Not my "cup of tea", but certainly a record holder is Agatha Christie whose 66 detective novels and 15 short-story collections have sold over two billion copies, an amount surpassed only by the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.
In years past, my preferred crime writer was Walter Mosley, who wrote the Easy Rawlins series among his output of 70 novels. A Jewish African-American, he was at one time a computer programmer. He turned to novel writing at 35 years of age.
I used PhET Circuit Simulations in a classroom of 14-year-olds. Luckily, I had: (1) the freedom to space the tasks over a number of hour-long lessons; (2) plenty of equipment to also build the circuits; and (3) a lab assistant to make sure the multimeters were working. The PhET simulations allowed the students to construct circuits before setting them up with actual wires and resistors. Also, I could see which students completed the PhET simulations first and move them over to setting up the actual circuits. They worked as a couple of groups to build the physical circuits while the slower students kept working on the PhET simulations.
I helped those students who were building physical circuits, helping them to remedy their missteps. Then those students became group leaders once all students moved on to building physical circuits. Each group would always have some difficulty, but having "experienced" group leaders meant there were far fewer problems for me to solve.
A key understanding was that there were always discrepancies between the theoretical results of the PhET and the actual results from the physical circuits. The main source of these discrepancies was simply explained as the extra resistance provided by the wires. Evaluation was accomplished by the students building different circuits that I drew on the whiteboard and writing a report that included a photo of their group with their circuit(s).
The development of the lithium-ion battery is an example of how scientific discovery does not have a straight-line trajectory.
How We Got the Lithium-ion Battery
"One notable thing about the evolution of the lithium-ion battery is how hard it is to predict the trajectory of research, and how important it is to allow researchers the flexibility to pursue what they feel is promising. Whittingham stumbled across an intercalation-based battery when researching fast-ion transport through a solid electrolyte, an entirely different phenomenon. And his invention of the first lithium-ion battery cathodes was the result of a serendipitous discovery during work on superconductors. Thackeray discovered the manganese oxide cathode at Oxford ... for a year’s sabbatical so he could pursue the battery ideas he found promising. Early research on a graphite-based anode, performed by Rachid Yazami, was originally aimed at discovering a graphite-based cathode, not an anode, and Akira Yoshino’s battery efforts at Asahi Chemical were pursued in spite of the fact that company thought very little of the battery market, and only bore fruit because the company didn’t actively try and stop him. Likewise, the discovery of ethylene carbonate as an electrolyte that would allow graphite to be used as an anode was an accidental discovery by Moli Energy.
This sort of trajectory, of course, makes it hard to capture the value of research, or to have anything like a reliable, predictable path by which scientific research gets turned into marketable products. Exxon’s efforts to develop a practical rechargeable battery ultimately failed, though its research would spawn a successful battery in the fullness of time."
I don't think LLMs are suitable for chess. Witness the result of a chess game this year between ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Gemini (Google AI). The LLMs had a very poor record at picking legal moves, let alone good moves:
"Gemini's mistakes and ChatGPT's misses tell a lot of the story. One AI kept giving the other one opportunities, the other kept refusing those gifts. The good news for ChatGPT is that it made more "Good" or better moves than Gemini made mistakes and blunders. The bad news for Gemini is, well, almost everything that happened. ...
The final illegal move tally was Gemini 32, ChatGPT 6. That makes sense; it would have been crazy if the AI good enough to win was also bad enough to make more illegal moves. But it also means Gemini only went 50% in picking a legal move, while ChatGPT was over 80%."
Okay, here goes nothing. My small take on the Excel story.
The year was 1986, pre-spreadsheets. Writing up an undergrad physics experiment in 1986, I needed to do a hundred or so similar calculations and present the results in a table. Luckily, a computer science acquaintance wrote a small program to do this task for me. Thanks, Dan.
In 1989, before Excel, there was Lotus 1-2-3. Loved that spreadsheet software. My PhD task involved plotting lots of data points, including smoothing some of them. Doable with Lotus 1-2-3, probably not doable otherwise.
More recent times.
Spaghetti Excel. An engineering acquaintance told me his student summer job, at an aluminum refinery, was to check and simplify their Excel spreadsheets. Apparently they had numerous spreadsheets linked to each other. I assume the main purpose was inventory control. I know I didn't envy him his task.
"Please, not just Excel." I took a class of high school students to a uni chem lab and had a small argument with a chemistry tutor who insisted the students use Excel to plot their data. I wanted them to first do it by hand with graph paper. This would have given them a much better feel for their data.
"Rinse-and-repeat Excel". I was tutoring a construction guy trying to learn maths. His job as an assistant on a high-rise construction job involved putting lots of numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. The check for this was to repeat the process and see if he got an identical result. I thank G*d his boss made him do this.
And that's it. Helped other people to use Excel, but I'm thankful that I haven't had to spend my life inputting data into spreadsheets.
Wow, this guy has been writing the code for card games for 10+ years. And the number of games has certainly grown. I remember when he had only coded about 3 games. No bridge, of course; it is the most complex of card games. The main differences being that bridge uses the whole pack, which create many bidding levels, and that one hand becomes exposed after the bidding, giving greater accuracy to the play.
When I used NMR scientific instruments that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1990s, the Japanese (Jeol) machines had a far more straightforward interface than the German (Bruker) machines.
Of course, the study of how living cells function is "hard". But that doesn't mean it has to be learnt without joy. We tend to explore things we enjoy. A lot of the writer's essays [1] are about finding some aspect of a topic intriguing and following that rabbit hole.
My own research centered on one subset of functions within E. coli. I was lucky that I found a carefully engineered subset of plasmids and adaptions of E.coli, that could be mathematically modelled [2] [3]. I didn't have to know the whole functioning of E. coli. I didn't have to use mathematics beyond algebra. That is, no calculus was needed. The key task was to put together the quantitative research of about half a dozen labs. Okay, I had a "mountain" of articles to read. And it took 5 years of effort. But it was only doable, because I was modelling a carefully constrained subset of cellular functions.
A suggestion: I enjoyed one short online computer course I studied, because we were given other students' submissions to assess. I recall using both my own code and the code of another student to suggest improvements in a third student's code. I am talking mainly about small tasks such as coding a function.
To me this is just formalising what students do anyway: namely, help each other understand and complete tasks in a course. The difference is that the instructor is actively giving students access to other students' code. I found the process motivated me to get stuck into a task, rather than leaving it to the last minute.
Reading the transcript of Bill Gates's (Nov 16) interview with Yejin Choi (University of Washington / Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence), one gets the impression that AI is still in its teething stages:
YEJIN CHOI: Usually, the smaller models cannot win over ChatGPT in all dimensions, but if you have a target task, like a math tutoring, I do believe that definitely, not only you can close the gap with larger models, you can actually surpass the larger model’s capability by specializing on it. This is totally doable, and I believe in it.
BILL GATES: Certainly for something like drug discovery, knowing English isn’t necessary. It’s kind of weird, these models are so big that very few people get to probe them or change them in some way. And yet, in the world of Computer Science, the majority of everything that was ever invented was invented in universities. To not have this in a form that people can play around with, and take a hundred different approaches to play around with, we have to find some way to fix that, to let universities be pushing these things, and looking inside these things.
YEJIN CHOI: I couldn’t agree with you more. It cannot be very healthy to see this concentration of powers so that the major AI is only held by a few tech companies, and nobody knows what’s going on under the hood. That’s just not healthy. Especially when it is extremely likely that there is a moderate size solution that is open, that people can investigate and better understand and even better control, actually. Because if you open it, it’s so much easier for you to adapt it into your custom use cases, compared to the current way of using GPT-4, which all that you can do is sort of a prompt engineering, and then hope that it understood what you meant.
I recall reading an interview of a higher-up in the Saudi government. He was asked why he doesn't have multiple wives. He replied that he doesn't have enough free time for that lifestyle. His grandfather was a tribesman: they raided other tribes about once a month to get what they needed. His father was a farmer/grazier: he worked about once a week. He, himself, is a government official and works most days.
Team sports require coordination between players. I never really appreciated how important it was to develop this.
The sport I want to mention briefly is Rugby. This is a catch, run and pass game. We would practise these three skills: catching, running and passing. The skill we didn't practise much was "communicating". One of our players had been coached by a national representative: this teammate told us that if you wanted to tell the person immediately beside you about your intentions you said "okay", if you were going to run to his left to get the ball, and "right-oh", if you were going to run to his right. Okay = left; right-oh = right. The beauty of this is that you intentions are instantly clear.
However, we never regularly practised this dynamic communication skill. Most of our practise time was spent practising set patterns. But in the heat of the battle, it is more effective to have a constantly adaptable attack.
I also quickly went through the basic tasks in 17 levels of Hedy in about 20 mins. (I just know a little programming.) Hedy is text-based and introduces ideas such as: print, entering variables, if, else, repeat, ... I really liked the gradual approach, which keeps you going forward onto the next level.
There are additional tasks at each level (see tabs at top) which I didn't try. It seems that these tasks are best done from left to right in order to get the basic idea of what is required.
Can it be argued that the cause of the Industrial Revolution was man's insatiable appetite for using our planet's resources? A recurring theme in our history!
Great Britain was an island. By about 1500, its residents had denuded most of its forests for fuel for cooking and heating. So, they turned to using coal. This spurred the need to pump water out of coal mines. The Industrial Revolution represents the uses of these steam-driven pumps for other tasks, such as textile manufacture and steam trains.
"[M]ost of Great Britain’s forests seem to have been cleared for agriculture in antiquity; by 1000 only about 15% of England (as a geographic sub-unit of the island) was forested, a figure which continued to decline rapidly in the centuries that followed (down to a low of around 5%). Consequently wood as a heat fuel was scarce and so beginning in the 16th century we see a marked shift over to coal as a heating fuel for things like cooking and home heating. Fortunately for the residents of Great Britain there were surface coal seems in abundance making the transition relatively easy; once these were exhausted deep mining followed which at last by the late 1600s created the demand for coal-powered pumps finally answered effectively in 1712 by Newcomen."
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
My wife and I missed out on having kids. We wanted kids but it "didn't happen". Yes, I used to also lie awake at night. My wife went through the demanding IVF schedule a couple of times. I admire her for that.
How do we cope?
I was a school teacher and now being a tutor has given me some interaction with teens. I am grateful for this.
My wife loves animals. I think our pets have given her something to cuddle and care for.
I think the only bonus to not having had kids is that we have missed out on the pain that friends have gone through when their child has died through an accident or health problem.
In years past, my preferred crime writer was Walter Mosley, who wrote the Easy Rawlins series among his output of 70 novels. A Jewish African-American, he was at one time a computer programmer. He turned to novel writing at 35 years of age.