Some more technical posts on science & math, engineering and product management, art & design, and technology.
Engineering and Product Management
- I wrote about agile product management when I was at AIG.
- I wrote about the great book on operations, The Goal, by Elihu Goldratt, has an excellent audio version. And there’s a video clip of Herbie’s hike.
Art & Design
- A wonderful video that uses Facebook Live’s time delay to build a song from its component tracks.
- In publishing, it’s common to put filler text in designs to avoid people focusing on the text. Normally you use Lorem Ipsum which is a standard Latin text. However, you can also use some other fun filler texts like Bacon Ipsum, Cupcake Ipsum, and more.
- Did you know that there’s a standard design to tell you if your gas cap is on the right or left of your car? This is useful for people like me that are always in rental cars.
- Sometimes there’s a button for a collapsed menu called a hamburger menu. If you click on the hamburger menu on the bottom of the page at Kottke.org you are sent to posts about hamburgers.
- The most famous medical map in the world, John Snow’s Cholera Map.
- There’s a non-standard punctuation mark called the interrobang which is a combination of a question mark and exclamation point. Normally I’d write it as “?!” but using HTML code “‽” I can make the interrobang symbol as “‽”. Isn’t that exicting‽
Technology
- Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is an incredibly powerful tool. To understand how it works, there’s an explanation for kids that’s pretty good for adults. The New York Times explains Google’s AI transformation. Alfred Spector, the former head of Google Research, gives an insightful speech on the opportunities and perils of Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Michael is one of the founders of the widely used POSTGRES database talks about big data, which is a prerequisite for AI. Also, take a look at the TED talks by Pete Haas (my friend from Yale) and Cathy O’Neil (author of Weapons of Math Destruction) to see where we should be suspicious of AI.
- AI Computers Play Video Games. Google’s DeepMind can learn to play video games just by playing games and having no other training. And here’s a video of it learning to play Breakout. Here’s a video of OpenAI playing Hide and Seek…and breaking the Game!
- Human-Computer Interaction. In 2016, I wrote about how computers and people work together and how computers and people work together to solve hard problems. Gary Kasparov gave a great presentation on how computers and humans can partner together to beat both the best human players OR the best computers. Kasparov also did a great write up of his thoughts in the New York Review of books.
Science & Math
- How Numbers Work in the Real World. In school, we were taught that math is linear; however, in the real world, distributions are more likely to be exponential.
- Why Today Can’t Be an Opposite Day. How the statement “Today is Opposite Day” is mathematically inconsistent.
- Game Theory for Parents. Game theory provides some interesting lessons on how to equitably share a piece of pie.
- Festival of the Spoken Nerd is the most adult geeky fun thing that I’ve ever seen. Have a look at their trailer. They have 3 live shows you can buy from their website for about $4 apiece. The math guy, Matt Parker, has his own site Stand Up Maths. He has an amazing video of spreadsheets that’s worth sharing with kids and a fun one on when math goes wrong and probability (the probability part is particularly amazing). He has another talk that inclues some wonderful craft projects you can do at home with a Mobius strip.
- Nontransitive dice are sets of dice that don’t adhere to the transitive principle that if A > B and B > C then A > C. If that seems weird, think about the game Rock Paper Scissors where there’s no best throw.