advice for grad students on learning and research here: https://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/potentialstudents.htmlI particularly like this bit, on non-linear tendrils of understanding.

Some initial rough notes on the interface paradigms of Vision Pro / visionOS: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Vision%20Pro

I'm grateful to @dwarkesh_sp for a very stimulating interview, with much focus on the personal emotional experience of learning and creative work!

Walter Kintsch's 1998 monograph "Comprehension" proposes a mechanistic model of how and when reading produces learning. Quite interesting!

How the 70mm print of Oppenheimer (11mi, 560lbs) is physically assembled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5XqqylBW7M

Calvin and Hobbes was my favorite as a kid. This is… different, to say the least! And gorgeous. Combinations of photography, sculpture, and painting. Alternately lushly detailed and minimal. What a treat to finally enjoy more from Watterson.

Dedicated thread for Dall-E 3 screenshots of classic 3D modeling/animation apps that never existed.

Fascinating analysis and experiment on Reddit and TikTok show some of the dynamics of vitality—that when people receive a burst of attention, they post more afterwards (presumably creating a feedback loop).