Tag: Books

Remembering Prof. Wilhelm Macke

A recent migration of (some of my) domains made a link on Wikipedia go into the void of a 404. It was a brief, German article on another – now extinct – German website of mine, linked by the article on Wilhelm Macke. In order to keep it alive though, I am copying the article…
Poetry: Dynamical Variables and Observables

The lines of the following poem are phrases selected from consecutive pages of the second chapter of Paul Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Fourth Edition, Dynamical Variables and Observables. we may look upon the passagefor the triple product We therefore make the general rulein spite of this fundamental difference which conforms with our notationThe rule…
Poetry: The Principle of Superposition

The lines of the following poem are phrases selected from consecutive pages of the first chapter of Paul Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Fourth Edition, The Principle of Superposition. ~ one would be inclined to thinkThere must certainly be some internal motion from general philosophical groundswe cannot expect to find any causal connexion observe what…
Pendulum

I was reading a scholarly thesis about Austria’s history of energy engineering and politics. Our only nuclear power plant was built and ready to go at the end of the 1970s. Only after it was completed a referendum was held, and 50.5% of voters decided against ever putting it into operation. The plant turned into…
Computers, Science, and History Thereof

I am reading three online resources in parallel – on the history and the basics of computing, computer science, software engineering, and the related culture and ‘philosophy’. An accidental combination I find most enjoyable. Joel on Software: Joel Spolsky’s blog – a collection of classic essays. What every developer needs to know about Unicode. New terms…
Ploughing Through Theoretical Physics Textbooks Is Therapeutic

And finally science confirms it, in a sense. Again and again, I’ve harping on this pet theory of mine: At the peak of my immersion in the so-called corporate world, as a super-busy bonus miles-collecting consultant, I turned to the only solace: Getting up (even) earlier, and starting to re-read all my old mathematics and…
Learning General Relativity

Math blogger Joseph Nebus does another A – Z series of posts, explaining technical terms in mathematics. He asked readers for their favorite pick of things to be covered in this series, and I came up with General Covariance. Which he laid out in this post – in his signature style, using neither equations nor…
Social Debt (Tech Professional’s Anecdotes)

I have enjoyed Ben Horowitz’ book The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Farnamstreet’s review is perfect so I will not attempt at writing one. I will focus on one idea I found most intriguing. I read Horowitz’ book as an account of dealing with hard decisions in general, about having to decide alone, about personal accountability,…
Virtual Book Spine Poetry (Edition 2014 + 2015/6)

I am going to merge two overdue posts: 1) the 2014 edition of my yearly book reviews, a tradition I started last year, and 2) my next experimental poem, in a new experimental genre. I owe to the inventors of Book Spine Poetry – and I’d like to challenge this: You can’t do that with ebooks.…
We Should Get Lost Sometimes – Nicholas Carr on Automation and Us

The Glass Cage is about automation’s human consequences. It is not intended to be your typical book about robots taking our jobs for better or for worse. Carr gives an intriguing account of the history of automation and robotics nonetheless – from Luddites to Google’s self-driving cars. What we have known intuitively is backed up…
Looking Foward to ‘The Glass Cage’ – Random Ambiguous Thoughts

On September 29, Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage – Automation and Us will be released. I have quoted Carr’s writings often on this blog, and his essay All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines might anticipate some of the ideas he is going to explore in…
When I Did Social Engineering without Recognizing It

I planned to read something about history this summer. Then I picked the history of hacking. My favorite was Kevin Mitnick’s autobiography – the very definition of a page-turner. The book is free of hardcore technical jargon and written for geeks and lay audience alike. Readers are introduced to the spirit of a hacker in…
5 Years Anniversary: When My Phone Got Hacked

I like to play with phones. 5 years ago my cell phone decided it wanted to play on its own. It did participate in a TV voting – so the provider said and the itemized bill proved. This was for a music show I wouldn’t even watch if somebody paid me for doing so. The…
I Picked the Right Blogging Platform! (Book Review: The Year without Pants)

Before starting this blog I compared blogging tools in 2011. These two facts about WordPress and Automattic did win me over: Now I have read the book on Automattic’s corporate culture: The Year without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun Scott is a former Microsoft manager and long-term author and speaker.…
Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Strange Loops: Nostalgia and Random Thoughts

I am curious – who read the book, too? Did you like it? I read it nearly 30 years ago and I would also tag it one of the most influential books I read as a teenager. [This might grow into a meandering and lengthy post with different (meta-)levels – given the subject of the post I…
Hacking the Biological Clock

I need to rant before I will borrow one hour of my life to some technocrats tomorrow – that will give it back to me in October. So the subtitle is: I hate Daylight Savings Time! Daylight Savings Time was inspired by a whimsical essay by Benjamin Franklin (probably not the first time that politics fell for something…
How to Introduce Special Relativity (Historical Detour)

I am just reading the volume titled Waves in my favorite series of ancient textbooks on Theoretical Physics by German physics professor Wilhelm Macke. I tried to resist the urge to write about seemingly random fields of physics, and probably weird ways of presenting them – but I can’t resist any longer. There are different…
Generation X. (I Resist Adding a More Zeitgeisty Header.)

Yes, this is really about Douglas Coupland’s landmark book. Generation X comprises people born between early 1960s and early 1980s. Thus I am perfectly average Gen X, and I re-read this book once in a while. As for the content I cannot do better than the blurb: Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a…