What if you slept…
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?
I probably read this book for the first time around ’97-’98, and it was an eye-opener. It should be required reading for all engineering students. This time around, I read it in a fraction of the time that it took me then, and I’m happy with how comfortable I am with the contents. It also tied in nicely with Euler’s biography from last year.
In terms of mathematics, I still have to understand $e^z$ and taking the logarithms of complex numbers. Soon…
Slice of life and society, and what a contrast to Musashi and Shogun. Well, not surprising, considering that this one is set in the 20th century! And then there’s this:
The author uses these to control a classroom of teenage girls. One could think of using these principles in business as well. Maybe that’s why Sun-Tzu is so popular?
How little we know about the world around us! And how interconnected everything is — I hadn’t realized that a Star Trek Discovery character was named after a ‘shroom expert! Plenty of recalls to ‘How to Change Your Mind.’ And, we understand so little about the world around us..
This was not intentional, but I ended up reading a book a week this year — probably more than I ever have! I went back and looked at what I’d read, and here’s a bit of a summary.
This year was dominated by sci-fi, but these were mainly entire series (total 24 books!):
What was the goal here? Basically entertainment, but quite a few amazing ideas (Ted Chiang, N. K. Jemisen) and beautiful writing (Le Guin).
The next big bucket consists of books that I read in the hope of improving my thinking, understanding new frameworks, and making sense of the world around me (total 14). Highlights are:
I bailed on quite a few books without completing them — life is too short!
The next categories that I can think of are economics (total 6), technical (total 3), and other miscellaneous (total 5)
My reading has been pretty haphazard thus far. I pick up whatever looks interesting from my pile o’ books at different points in time. I usually read 4-5 books concurrently, and when I’m very busy, I’m more likely to go for fiction.
This is the first time I’ve tried classifying what I read, and I think I may use this to guide what I focus on.
Finally, the book that had the largest impact on me was a book recommended by Varad: Ted Chiang’s “Stories of Your Life, and Others”, for the beautiful, first-rate writing, mind-blowing ideas, and emotional wistfulness.
What a wonderful way to end out an absolutely fantastic reading year! My notes:
Three basic questions:
And different -ism’s:
I’ll be using this framework to explore further, and to structure my own thinking in the coming year.
I honestly don’t know what the purpose of this book is. Introspect on your life? Stuff matters? It violently clashes with my current exploration of my own philosophy, so probably wasn’t a good time for me to read it…
Wow! This is one way that we evolve into post-human constructs. And people currently worried about the ethics of AI should add a whole new dimension about what could happen!
This has been a pretty poor year for books recommended by friends — such as this one! There are some cases where you know what you’re looking for, and you search for it. And that is all that you’ll find. If you wander around aimlessly, you’ll find other interesting stuff that you otherwise wouldn’t have found. I’m not sure what the big deal is!
Okay, I’m being facetious, but honestly, they could have done with much, much, better examples than what they used. Coming up with a figure that looks like a car (to us!!)? Give me a break. And I’ve worked with genetic programming twenty years back, so I’m not a sceptic.
Recommended by a friend. My gut reaction was that I wouldn’t get much from this book, and I’m sorry to say that I didn’t. I guess I’m just too jaded! I don’t disagree with anything that Morrie says, but the book had more of the surrounding drama and the actual message tends to get lost…
I had to struggle to get the context right while I was reading this book. He explicitly targets the liberal arts, and I was trying to apply his statements to engineering, and disagreeing with them. I get what Caplan is trying to say at an intellectual level. The amount of analysis that he’s done is amazing, and it’s instructive to see how different factors can be included and different impacts can be measured. There is a lot of unnecessary fluff in the U.S. curriculum, and in India, one could easily apply this logic to even regular engineering and other courses.
Ironically, things may change in India precisely because the education system is so bad! See my other posts on hiring and interviewing, and what TCS is (hopefully) doing right now.
This (of course?) reads like vignettes of episodic occurrences that are very loosely strung together in a supposed story, and it ends pretty abruptly. I didn’t have to work too hard to imagine Keillor speaking this as I was reading it. Beautiful, descriptive prose, brings back fond memories of NPR in California and living in St. Paul.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t read these books before but get the feeling that I’ve read something similar to Ciri moving through space and time. Oh well.
Always be scared if you’re the sidekick. Especially if one of the other sidekicks is stepping away from the stage…
“A Refined Laser Method and Faster Matix Multiplication, ” Josh Alman and Virginia Vassilevska Williams lowers the complexity of matrix multiplication from $n^{2.37287}$ to $n^{2.37286}$
Revisiting an old favorite…
A glass of tea; the moon;
The frogs croak in the weeds.
A bat wriggles down across Gold disk to silver reeds.
The distant light of lamps.
The whirr of winnowing grain.
The peace of loneliness.
The scent of imminent rain.
Abhishek & Soham present “Understanding UMAP,” Abhishek Deshpande, Soham Joshi, Varad Deshmukh and Shrirang Karandikar
