- The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Paul Erdős)
The Dirac book is by a physicist, as opposed to a professional biographer. I very much enjoyed it. Dirac crossed paths and interacted with all of the great quantum physicists in the 20th century. He and his work never captured the public imagination in the same way Einstein did, nor did his personality and propensity for teaching resonate like Feynman or Sagan. (Feynman was, of course, an exceedingly brilliant physicist, but I think he was known more by the public for his personality than his QED). But he had a lot of ideas that were ahead of his time, and he was driven by the notion of mathematical beauty. Hell, the Dirac equation was a work of inspired genius that seemed to come from the annals of his mind alone.
Similar to Einstein, his work got away from him, and later in life he was resistant to the beast he helped create (quantum field theory).
Erdős was a prolific, unparalleled genius in number theory, as well as a wandering academic. He was quite inept at self-care, and found shelter based on the hospitality of his friends and colleagues. He never held a permanent position, spending his time trotting the globe to collaborate with interesting folks. I came away from the book feeling quite melancholy about the man and his life. But he seemed to have followed his passion in a way few do. On the other hand, he would likely pity me, the mathematician-turned-physicist-turned-industrial-researcher.
This is pretty interesting. I wonder how the recipe parsers from MyFitnessPal or Pinterest compare to this. Sometimes I think they do pretty good, but often they do miss the mark. My guess is on Pinterest they only treat something as a Recipe if it contains the metadata mentioned in the article, and do the easy parse if so. MFP seems to try something a bit more advanced, but I've never been super-impressed with its parsing abilities.
reddit is what you make of it. That's the whole point of different subreddits and the ability to customize what you see.
Once you get rid of the default subscriptions, the experience becomes way more enjoyable. Smaller subreddits generate less garbage and tend to be moderated better. Even better, you're less likely to see ads-disguised-as-content like you do on /r/pics and /r/aww. No one posts in /r/woodworking or /r/PrintSF because they want to whore some karma. /r/asoiaf has some wonderfully nuanced (if not repetitive due to the lack of new source material) discussions. And so on.
Overall, though, I think the state of /r/AskReddit gives the best summary of reddit's downfall. When I started going on reddit in 2009, the threads there were often interesting, and you didn't have to tag something "serious" to get serious replies. Several years ago, it began to be the case that if you didn't tag something serious, then, well, you would get thousands of comments of _literally_ the same joke. And that's default reddit -- thousands of comments of literally the same joke.
I recently read
- The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Paul Erdős)
The Dirac book is by a physicist, as opposed to a professional biographer. I very much enjoyed it. Dirac crossed paths and interacted with all of the great quantum physicists in the 20th century. He and his work never captured the public imagination in the same way Einstein did, nor did his personality and propensity for teaching resonate like Feynman or Sagan. (Feynman was, of course, an exceedingly brilliant physicist, but I think he was known more by the public for his personality than his QED). But he had a lot of ideas that were ahead of his time, and he was driven by the notion of mathematical beauty. Hell, the Dirac equation was a work of inspired genius that seemed to come from the annals of his mind alone.
Similar to Einstein, his work got away from him, and later in life he was resistant to the beast he helped create (quantum field theory).
Erdős was a prolific, unparalleled genius in number theory, as well as a wandering academic. He was quite inept at self-care, and found shelter based on the hospitality of his friends and colleagues. He never held a permanent position, spending his time trotting the globe to collaborate with interesting folks. I came away from the book feeling quite melancholy about the man and his life. But he seemed to have followed his passion in a way few do. On the other hand, he would likely pity me, the mathematician-turned-physicist-turned-industrial-researcher.