The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived.
In other words, making a film (like making a website) is an iterative, evolutionary process. Many important motifs, themes, and meanings cannot be in the original draft because the people making it have not yet evolved their understanding to discover them. Only through the process of making these things can you uncover a new correspondence of meaning deeper and more resonant than anything in the original draft — which makes sense, given that the drafts themselves are not even developed in the medium of the final form, e.g. movies start as screenplays and websites as hand drawings or static mocks, both very different mediums than their final forms.
...the creative process is not an assembly line. Complications and in-process revisions are something to be embraced, not feared, because they are an inherent part of making.
I want to show you that that Internet you used to go exploring is still very much there. There are still tons of small personal websites, and a wealth of long form text from both the past and the present.
So it's a search engine. It's perhaps not the greatest at finding what you already knew was there, instead it is designed to help you find some things you didn't even know you were looking for.
A short, provocative book about why "useless" science often leads to humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs.
“Oh, look at your fish!” he said, and left me again to my own devices. In a little more than an hour he returned, and heard my new catalogue.
“That is good, that is good!” he repeated; “but that is not all; go on”; and so for three long days he placed that fish before my eyes, forbidding me to look at anything else, or to use any artificial aid. “Look, look, look,” was his repeated injunction.
While language model (LM)-powered chatbots and generative search engines excel at answering concrete queries, discovering information in the terrain of unknown unknowns remains challenging for users. To emulate the common educational scenario where children/students learn by listening to and participating in conversations with their parents/teachers, we create Collaborative STORM (Co-STORM). Unlike QA systems that require users to ask all the questions, Co-STORM lets users observe and occasionally steer the discourse among several LM agents. The agents ask questions on the user's behalf, allowing the user to discover unknown unknowns serendipitously. To facilitate user interaction, Co-STORM assists users in tracking the discourse by organizing the uncovered information into a dynamic mind map, ultimately generating a comprehensive report as takeaways.
Stories like mine are why we need to fund “basic” or “curiosity-based” research. Governments love to pretend that we can do science more efficiently by only funding work that addresses a well-defined economic or societal need – but expecting such a strategy to work is monumentally foolish. Everyone knows a story like mine. It might be a famous one, like the accidental invention of Post-It notes; or it might be more obscure, like the accidental discovery of phosphorus by a gold-seeking alchemist. And many such stories haven’t finished unfolding yet: it may take years for the accidental importance of one’s work to become clear. Science has advanced this way for hundreds of years, with smart people following their curiosity around the twists and turns that nature throws at them.
Actually, in a larger sense accidental discoveries aren’t accidental at all. They may be individually unpredictable, but in the aggregate, they’re the fruits of a “let’s unleash curiosity” strategy. We should tell our accidental stories often, because society needs to know that there’s no better way to move science forward than to unleash the smart and curious, and wait for “accidents” to happen.
This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?"
There is a hidden cost to having a hypothesis. It arises from the relationship between night science and day science, the two very distinct modes of activity in which scientific ideas are generated and tested, respectively [1, 2]. With a hypothesis in hand, the impressive strengths of day science are unleashed, guiding us in designing tests, estimating parameters, and throwing out the hypothesis if it fails the tests. But when we analyze the results of an experiment, our mental focus on a specific hypothesis can prevent us from exploring other aspects of the data, effectively blinding us to new ideas.
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Taught that programming—or the worse "developing software"—is like a routine engineering activity, many find difficulty seeing writing as a model or even a metaphor for programming. Writing is creative, it is self-expression, it is art, which is to say it isn't a science and unlike science and engineering, it isn't a serious activity. Judgments like this, though, are easiest made by people who don't seriously engage in making both science and art. Art, engineering, and science are—in that order—part of a continuum of finding truth in the world and about ourselves.
More than making money… more than that feeling of launching a new product, feature, website, or app… the idea I am coming to value most in my professional life is the feeling of “play”. Sometimes play is being on my own with high autonomy and low consequences, sometimes it’s getting to choose new and fun technologies, but where play is most valuable is when it involves other people.
...If there’s a downside to the Hot Potato process it’s that there’s a lot of re-building mid-flight as new requirements trickle in or you discover new constraints. When you build frequent iteration and circling back into the process, it can lead to a feeling of never being “done”. That is a tax on cognitive load, like open browser tabs, that may not neurologically suit everyone. Others might even prefer a more linear assembly line process.
If I had to choose which process I prefer, I’d pick reworking a component over-and-over in a Hot Potato process versus other alternatives.
In the terrific documentary about his work, The Secret Life of Lance Letscher, the collage artist points out that he doesn’t want his file boxes of source material organized too much, that he specifically avoids organizing them, so that he can find unexpected things when he starts searching. “He depends upon that chaos of stuff, of things lying around.”
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There are several paragraphs in Murch’s book about the importance of fighting against the touted “features” of digital tools, such as speed. “The real issue with speed,” he says, “Is not just how fast can you go, but where are you going so fast? It doesn’t help to arrive quickly if you wind up in the wrong place.”
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If I was simply able to execute a full-text search on my notebooks, and pull up exactly what I was looking for, that’s all I’d find: exactly what I was looking for. And the real art is in finding what I didn’t know I was looking for.
Syllabus was born from a conversation about discovery and learning. In discussing the ways that cultural artifacts travel through a society, we imagined how a syllabus could function as a creative tool that allows you to do things like:
i. present what you feel is important for others to experience or consume;
ii. group items together in ways that shade and refine their meaning;
iii. apply a conceptual or idiosyncratic approach to the syllabus form;
iv. develop rogue pedagogies.
I’ve been thinking over a term for all of this, one that’s somewhat like the way ‘analog’ is to ‘digital,’ that can help differentiate the web crafted by a human touch from the one build by (and sometimes, for) robots. The term ‘analog’ was initially used to depict how electrical signals are transmitted via devices like telephones and record players, in stark contrast to a digital signal, which is encoded and subsequently decoded. But it has slowly gathered into an entire culture.
What we need is a term—an ‘analog’ equivalent—that encapsulates the essence of the human web. The small web. The personalized web that’s an intentions reflection of our human imperfections laid bare for others to see and explore, and maybe, to discover. I’m going to do a bit of thinking on this one.
As of June 2023, I've asked 9,000+ authors to share five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood and why they love each book. This infuses each book with a bit of magic and meaning.
Then, we give readers fun and unique ways to follow their curiosity down rabbit holes. Try our bookshelf on science fiction or life satisfaction. At every step, you can meet the person who recommended that book, the book list it came from, and what they are passionate about.
Walking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?