note | Chris Aldrich

🔖 Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior by Robin Dunbar (Oxford University Press)

🔖 Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior by Robin Dunbar (Oxford University Press) marked as want to read.
Official release date: November 1, 2016
09/14/16: downloaded a review copy via NetGalley

Description
The story of human evolution has fascinated us like no other: we seem to have an insatiable curiosity about who we are and where we have come from. Yet studying the “stones and bones” skirts around what is perhaps the realest, and most relatable, story of human evolution – the social and cognitive changes that gave rise to modern humans.

In Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior, Robin Dunbar appeals to the human aspects of every reader, as subjects of mating, friendship, and community are discussed from an evolutionary psychology perspective. With a table of contents ranging from prehistoric times to modern days, Human Evolution focuses on an aspect of evolution that has typically been overshadowed by the archaeological record: the biological, neurological, and genetic changes that occurred with each “transition” in the evolutionary narrative. Dunbar’s interdisciplinary approach – inspired by his background as both an anthropologist and accomplished psychologist – brings the reader into all aspects of the evolutionary process, which he describes as the “jigsaw puzzle” of evolution that he and the reader will help solve. In doing so, the book carefully maps out each stage of the evolutionary process, from anatomical changes such as bipedalism and increase in brain size, to cognitive and behavioral changes, such as the ability to cook, laugh, and use language to form communities through religion and story-telling. Most importantly and interestingly, Dunbar hypothesizes the order in which these evolutionary changes occurred-conclusions that are reached with the “time budget model” theory that Dunbar himself coined. As definitive as the “stones and bones” are for the hard dates of archaeological evidence, this book explores far more complex psychological questions that require a degree of intellectual speculation: What does it really mean to be human (as opposed to being an ape), and how did we come to be that way?

🔖 Complex Analysis by Elias M. Stein & Rami Shakarchi

🔖 Marked Complex Analysis by Elias M. Stein & Rami Shakarchi as currently reading in relation to UCLA class Introduction to Complex Analysis

📖 5.0% done with Complex Analysis by Elias M. Stein & Rami Shakarchi

A nice beginning overview of where they’re going and philosophy of the book. Makes the subject sound beautiful and wondrous, though they do use the word ‘miraculous’ which is overstepping a bit in almost any math book whose history is over a century old.

Their opening motivation for why complex instead of just real:

However, everything changes drastically if we make a natural, but misleadingly simple-looking assumption on $f:$ that it is differentiable in the complex sense. This condition is called holomorphicity, and it shapes most of the theory discussed in this book.

We shall start our study with some general characteristic properties of holomorphic functions, which are subsumed by three rather miraculous facts:

Contour integration: If $f$ is holomorphic in $\Omega$ , then for appropriate closed paths in $\Omega$
$\int\limits_\gamma f(z)\,\mathrm{d}z = 0.$

Regularity: If $f$ is holomorphic, then $f$ is indefinitely differentiable.

Analytic continuation: If $f$ and $g$ are holomorphic functions in $\Omega$ which are equal in an arbitrarily small disc in $\Omega$ , then $f = g$ everywhere in $\Omega$ .

This far into both books, I think I’m enjoying the elegance of Stein/Shakarchi better than Ahlfors.

📖 5.0% done with Complex Analysis by Lars V. Ahlfors

📖 5.0% done with Complex Analysis by Lars V. Ahlfors

🔖 Complex Analysis by Lars Ahlfors

🔖 Marked Complex Analysis by Lars Ahlfors as currently reading in relation to UCLA class Introduction to Complex Analysis

My first pull request

Replied to My first pull request by

Clint Lalonde (ClintLalonde.net)

Crazy to think that, even though I have had a GitHub account for 5 years and have poked, played and forked things, I have never made a pull request and contributed something to another project unti…

Clint, first, congratulations on your first PR!

Oddly, I had seen the VERY same post/repo a few weeks back and meant to add a readme too! (You’ll notice I got too wrapped up in reading through the code and creating some usability issues after installing the plugin instead.)

Given that you’ve got your own domain and website (and playing in ed/tech like many of us are), and you’re syndicating your blog posts out to Medium for additional reach, I feel compelled to mention some interesting web tech and philosophy in the #IndieWeb movement. You can find some great resources and tools at their website.

In particular, you might take a look at their WordPress pages which includes some plugins and resources you’ll be sure to appreciate. One of their sets of resources is allowing you to not only syndicate your WP posts (what they call POSSE), but by using the new W3C webmention spec, you can connect many of your social media resources to brid.gy and have services like twitter, facebook, G+, instagram and others send the comments and likes on your posts there back to your blog directly, thereby allowing you to own all of your data (as well as the commentary that occurs elsewhere). I can see a lot of use for education in some of the infrastructure they’re building and aggregating there. (If you’re familiar with Known, they bake a lot of Indieweb goodness into their system from the start, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t have it for your WordPress site as well.)

If you need any help/guidance in following/installing anything there, I’m happy to help.

Congratulations again. Keep on pullin’!

Reply to Scott Kingery about Wallabag and Reading

Replied to a post by

Scott Kingery (TechLifeWeb)

Chris, as a kind of sidebar to this, we talk about hosting things on our own site. I’ve always kind of thought this should be 1 piece of software we use for everything. I think that way becau…

Scott, as someone who’s studied evolutionary biology, I know that specialists in particular areas are almost always exponentially better at what they do than non-specialists. This doesn’t mean that we don’t need alternate projects or new ideas which may result in new “Cambrian explosions,” and even better products.

I also feel that one needs the right tool for the right job. While I like WordPress for many things, it’s not always the best thing to solve the problem. In some cases Drupal or even lowly Wix may be the best solution. The key is to find the right balance of time, knowledge, capability and other variables to find the optimal solution for the moment, while maintaining the ability to change in the future if necessary. By a similar analogy there are hundreds of programming languages and all have their pros and cons. Often the one you know is better than nothing, but if you heard about one that did everything better and faster, it would be a shame not to check it out.

This said, I often prefer to go with specialist software, though I do usually have a few requirements which overlap or align with Indieweb principles, including, but not limited to:

It should be open, so I can modify/change/share it with others
I should be able to own all the related/resultant data
I should be able to self-host it (if I want)
It should fit into my workflow and solve a problem I have while not creating too many new problems

In this case, I suspect that Wallabag is far better than anything I might have time to build and maintain myself. If there are bits of functionality that are missing, I can potentially request them or build/add them myself and contribute back to the larger good.

Naturally I do also worry about usability and maintenance as well, so if the general workflow and overhead doesn’t dovetail in with my other use cases, all bets may be off. If large pieces of my data, functionality, and workflow are housed in WordPress, for example, and something like this isn’t easily integrateable or very difficult to keep updated and maintain, then I’ll pass and look for (or build) a different solution. (Not every tool is right for just any job.) On larger projects like this, there’s also the happy serendipity that they’re big enough that WordPress (Drupal, Jekyll, other) developers can better shoehorn the functionality in to a bigger project or create a simple API thereby making the whole more valuable than the sum of the parts.

In this particular situation, it appears to be a 1-1 replacement for a closed silo version of something I’ve been using regularly, but which provides more of the benefits above than the silo does, so it seems like a no-brainer to switch.

To reply to this comment preferably do so on the original at: A New Reading Post-type for Bookmarking and Reading Workflow

Reply to: Getting started owning your digital home by Chris Hardie

Replied to Getting started owning your digital home by

Chris Hardie (Chris Hardie)

My recent post about owning our digital homes prompted some good feedback and discussion. When I talk about this topic with the people in my life who don't work daily in the world of websites, domain names and content management, the most common reaction I get is, "that's sounds good in theory, I'm not sure … Continue reading Getting started owning your digital home

Chris, I came across your post today by way of Bob Waldron’s post WordPress: Default Personal Digital Home (PDH).

Both his concept and that of your own post fit right into the broader themes and goals of the Indieweb community. If you weren’t aware of the movement, I highly recommend you take a look at its philosophies and goals.

There’s already a pretty strong beachhead established for WordPress within the Indieweb community including a suite of plugins for helping to improve your personal web presence, but we’d certainly welcome your additional help as the idea seems right at home with your own philosophy.

I’m happy to chat with you about the group via website, phone, email, IRC, or social media at your leisure if you’re interested in more information. I’m imminently findable via details on my homepage.