Hello there! I’m Nikkin. I write a blog and have my personal
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nikkin.dev. I started
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Issue № 31
25 December 2024
It is December and if you are anywhere near cold weather and it seems
to get to your nerves, have a look at How
to Build an Electrically Heated Table? from the Lowtech Magazine.
This magazine was the inspiration for me to setup my personal website on
a small pi zero, though I am doubtful if I can go to the lengths of
having it solar powered.
Our cute segregation sim is based off the work of Nobel Prize-winning
game theorist, Thomas Schelling. Specifically, his 1971 paper, Dynamic
Models of Segregation. We built on top of this, and showed how a
small demand for diversity can desegregate a neighborhood. In other
words, we gave his model a happy ending.
On more interesting things on the web, here is a project - 15min-city What
is it about?…
The 15-minute city is an urban planning concept that advocates for
services to be accessible in less than 15 minutes from any place in a
city by walking or biking to reduce emissions due to private
transportation and increase the livelihood and safety of
neighbourhoods.
Bartosz Ciechanowski is back with another web project. Gather all the
minions… this time, we conquer the Moon
12,419 Days Of
Strandbeest Evolution (youtube) It is hard to put in words what Theo
Jansen is trying to conceive in this world. Beautiful video. Makes you
question what a living thing is, at the end of the day! Now, if you want
to play with the simulator of the Strandbeest leg, here is one
from fablab-ka
From my time in the physics lab doing Infrared spectroscopy, I was
taught that a dip see you in the graph of the sun’s photon flux for
particular wavelengths of light is because of the absorption by water
vapour in the upper atmosphere. Now, I learnt that is this is exactly
the reason why major LIDAR scanning systems operate in this wavelength
on ground systems! More details in this post - A
Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology by Vikram
Sekar
Computer stuff
When it comes to text search in a website or any source, the Best Match 25
algortithm inevitably pops up. There have been different variations of
it and at first glance, it can be a bit overwhelming. Evan Schwartz’s
blog post - Understanding
the BM25 full text search algorithm really helps explain the
algorithm in a more intuitive way
Choreographic programming is a way of programming message-passing
systems that lets the programmer describe the behaviour of the whole
system as a unified, single program
If you are an stickler for quick scripts that you want to invoke from
the Terminal just like me, this article - Lazy
self-installing Python scripts with uv form Trey Hunner is really
interesting!
Hurmet is a great
project by Ron Kok. When I wanted to communicate a piece of work that
includes equations, my first option would be to write them on a piece of
paper, scan it and send it. Or I can go the other way around and use
something like the TeX typeset system to create digital documents. If
the notebooks need to be interactive, something like the Jupyter
notebook or R Markdown would serve the purpose. But the Hurmet project
is both WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) and also interactive at
the same time. Next time you have an engineering team meeting, or if you
just want to solve a simple math homework, you can use this as a tool
(The documentation is particularly excellent)
Ever gone to a new place and spent countless hours scrolling through
trip-advisor-websites recommending not so interesting places? Wikipedia
(and maps) to the rescue. The NearbyWiki project helps identify
places on a map that links to Wikipedia articles so you can comfortably
make your own choices about a visit.
Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown
fame appeared recently on the podcast StarTalk and had a
conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson - Youtube link. In
one particular section,
they talked about the central limit theorem that was very interesting. I
wanted to try and simulate the same for a random walk. Here
is the quick simulation
Jan Milsovsky writes the blog post - MomBoard:
E-ink display for a parent with amnesia where Jan comes up with a
project for his mother who suffers from Amnesia (not Dementia. I learned
the difference only while reading this as well). A really heartwarming
story :)
The National Security Agency of the US recently released a copy of an
internal lecture delivered by Grace Hopper. Press
release here - What a sharp mind at 76 years old! (The second part
of the video is mis-linked in the page. Here it is)
The lecture, “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and
People,” features Capt. Hopper discussing some of the potential future
challenges of protecting information. She also provided valuable insight
on leadership and her experiences breaking barriers in the fields of
computer science and mathematics.
Now, gone were the times (or so I thought) of Online Forums and
people discussing niche things. Oh, was I wrong! Here is a nice little
article - Forums
Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information that
lists out some active forums for different interests. Maybe you find
something interesting here and connect with fellow interesting people
online.
Asimov Press’ new article The
Forgotten Pandemic was an interesting read into the history and
contemporary treatments for Tuberculosis. I never knew that some of the
famous people mentioned there were taken away by TB before I read
this.
Can
SpaceX land a rocket with 1/2 cm accuracy? - Scott Shambaugh writes
a surprisingly detailed article on trying to understand what could be
the accuracy of the navigation and positioning systems in place, that
enabled the starship booster to be caught by the Mechazilla.
To celebrate the success of SpaceX’s starship booster landing (or
should I say catching), here is a nice little game. Need a
little more challenge, try the Mechazilla
Read
Being raised by the
internet A short essay by Jimmy Miller. It resonated with me and
took me back to the time when I ordered an Ubuntu OS CD online (FOR
FREE!!!) and got it delivered. Still remember the orange artwork on the
front of the disk. The internet is indeed, full of wonderful things and
people if we look at the right places.
Noise:
A Flaw in Human Judgment (Book) - Decision comes with personal
judgement. And this done many times, leads to variability in these
judgements that the authors call Noise (different from Bias). This
concept was then illustrated with examples in the field of law, medicine
business along with coping strategies on how to identify, evaluate and
get rid of this “Noise”. Sometimes they can be beneficial too!
Things
you should know about stock options before negotiating an offer -
Julia Evans writes a wonderful piece explaining how stock options would
work in real life, though details might vary between
companies/countries. But for someone who might have no idea about stock
options, aka me, this was an interesting read.
An essay of the life
of Niels Henrik Abel, the mathematician, in whose memory the
Norwegian government awards the Abel prize for outstanding work on
Mathematics.
Optimal
Protocols for Studying & Learning - Andrew Huberman My biggest
takeaway was that testing (recollection and reasoning of material
learnt) is an effective way to learn and master new concepts while
testing oneself right after the learning of the material helps immensely
to “offset forgetting” (More context about this in the podcast)
We start this edition off with a public service announcement. I
recently got a phishing email from a hacker claiming to have hacked into
my system and has proof of profanity that will be forwarded to all my
contacts if I don’t transfer a certain amount of bitcoin. Time to delete
it and move on? No. The intriguing part was that the email was sent from
MY email address to MY email address. How could this happen? Was my
account really hacked? I went and checked the sent mailbox. No such
email was stored under the sent mailbox. Something was fishy. Now, all
mailbox providers’ native-web-interfaces provide the option to view the
“Raw message” (sometimes by right-clicking on the message and selecting
View message source) I open it up and very quickly, see these lines
…
Authentication-Results: spf=fail (sender IP is 41.191.XX.XXX)
smtp.mailfrom=xxxxxx.com; dkim=none (message not signed)
Now, if you use emails, it is good to spend a few minutes learning
what SPF, DKIM and DMARC means. Cloudflare
has a nice article here. Basically, the reason why the
authentication above failed, was that someone was “spoofing” my account
(acting like me) without never having actual access to my account. This
kind of phishing attack is sophisticated, yet, very prevalent through
emails. Now, the next time you see an unknown email from yourself, look
at the message source! And if you see that it was not sent from your
account, just delete it and move on.
To something more interesting and thanks
to Justin Skycak’s post of his review of this book, I flipped
through around 1/3rd of the pages of Developing Talent in Young People
by Benjamin
Bloom. Bloom is highly regarded as an educational psychologist and
for this book, he studied 120 talented individuals spanning 6 domains -
piano, sculpting, swimming, tennis, math, & neurology. Along with
extensive interviews with their parents, he structures and elaborates on
his findings. It is very interesting to see how much of an influence the
family has in the nurturing of a certain individual and quite often, the
paragraphs suited my confirmation bias. Nevertheless, you can read a
copy of it for free on
Internet archive here after creating an account and “borrowing”. On
a side-note, I love the idea of “borrowing” a book online. I personally
feel more accountable to myself that I should finish reading it as
opposed to when I buy it or download it or (pirate it, which of course,
I never do)
Nicholas Carlini (research scientist at Google Deepmind) lists 50
ways he uses Large Language Models and makes his justification as to why
LLMs are not over-hyped
David Stork is a pioneer in computer vision and consciously wading
away from AI, he beautifully delivers this talk on using computer vision
techniques to debunk or corroborate claims in art. If you also love
illumination techniques in game development, you will love this
video!
If you love rapid prototyping in any field, you will want to watch
this. The impressive account of Firefly being able to launch its Alpha
rocket within a 24-hour window is beautifully discussed with the two
senior engineers - Bridget Oaks and Jordi Fabich. Brian James McManus
delivers it again in the Real Engineering
channel.
Absolutely beautiful video from CPSdrone (from Poland) on building
and operating an autonomous small boat with a detachable submarine unit
to look for a WWII plane wreck
I came across Andy’s work for the first time with his evergreen
notes concept. His work with Michael Nielson on Quantum Country has been a nice
project and he has also been working on a project - Orbit that enhances the spaced
repetition technique by creating a tool to ease the process of creating
and using flashcards. I resonate a lot with his take on learning
systems. And his technical ability to create those tools helps drive his
point home. In this talk, he delves on the topic of HOW the AI can be
used in assisted learning using a conceptual explanation.
We present a prototype called Embark which enables users to perform
an entire travel planning process within a single outline document
enriched with computational tools. In Embark, users can mix freeform
text together with references to external data, and can author dynamic
formulas for pulling in information like weather forecasts and routing
information.
We discuss discovering your unique self-identity and purpose through
specific practices of reflection, meditation and conversations with
others. We also discuss self-perception and the evolution of roles
within marriages, parent-child relationships, and work.
Throughout the episode, Dr. Hollis provides both basic knowledge and
practical tools to help us assess ourselves and better understand who we
are and what we really want in careers, relationships of all kinds, and
society.
I recently switched off my youtube account’s watch history so I don’t
end up in a trail of videos in the middle of the night. Instead, I use
the Subscriptions page from youtube to only watch the videos from
channels I have subscribed to. Then I came across Wesley
Moore’s post on exporting youtube subscriptions to OPML and watching it
via RSS feeds Though I would personally prefer to have text based
reading and video context separate, this would be a nice option to come
back to, if I still get lost in the recommended videos tab to the right
when watching any video on youtube.
The Air Travel Design Guide is a guidebook for airport stakeholders,
designers, and air travel enthusiasts, which describes the
design of artifacts, spaces, and systems that impact
the passenger experience of air travel
One of the great misconceptions about brain chemistry is that the
brain is dominated by norepinephrine and serotonin. Together,
norepinephrine and serotonin account for just a few percentage of the
synapses in the brain
To Find
the Day of the Week for any Given Date (The) Lewis Carrol’s letter
to Nature in 1887 where he outlines a technique to find out the day in
the week for any given day. There seems to have been a lot of
improvements on this technique. A more comprehensive follow-up article I
found that explains this - Learn
the First Sunday Doomsday Algorithm
Aavesham
(Movie) One of those movies that are hard to define a genre for. A
bit of a roller-coaster!
Sugar (Series)
One of the best mystery series I’ve watched in a while with flashbacks
to Film noir. Not so gripping on the storyline, rather how it was
presented.
The first piece of writing I want to share is by Adam Mastroianni on
You
can’t reach the brain through the ears. Adam writes about why we
don’t give enough importance to other people’s opinions or life lessons
(derived from actual life experiences). Was quite an interesting
read
You might have already known xkcd from
its comics and stick figure characters. I only recently knew their Machine simulator (in-web) that allows
you to place different objects and create contraptions. Click the ‘View
Machine’ button in the bottom right there to see a nice contraption.
Daniel Shiffman has been making some wonderful “creative coding”
videos at The Coding Train that
I had shared earlier. I came to know that recently updated his book The Nature of Code using the p5.js library. How I wish to have studied
these topics with these nice animations in the first place.
To a bit of personal finance, I learnt what a double-entry
bookkeeping is from a basic writeup by Matheus Portela. Maybe time
to experiment with this on my personal finance? I’ll write about it as
well when I do.
Watched
Masters of the Air
(series) A war drama based on the book by Donald L. Miller about the
100th Bomb Group during world war II
Manjummel Boys
(Movie) Follows a group of men on a trip where one of them gets
stuck in a cave. based on a true story. Gripping!
I realised that I’ve been putting quite some effort into creating and
hosting this newsletter. So, I wrote a blog post on how and why I run
this newsletter Do write to me if you like to know more on any
specific details of my setup or if you have feedback on how it can be
improved. I’m all ears!
The website find of this issue is Oimo.io Saharan, a student from Japan makes
some very cool animations. You can find a list of them in the same site. My favourite is the
Blob Toy simulator. From his
shared work on github, the
favourite tool of choice seems to be Haxe. Check out Saharan’s works to see if
you like anything in particular.
Not so recently, I had to survey a small piece of land to calculate
how much the area measured. I thought it would be straightforward using
the GPS signal on my phone along with some existing apps like Google
maps. But I realised there are some special apps meant for surveying
with some advanced features provided your device (could again be your
phone) was capable enough to handle the GPS signal. Digging in to
understand more about surveying is when I came across a blog post by Ben
Dauphinee titled To
Know Where You Are; High Precision Mapping From Scratch. Ben takes
surveying to the next level albiet using some fancy equipments that
would burn a hole in my wallet. Nevertheless, a detailed writeup and I
liked it.
Onto some tools that can help you with day-to-day tasks, Simon
Williamson wrote and hosts the site that lets you upload PDF or images and uses
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract the text. But the
important feature is that all this is done client-side meaning your data
never leaves the browser to be sent to any other place/person.
We finish off with a technique to replace a Duvet cover - Roll-Invert-Unroll
Watched
Series. Utopia
- Season 5 A comedy series around the day-to-day matters of a
(dysfunctional yet somehow functional) government body that oversees
major construction projects in the nation. Shoutout to Rob Stitch
I’ve tried juggling tennis balls for a while when I was young. Do you
remember seeing people juggling 3 balls between 2 hands interchangeably?
Apparently the technique is called cascade. I learnt it from the Library of juggling.
The website boasts of wonderfully well-documented animations of
different techniques and ways to perform juggling. Do give it a look and
maybe share with me your newly learnt juggling skills?!
Like Math, but love movies? Or the other way around? Burkard Polster
and Marty Ross wrote up a nice little list - The Mathematical
Movie Database. Maybe it comes in handy for your next movie
night!
Weighted
Voronoi Stippling by Daniel Shiffman He goes into the details of
turning an image into multiple dots that still captures the context of
the image through the technique called Voronoi Stippling. Lovely to
watch him code live, make mistakes and share his thought process
throughout the video.
There come certain weeks in my life where my calendar is moderately
filled with events/work and I try to communicate it to someone to find a
new time slot among them. There are existing tools that help you do that
without going back and forth too much on the options for slots. Google workspace
calendar and Fantastical are some paid
options. But for quick ones, like for situations when we need to find a
time among a group of friends, Doodle has been a good option. I came
across new one - Crab fit that looks and
feels lightweight (also open sourced with a self hosted options and
details on its github page). Do give it a try for the next time you
organize events as a group. Thanks to Maggie Appleton’s
post where I came across this
I have been sending emails with the custom domain on which I also
host my newsletter website. But for unknown reasons, some of the emails
would not get delivered every now and then. Not even to junk. Just poof,
vanished into thin air. I started understanding what SPF, DKIM and DMARC
records were and how they are to be configured in the custom DNS
records. I verified the changes with a nice little web app called dmarcchecker to check
and verify the updated settings. Hopefully, no emails should get lost
anymore
A little game I came across from Tom Scott’s newsletter is the
Domino Fit There’s a new
daily puzzle and you arrange a couple of domino pieces to satisfy the
sum of all the dots along rows and columns.
I recently learnt that people take lifting heavy stones as a
relatively serious activity. Here’s a nice little article on the etiquettes
of stonelifting
If nothing caught your attention yet, I’m sure this one will. Ben
Ashford gives a
lightning talk where he talks about his trip visiting a place in
Europe with a name containing every day of every month in the calendar.
Here’s the final
calendar
Finally, Bartosz
Ciechanowski is back with new article on Airfoil. He goes into the
details of fluid simulation explaining the idea of how airfoils are
designed to exploit principles of pressure differences to create lift.
His animations in-browser are always top-notch and I sometimes wonder
how my phone/computer never heats up while loading his articles while
tons of bloated websites eat up my RAM in return for nothing. If you’re
interested in learning more concepts in physics/engineering, I would
also recommend to sit down and check our his archived articles during a
weekend
Eat that frog! by Brian Quincy. The crux of the book is
simple. Every morning, you first focus on the most important task (frog)
of the day and everything else will fall in its place. Of course, the
anecdotes and stories help drive the message home. A nice quick
read.
An absolutely beautiful project I came across was the Balancing cube by
Willem Pennings The cube balances itself by conserving angular
momentum. With the wheels in either of the 3-axes acting independently,
if the controller board using the readings from Hall sensors sense that
the cube is tipping, the motors are activated to rotate in the direction
of the fall so that the cube is forced to rotate in the other direction
to conserve angular momentum. But the actual implementations are much
more complicated than that where you’ll need to account for mass
distribution to have the right amount of torque applied on any single
wheel. The impressive part is that Willem also custom designed the
controller boards himself and open-sourced the whole project. Also, not
to mention, very impressive videography skills. Here’s the link to
his video
Also, here is a nice article on CNC lasers by Jacques
Mattheij If you’re planning on buying one or recommending one, he
goes into the practical details of what parameters to consider while
getting one. In your Math classes, if you remembered proving something
by induction, but forgot what you actually proved, here is a nice Wiki
called ProofWiki that
aims to be a repository of different proofs.
A magazine recommendation for this week on science fiction and
fantasy is the ClarkesWorld
magazine You can still read all the issues online or you can subscribe to have
physical copies delivered to you!
My newsletter website is now hosted on a tiny little computer
(Raspberry Pi Zero 2W) that sits in my room and connects to the WiFi to
bring you the text to your screen so you I get you to read all the
random stuff I want to share with you. Technology is wonderful.
I manage the contents and the configuration of the website by SSH-ing
to this tiny computer from my normal computer. And SSH normally uses the
port 22. Here’s a nice little story on how
the SSH port became 22
Another interesting video I watched was the Weird POV effect
from Chris Long. If you pause the video, it is impossible to know where
the line currently is. But you can still see the line moving between
frames (Check out the video description and comments for more
information)
If you’ve already got your diary for 2024, but still haven’t been
able to execute your plans, there are a bunch of equally nice task
planners/productivity tools designed by David Seah here Also, he
seems to have been formally diagnosed with ADHD & ASD and he feels
in hindsight that these tools give him options to plan his days. His Emergent
Task Planner is a classic one!
I had fun with the learning the different standards of cryptography
with IBM’s course on Practical
introduction to quantum-safe cryptography. The Mathematical
explanations are optional, but adds value to the reading material. There
is a nice little quiz at the end and a little badge that you can flaunt
and give you a little bit of closure to things. While doing the quiz, I
realised how I started with flashcards a while back to try out spaced
repetition, but dropped it since creating flashcards seemed too much
work. But, with the recent advancements in Generative AI, is it possible
to get over this hurdle and create nice flashcards in a jiffy? Could be
worthwhile to investigate.
In terms of magazines, the issue #18 of Chalkdust magazine is out! It’s
‘A magazine for the mathematically curious’ that is both engaging in its
articles for the normal reader. It is run by volunteers and written by
people like you and me. It is completely free to download/read online.
I’ve been ordering physical copies of the issue from around issue #12
and was excited to have it delivered! The joy of getting physical
magazines delivered to your doorstep is always good.
Hacking
Portable Satellite Dish For More Space Experiments from Gabe Emerson in
Minnesota. He goes about how he modifies a Winegard portable satellite
antenna and trying to get a useful signal out of it. The way he walks
you through his fail-and-try-again process is a delight to watch (with a
lot of humour to it) He does manage to get a sweep of a couple of GPS
satellites at the end!
How an ASML
Lithography Machine Moves a Wafer from Asionometry. It has been a
very consistent and impressive channel churning out detailed video
essays on semiconductor and other such technologies focused on the Asian
sub-continent
I love catalogs. I stumbled upon one of the best of such catalogues -
Popular
electronics. It was started by Ziff Davis, a
publisher of hobbyist magazines. Popular electronics were touted to be
started for electronic hobbyists and soon grew very popular. The issues
have detailed descriptions of how to design electronic circuits for all
different kinds of electronic appliances. It is said that the electronic
components could also be ordered and requested by mail and then
assembled at home (seems like what we do with Digikey these days). The
special editions Electronic Experimenter’s Handbook at the bottom of
that page are very meticulously detailed. For example, when I opened the
1967 Spring edition, I can learn and design a reverb for my car. Want to
put together an alarm system? the next article on building the
ultrasonic omni-alarm got you covered. Wonderful times to be a nerd.
The next is an Andrew Chan’s article Simulating Fluids, Fire,
and Smoke in Real-Time. He goes into the details of a grid-based
simulation of fluids and fire. The derivations of equations are a bit
ad-hoc. But the interesting parts are the little interactive simulations
that are built into the browser. It was nice to see the output demo and
the equations that make it happen in the same section.
Issue #3 of Paged out is
out. It is an experimental article about programming tricks where each
submission is a single page in the PDF. I’ve been following it from
their first issue and some are the articles are pretty cool while some
just fly over your head. Flip through the pages to see if you find
something interesting.
This year was a wonderful start to the Newsletter. I’ll keep writing
and sharing more interesting things I come across. See you next
year!
The game of this week is Paper tactics. Its a turn based
game where you play till you’re out of moves. Reminds of Battleship
With the advent of a lot of so-called ‘AI models’ out there which
belong to the class of Large-language-Models, it is very easy to get
lost in the options. If you would like to try out such product locally
on your computer, try using llamafile.
It allows for automatic text generation for your question/query and also
extract information from a picture. Just one file. Neat!
In many tabletop role-playing games, you evade through obstacles on a
map. Digitally, such maps can be created by turning a few knobs (and
someone writing a ton of code behind it). These are called map
generators. I came across a nice little article by Boris on How
does Cave/Glade Generator Work where he dissects watabou’s cave
generator. An interesting read.
The website find of this week is Greg Egan’s homepage. He is a
science fiction writer and a computer programmer (and a damn good one).
On the science side of things, his foundations
and science
notes were interesting to skim through. But, the more interesting
part was his applets
gallery. Try opening deBruijn in full screen and you’ll have a
lovely (pseudo-)screensaver for a few seconds.
If you tried a consumer radio device, you would remember that you can
turn the dial between certain frequencies to tune-in and listen to
different radio stations. But, how do you exactly tune into a certain
frequency? One way of tuning by (roughly speaking) changing the code
parameters is called Software Defined Radio (SDR). Such receivers that
are connected to the internet are called WebSDR and there are lots of
such providers out there. Try out http://www.websdr.org to see how they
work.
Ever wondered how you can conduct exercises on Rodents for longer
duration in space? The International Space Station, well-suited for
longer space missions has its own well-designed Rodent
Habitat.
The find of this week is the archive of Whole Earth publications.
Each of the different magazines and journals have very interesting
themes. Though it was initimidating to look at so many editions on one
place, after looking at a few editions, each one had a lot of takeaways.
Thanks Stewart
Brand. There is also an accompanying documentary We are as Gods (with music score
by the wonderful Brian Eno) if you are interested in the person behind
these publications.
If you wanted to get started with electronic music or if you wanted
to explore more on the history of it, Ishkur’s guide to electronic music
is a great place to spend some time.
Ever wondered what’s the difference between http and https while
browsing websites or why do people suggest you use https connections?
Here is a nice little infographic How
https works that will explain the difference.
One of the finest collection of puzzle games I’ve come across is Simon
Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. I have been playing a few of
these from time to time for over an year now. He is a software Engineer
form the UK and well known as the creator of PuTTY client (story).
You can spend a whole day just browsing through his collections and
writings in his
website.
Tired of tying your shoelace the same way? Try Ian’s shoelace site. He
also seems to have invented the Ian Knot. Time to shave off another few
seconds while heading out.
The find of this week is Nicolas Rougeux’s Byrne’s Euclid. Euclid’s
Elements is treated as a seminal work in mathematics on geometry and
number theory. Euclid is said to have compiled parts of the work from
earlier Greek mathematicians. Oliver
Byrne re-did the 13-books Elements work by developing a coloured
version and enhancing the reading experience (for example by having
equivalent geometrical objects printed in the same colour). Now, Nicolas
developed the website that reproduces part of Byrne’s work for the web
by having interactive elements in the site. Scroll through one of the
six books and click on any geometrical objects to see what happens. A
clever way to use web elements to enhance the experience of learning
math indeed.
I just started watching the first few episodes of the series
Infiltration. In it, the scientists try to figure out the meaning of
extra-terrestrial noise. And there’s a scene where they play the signals
with different frequencies out on the speakers. How would that work?
Here is nice website Sounds of space
where you can hear different events/objects in space. A human’s typical
hearing frequency is said to be between 20 Hertz and 20,000 Hertz. But
the waveform of these celestial events are typically outside this range.
If not, we would be able to hear everything that happens in the solar
system all the time (We would also have different shapes and sizes for
ears). Sonification is the name given to a process where any data is
converted to auditory information. NASA has a nice site A Universe of sound with more
information on this.
A good find for this week is the Kagi small web. Kagi runs a search engine with pricing tiers
and promises no ads and tracking. Kagi Small Web claims to be a step in
the direction to humanize the web. I personally relate to it since a lot
of a search engine results about any topic always ends up with websites
that have somehow hijacked the ranking algorithms with fine tuned Search
Engine Optimization (SEO). Personally, I find following an individual
person’s work through RSS feeds on their blog to be more rewarding and
valuable. Nevertheless, we do need a major search engine that indexes
the majority of the internet to be able to function in this digital
world. But projects like the Kagi Small web takes you back to the place
where fellow humans wrote and shared interesting projects and stuff. Try
browsing for a while and see if you find anything that looks interesting
to you.
I just finished reading the book ‘Getting things done’ by David
Allen. In the book, he talks about a methodology for being productive.
It does not focus on any specific digital tool, though he mentions how
they can be configured to work for us. But, the core idea is to build a
system around ourselves to get the next-to-do-thing out of our mind and
capture it inside the system so we can focus on actually doing the task
at hand and not worrying about what is to come. Of course, there will
always be unexpected events that de-stabilize our state of mind. But, if
you find yourselves in a situation with enough time to do stuff and
still not being able to get work done, I would recommend you pick this
book up. As with any methodology, this book should not be followed to
the letter and rather, adopted in small chunks in our life. If we see a
positive difference, we should invest more time in setting the systems
right around us.
If you’re a fan of science fiction stuff, you’ll love the Sci-Fi idea bank.
Everytime I read one of Isaac Asimov’s short stories, I am impressed by
the imagination and the different sci-fi ideas, although, one has to be
careful to distinguish science fiction from artificial general
intelligence. Technovelgy seems
to be the knowledge base used for this and you can see the created idea
bank here.
Ever tried 3D tetris? Here is a nice little
implementation (works only in Desktop). The articles at the end of
the page were also a nice read. It makes me wonder, how many puzzle
games are out there, that challenges our 3-dimensional perception? Most
of them are 2-dimensional gameplay and maybe rendered in 3D. I would
believe that real 3D puzzle games could really challenge and enhance our
cognitive skills.
When looking up words in a dictionary, I always steered clear of the
phonetics. Looking over Rhyme
theory, I now realise how it is is better to actually use phonetics
to club words together. Takes me back to the time of learning தொடை
[Thodai] (எதுகை [Edhugai], மோனை [Monai], முரண் [Muran] …) in Tamil
grammar (kind of equivalent to alliteration in English).
Ever heard of Markov decision process (MDP)? It is a way to make
optimal decisions by abstracting any process into possible states and
actions. ‘Markovian’ way of doing things refer to the fact that you are
not worried about the past. You just look at the current state and try
to determine what is the optimal action that you can take. It is always
better to understand these with an example. Here is Peter Norvig’s article on MDP
applied to shuffling songs on your iPod. Sans the math and code, it is a
nice read for an example scenario.
How do you think about timelines? I came across a nice little app
called Markwhen that lets you create
and visualize timelines. You can write in the markdown format. Markdown
is a nice little format to write short texts and reports but managing
images might be hectic. You can learn how to write in markdown
here. When you look at an example of what you can create with Markwhen (best
opened on dekstop), you’ll appreciate the power of turning plain text
into something beautiful that gives you context of timelines. I see an
immediate use-case being while working on shared projects where you
share your timeline or maybe just learning history in your
leisure-time.
In the spirit of keeping you surprised, we go back to the 90’s and watch the television. Each
channel kept repeating after a while. Nonetheless, a happy trip back the
memory lane (especially the cartoons).
Searching for a place to store your cocktail recipes? cocktailcms to the rescue!
Short little pieces I read this week that I resonated with - Productize Yourself.
I came across it with Town
Hall’s latest post. Gives me solace with the fact that I’m not the
only rando sharing random things.
In the previous editions, I tried sharing interesting links I came
across during the week. I am realizing that it was a bit mundane with
little context. So, I will try something new in this edition.
Remember Michael Nielsen’s
post I shared in the last edition? It sent me down a rabbit hole
trying to find any information archiving tools out there. The first one
that caught my eye was Eaglefiler which gives an
interface to store and tag files, archive webpages and emails and more.
This left me wondering about the archive option we have in our email
interface with many providers. How often have we archived emails, for
memories to look back on conversations we had with people? (let alone
converse with people over emails). Archiving is not optimal if we don’t
have a good enough software to sift through and find relevant
conversations for a given search keyword. Imagine you start to work on a
digital project and would create a folder on your computer with the
project’s name. The folder should ideally contain a lot of PDFs, tables,
archived webpages, even copies of relevant conversations over emails.
Applications like Eaglefilter seem to help us with the same. To note,
one good thing about archiving emails is that the data is stored
locally. Why would you care about that, you may ask? With all kinds of
cloud storage solutions (especially free ones), there is a very good
chance that they may be used to train the provider’s recent “state of
the art” Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing models. At
least, google is being honest about this. Policies of such providers
written online are subject to change at any point in time. For example,
I was glad to host a site on google domains till
I came across this news that states “Squarespace announced its intent to
purchase domain registrations…”. (No google, you decided to sell
google domains to Squarespace!! Don’t sugarcoat it)
Anyways, back to the archiving tools, after looking at the price of
Eaglefilter, I moved on. Then, I came across this youtube video - Researching with
Hazel, DevonThink, Bookends, and Tinderbox Applications. I was blown
away by how people use the right applications to make their workflow
easier. So, what is the solution here? In my opinion, if the digital
work is short-lived and you have money to spend, any latest application
that does the job should work. But if you are looking for a long-term
archival solution, using a lot of different applications for the
workflow is not recommended. The reason being that each application
creates its own format meaning that if the application dies (for any
reason), the custom format becomes inaccessible. Look for applications
that work with and store files as is (Eaglefiler does this to its
credit)
Enough with the rant. To lighten things a bit, here is a site called
Netscrap that is just
jokes collected from around the internet. I found myself spending over
an hour on it and just giggling away. It’s always a nice feeling to find
the little corners of the old internet.
Also, you might find that this edition is being sent from a new email
address. As much as I liked buttondown, the pricing was getting
steep and I have started using Serialmailer. Another upside is
that all your e-mail addresses are now saved locally on the
computer.
Ready to solve a mystery? Read right over to mystery-o-matic for a new mystery
everyday!
Remember your protractor and compass from school? Want to know the
importance of certain angles or directions? Take a peek at degreeswhat
This weekend, we have a nice little article by Michael Nielsen titled
How I use
memory systems. He has been vocal about using memory systems in
everyday lives in a lot of his other articles. I have tried Anki flashcards for a while and I
found it rewarding. Maybe we should make time this weekend to sit and
think about how to formulate a memory system to augment and enrich our
lives.
Neal is back with another scrollable info-site. This time, we look at
the deep sea. Keep scrolling
and explore the organisms in the deep sea. Once you reach the bottom,
you would definitely want to take a look at the book The bathyscaph
Trieste : technological and operational aspects written by Don
Walsh, one of the people who went down to Challenger Deep. A real marvel
of engineering!
Finally, for some weekend activity, why don’t we sit down and make a paper globe?!
Instructions and model are available as downloadable A4 PDF files :)
We start this week with an anthology titled AI Anthology:
Reflections on AI and the future of human flourishing. The series of
essays are from well-established pioneers in different fields and the
objective is to get their input on the contemporary capabilities of AI
and how it can be directed to better serve humanity. Though this can be
seen as a marketing stunt by Microsoft, the inclusion of such wide range
of people and their efforts add credibility to the essays. Time to start
talking about AI during your watercooler-conversations with
colleagues.
For the game of this week, we have Slow roads (best played in desktop
browser). Sit back and ride the endless winding roads. Play around with
settings for different experiences.
If you have tried different organisation systems for your projects or
files, there are always tons of options to choose from, sans your own
improvisation on top of that. A recent Johnny.Decimal
system caught my eye. Maybe starting folder names with numbers are
not so bad after all!
Let’s look at a daily puzzle game
called figure.game. Give it a try for a couple of rounds and you’ll
also have hints popping up to help you. If you are wondering how we can
use computers to solve it, there are a lot of methods. One possibility
is to use something called backtracking. If you feel comfortable with
come code, I suggest you take a look at Peter Norvig’s Solving every
Sudoku puzzle article where he talks about using backtracking to
solve (you guessed it right!) Sudoku problems.
This week, we start again with a browser based activity called
Slide. This is optimal when opened on a phone. Start sliding and see
how weird it gets very soon.
In the spirit of creating this newsletter to share interesting stuff,
I came across a website that does the same. Read Something Wonderful
has a list of some wonderful curated contemporary articles. Start
scrolling and maybe you find something for a nice weekend read.
Taking a detour to physics, a recent re-typeset article surfaced on
Arxiv titled Gravitational
Machines by the one and only Freeman Dyson. This is a humble 4 page
article on a specific setup of astronomical objects and how we can
extract useful energy from gravitation. Though it may take aeons to see
it happen, it reminded me of the rock hopping scenes from the Sci-fi series ‘The
Expanse’ (Started with Netflix and later, taken up by Amazon). I
highly recommend the series if you haven’t watched it yet.
I came across a free 2D space trading and combat game The endless sky. I haven’t
played it yet. But it looks interesting. Hope any of you take interest
and let me know how it is :)
We start with a game that can be played in the browser The evolution of trust This game give
a little introduction to trust from the perspective of game theory. Give
it a go!
Or fancy managing an ecosystem of different species inside a fish
bowl? Try Orb.farm
There is a neat site that explains how semiconductors work from the
level of basic hardware using in-browser graphical interfaces. Try out
Siliwiz
Another week is here and I have more links for you to open :)
How to do what you
love A nice article that reminds us of how we have been shaped and
how to move forward
Things
you’re allowed to do A very nice article on the things you’re
allowed to do in life, but you never thought of. Has many other links
that may be useful :)
The
importance of stupidity in scientific research I would recommend you
to open this in your desktop/laptop to read the margin notes clearly.
Apart from this article, I like this website where they post curated
articles about everything under the sun annotated by the actual people
who are pioneers in the field. Do take a look at their website!
