From the New York Times-bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong, himself a world-class geometer, a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything
How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play chess, and why is learning chess so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry.
For real. If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly-remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of 9th grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps, only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. OK, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, a border section that has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel.
Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word geometry, from the Greek, has the rather grand meaning of measuring the world. If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world - it explains it. Shape shows us how.
Category: Read
When I re-made my site with Eleventy, the pages didn't change much, but I had loads of fun adding new features. The most fun was webmentions and I'm here to convince you to add them!
First, let me step back and explain why webmentions exist—the IndieWeb.
This is awesome Amber!
Jeremy Keith (CSS-Tricks)In 2020, I rediscovered the enjoyment of building a website with plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no transpilin’, no compilin’, no build tools other
Amen!
Aaron Davis (Read Write Collect)Clio Chang reports on the rise of Substack. Established in 2017 by Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, it was designed as a platform that allowed users to earn an income. A part of this move is to approach potential contributors. The problem is that it still replicates the patterns of mar...
The narrative fallacy is that past events prefigure the future. It is especially common in biographies, where the subject’s early life is reduced down to a collection of events that suggest that their future path was obvious, if you only knew how to look. It ignores all the other people who did almost the same thing, and ended up somewhere else entirely.
ᔥ in Early December Check-in ()
What we believe in. If I was of college going age, such an institution would be at the top of my list. Also, I was not aware of this blog before the e…
This would be an interesting college!
ᔥ in @c @macgenie What we believe in. ()
After lots of thought and consideration, I have decided to leave my trusty WordPress site behind and switch to a Jekyll based static site.
I mostly wonder how long it takes him to move to Hugo, or some other platform. If you’re as enamored of the shiny bits as much as he indicates, it’s only a minute or two before you’re moving on to the next platform…
Covid-19 has drawn new attention to indoor air pollution. Science has long considered gas appliances to be key culprits.
STONEHENGE'S builders were "way more advanced than anything we ever imagined," historian Dan Snow claimed after visiting the site and making a "remarkable" find.
Raven Black begins on New Year’s Eve with a lonely outcast named Magnus Tait, who stays home waiting for visitors who never come. But the next morning the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby, and suspicion falls on Magnus. Inspector Jimmy Perez enters an investigative maze that leads deeper into the past of the Shetland Islands than anyone wants to go.
Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Brief review
Entertaining enough. I may have ruined it by watching the series first (though I missed this episode somehow.)
There’s a pace here almost as slow as that of the television show and perhaps one that may mirror the pace of life on a small island separated away from the general business of the world.
A generally well crafted mystery here, though there were bits that were guessable. Seemed an odd plot feature to have one person discovering all the bodies though I’m not sure if it added to the mystery of the story in any way, at least for me.
Raven Black begins on New Year’s Eve with a lonely outcast named Magnus Tait, who stays home waiting for visitors who never come. But the next morning the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby, and suspicion falls on Magnus. Inspector Jimmy Perez enters an investigative maze that leads deeper into the past of the Shetland Islands than anyone wants to go.
Finished reading Raven Black
Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)# I'm up early because the supermarket changed our delivery slot and "on this day" reminds me that it's now been over four years since I last posted to Twitter; almost three since I finally deleted my account. I've hemmed and hawed over the years about whether I'd want to go back but that I haven't...
When the business icon died in a fire last week, questions abounded. The answers seem rooted in a Covid-period spiral, where he turned to drugs and shunned old friends.
WarnerMedia’s decision to put all of its 2021 films on HBO Max is a shortsighted decision that will have major repercussions.
Every now and then, researchers are lucky enough to experience a Eureka moment — when a series of facts suddenly crystallize into a an entirely new pattern.
Place names can be quite important if we still remember what any of them still mean. I was looking at some place names in Welsh recently which are more descriptive if you know the Welsh.