Substrate

Mathematics makes the mind its playground. And teaching play is hard work! It’s actually harder than lecturing because you have to be ready for almost anything to happen in the classroom, but it’s also more fun. It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. I would like to encourage institutions to start valuing the public writing of its faculty. More people will read these pieces than will ever read any of our research papers. I now explicitly say on my exams that I will give extra credit on incomplete proofs where students acknowledge their gaps. I get much more thoughtful answers that way. So let me encourage all of us to try having these conversations, to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and quick to forgive each other when we say something stupid. That’ll happen if you start to have conversations, and we just have to have grace for each other if we make mistakes—it’s better than not talking. I sometimes wish graduate school admissions would remember this too: “Background is not the same as ability.” As my friend Bill Velez says: If you want your Ph.D. program to have more students of color, then you have to stop admitting students on the basis of background and start admitting students by their ability. And then, support them. And he said, “I would rather see you work with me, than quit.” Web Mirror: https://mathyawp.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/mathematics-for-human-flourishing/

In the fall of 2009, as the age of blogs was already fading, I launched The Frailest Thing as a space to think out loud as I worked my way through a graduate program in technology studies. In the y...

Now we walk in straight lines because we have to, not because we know where we're going. Far from an expression of certainty, the urban street grid simplifies, removes choices, and reflect's nobody's direct route exactly. ​ We eagerly provide data about ourselves to platforms so they can help us learn what we want; our unique personal desires are mere inputs for systems that channel them into a narrower range of outputs.

I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey, for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible, than the story of our own life, the one we do not want to hear and will do anything to listen to.

Twice in my life I’ve had the good fortune of getting exactly what I wanted, only to find that, once I had it, it wasn’t what I wanted at all. ​ Twitter, then, is a shared delusion experienced by many millions of people simultaneously. That shared delusion can be wonderful and powerful, which is why it is so difficult to explain to non-participants, but it certainly comes with tradeoffs as well ​ A physicist making a contribution about physics might find a social justice advocate reviewing the contribution for social justice norms; a social justice advocate carelessly drawing a physics metaphor in a social justice contribution might find a physicist explaining technical inconsistencies in the metaphor that was intended to be casual. All happens in front of an audience, driving behavior that might play out differently in public. Participating in this process can be stimulating, but also frustrating or exhausting - it is difficult to foresee the various intersections of “expertise” to which a given contribution might be subjected.

Writer Ted Gioia on how important high-quality inputs are to mainting high-quality output.

Bow is a library for Typed Functional Programming in Swift

Applied Category Theory 2019, Oxford http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ACT2019/

she’s now officially resting in peace, buried inside the strong, hot and smart right bicep of someone who cares.

What I’d like to write on it, I’m not exactly sure. Maybe something like this: It’s ok to rest, to explore, to experiment, to fail. It’s ok to have agenda-free downtime, even if it’s scary. It’s ok to wander around, even if you’re clear on how you’d like to be of service to the world. It’s ok to decompress, to not know and to just play with what comes up, as a beginner. It’s ok to frustrate yourself, to feel lost in space as there’s no sense off feedback or validation for doing nothing. Maybe it’s ok that I can just trust what’s coming up within me is good enough.

To know why a garden looks the way it does today is to understand not only the histories of its individual parts, but also of the relationships between them, both past and present. In a garden, each individual flower becomes a character in an ongoing story, with a personal narrative arc all its own. ​ This, more than anything else, stands out to me as the key difference between exploration and gardening games. In exploration games, to spend time in a place is to deplete it, to make it less and less interesting until there’s no longer any reason to stay. In gardening games, to spend time in a place is to enrich it, to participate in stories and interactions and relationships that make it more interesting by virtue of your understanding of its inhabitants.

A “user interface” is simply one type of dynamic picture. I spent a few years hanging around various UI design groups at Apple, and I met brilliant designers, and these brilliant designers could not make real things. They could only suggest. They would draw mockups in Photoshop, maybe animate them in Keynote, maybe add simple interactivity in Director or Quartz Composer. But the designers could not produce anything that they could ship as-is. Instead, they were dependent on engineers to translate their ideas into lines of text. Even at Apple, a designer aristocracy like no other, there was always a subtle undercurrent of helplessness, and the timidity and hesitation that come from not being self-reliant. It’s fashionable to rationalize this helplessness with talk of "complementary skillsets" and other such bullshit. But the truth is: An author can write a book. A musician can compose a song, an animator can compose a short, a painter can compose a painting. But most dynamic artists cannot realize their own creations, and this breaks my heart.

on cultivating gardens in our lives

the horses running until they forget that they are horses.

As opposed to a textbook, real maths is highly non-linear. ​ As we will see throughout the post, personalization (and the engagement inherent in it) is essential to the success of the lecture.] ​ [Before the third, I ask the class whether the first two alone are enough. If I get nods, I draw a random collection of dots and lines, with the lines not at all connected to the dots, and they see we need some statement of incidence.] ​ Since we will always draw constellations as a picture, we can just use the picture as our “function.” ​ Compare this to being given the definitions and propositions in the established mathematical language. To an untrained, uninterested student, this is not only confusing, but boring beyond belief! They don’t have the prerequisite intuition for why the definition is needed, and so they are left mindlessly following along at best, and dozing off at worst.

Left to its own devices, the human brain resorts to one of its most emblematic tricks, maybe one that helped make us human in the first place. It time-travels. ​ The whole sequence is a master class in temporal gymnastics. ​ The PET scanner allowed us to appreciate, for the first time, just how complex this kind of cognitive time travel actually is. ​ “Apparently, when the brain/mind thinks in a free and unencumbered fashion,” she wrote, “it uses its most human and complex parts.” ​ Amos Tversky once joked that where probability is concerned, humans have three default settings: “gonna happen,” “not gonna happen” and “maybe.” We are brilliant at floating imagined scenarios and evaluating how they might make us feel, were they to happen. But distinguishing between a 20 percent chance of something happening and a 40 percent chance doesn’t come naturally to us. ​ The Homo prospectus theory suggests that, if anything, we need to carve out time in our schedule — and perhaps even in our schools — to let minds drift.

Refactor Camp 2019, Day 1, Drew Austin: "The City as Weakly-Escaped Reality (Revisiting the Holey Plane)"

Maybe technology made it all too easy to slide into a life I wasn’t meant to have. ​ We still have to make our way in the world, alone, save for our technology built from other people’s frozen choices. ​ I spent so much time trying to organize the life that I thought I wanted. It wasn’t the same as living.

“That sucks” is negativity. “That sucks, here’s why, and here’s how to fix it” is criticism, ​ Someone with an informed, critical opinion is, in my experience, far less likely to be negative than someone not as informed. If anything, critical thinking adds dimension to an appreciation of the world around you.

Here’s the thing: the hero is the most damaging person on a team, particularly on a team that’s supposed to be writing high-availability or otherwise mission-critical software. ​ The hero is a human patch. ​ When a team can rely on a hero, they don’t need to grow and learn collectively. They don’t need to get better. They can coast along, which serves no one in the end. ​ You’re clearly managing someone highly motivated, but you need to shape that motivation into something more constructive.

🎶 A collection of types and functions that enhance the Swift language. - swift-prelude/Sources/Optics at 8cb25510cd54be91d28f0466e37f337aca815b74 · pointfreeco/swift-prelude

“Race to the Top; what a horrid metaphor for education. A race? Everyone is on the same track, seeing how fast they can go? Racing toward what? The top? The top of what? Education is not a race, it’s an amble. Real education only occurs when everyone is ambling along their own path.” —Peter Gray ​ 2. Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting or writing. Trust your own interest.

in addition to this act of pressing “send,” there’s also a visual cue to suggest the end of a transmission: “Text messages and tweets already have a terminus, which is just the fact that they exist in little ‘bubbles.’” For these reasons, when a period is used, it can sometimes feel angry. ​ saying ‘end transmission’ instead of just ending it

I’ve always found the PDF to be the calmest of digital formats—

In the post-Facebook era, which many of us are already living in, there is no single platform, or place, where we can even expect to find everyone we know, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there never is again in our lifetimes. ​ The increasingly-maligned model of VC-funded, loss-leading hypergrowth in the pursuit of market dominance, understood another way, is a quest to create voids that matter, voids that will hurt if we let them emerge by rejecting the product currently filling them ​ The residue of buildings and cities determines what gets built on top of them, and if we’re conscientious, we’ll build with a more distant future in mind.

This PR introduces some concept that were done by our friends at PointFree ❤️ combine and pullback for Reducer and Feedback Store class that has minimal set up of the state machine Context is abil...

In last last week's episode of PBS Infinite Series, we talked about different flavors of multiplication (like associativity and commutativity) to think about when multiplying things that aren't numbers. My examples of multiplying non-numbers were vectors and matrices, which come from the land of algebra. Today I'd like to highlight another example: We can multiply shapes!