Sanjoy Mahajan’s book, Street-fighting Mathematics, is about the art of educated guessing and opportunistic problem solving. In problem solving, as in street fighting, rules are for fools: do whatever works—don’t just stand there! This engaging book is an antidote to the rigor mortis brought on by too much mathematical rigor, teaching us how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation. The book is available in traditional dead-tree format and also for download under a Creative Commons license.
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Street-fighting Mathematics
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July 27 2010, 4:26am | Comments »
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Awesome things
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A recent interview with Neil Pasricha, author of 1000 Awesome Things, celebrating the release of The Book of Awesome. His blog — some entries are nostalgic, reflective, but always positive — now gets about 40,000 visits a day, more than 11 million hits in total. His email box is regularly packed with readers’ messages, spilling out their woes and thanking him for lifting their spirits. Neil was one of my editors at Golden Words years ago. He’s incredibly funny and well-deserving of the attention that the site has garnered. I hope the book sells really well, I’ll be pick up a copy when it makes it to this side of the pond, or next time I’m back in Canada. Congratulations Neil!
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April 25 2010, 5:25am | Comments »
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The Alice 100
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The Alice 100 collection at UBC contains hundreds of editions of the Alice in Wonderland, as parodies, film productions, stills and other works by Caroll. This article discusses the collection, and the variety of artwork that it has inspired over the years. In other Alice related news, the British Library has made the first edition of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground available in its entirety, and there’s a version of Alice for the iPad.
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April 15 2010, 4:37am | Comments »
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Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner
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Philip K. Dick never got to see Blade Runner, but thought highly of the preview that he saw before his death. The film by Ridley Scott was an adaptation of his short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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April 4 2010, 6:29pm | Comments »
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Eiffel blueprints
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The blueprints for the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Apparently, they are reproductions from a book titled The 300 Meter Tower, written by Eiffel himself, and published by Lemercier in 1900. I wasn’t able to find an electronic copy of the book (it’s likely out of copyright), but I did come across another book about the tower published in 1889.
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December 27 2009, 1:41pm | Comments »
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Alice as mathematical satire
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The absurdity in Alice in Wonderland is often attributed to drugs or a dark trip into the subconscious. For her PhD work, Melanie Bayley examined some of the most popular scenes from a mathematical perspective, which is summed up in Alice’s adventures in algebra. Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Caroll) was a rather conservative mathematician, who disagreed with many of the new mathematical theories emerging during the 19th century. The madness of Wonderland, I believe, reflects Dodgson’s views on the dangers of this new symbolic algebra. Alice has moved from a rational world to a land where even numbers behave erratically. I don’t imagine that Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland will delve too deeply into mathematical theory.
December 17 2009, 11:08am | Comments »
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Cormac McCarthy on The Road
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A discussion with Cormac McCarthy and John Hillcoat. There’s some information about the film adaptation of The Road, his next novel, and insight into McCarthy’s process. I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing. McCarthy also decided to part with his typewriter, it sold at auction for more than a quarter million dollars. He’s not going digital though, a friend bought him the same Olivetti model to replace the old one.
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December 11 2009, 8:46pm | Comments »
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Bookstore stupidity
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Stupid Quotes from BookMine. You can only wonder what goes on in the heads of some people.
December 10 2009, 11:52am | Comments »
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Barthleme’s syllabus
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Donald Barthleme’s list of must-read literature. Can’t say I’ve read much on the list, but it seems like a good starting point on the way to becoming better read. Phil Gyford posted a full-text list of the books, which is probably a bit easy to print out and drag along with you.
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November 13 2009, 1:37pm | Comments »