* Computers can be understoodExplains a mindset to understand systems by looking under the layers of abstraction. * Systems that defy detailed understanding: Follow-up to the above, listing some types of systems where it’s either impossible or just not worth it to understand from first-principles how the system works. Advocates using…
Grr. I really need to write blog posts other than book reviews. But until then, here are some notes on two books I read recently: Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner Superforecasting is a book about what qualities it takes for a person to be good at forecasting events.…
Spin is a sci-fi trilogy comprising of the books Spin, Axis and Vortex. The first book in the series, Spin is a really great science-fiction story and the Hugo award it won is well-deserved. Since it is a story that can be easily spoiled, I’ll try to sell it…
Just finished reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. I think I put the book in my to-read list after Alan Kay recommended in a talk of his(I don’t remember which one). The book is about how any communication medium dictates the kind of discourse taking place…
Some random updates: I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. This is the second time I’ve started to read the book and I must say that I’m just having a lot of trouble getting into the book. That said, I haven’t abandoned it yet- I’ve…
I haven’t posted here in quite a while, and I’d like to re-boot the site with something easy. So I wrote up “mini book reviews” of some books that I read recently and liked quite a lot. Bringing Down The House by Ben Mezrich This is a book…
I recently started reading a very interesting book called [The Elements of Computing Systems][nand2tetris] by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken. The book is nicknamed “nand2tetris”, so called because the reader starts off with a NAND gate and using it as a building block for more complex systems builds a…
Last week I started playing around with the [Instaparse][instaparse] library, which makes writing parsers really easy in Clojure. What Instaparse does is take the formal definition of a language and give you a parser for that language. You can then use that parser on a string, possibly containing something…