These Tom Lehrer videos on YouTube are pretty funny. I particularly enjoyed this lip sync of “New Math” by some kid in a math club (apparently).
TED Talk on how algorithms are shaping our world, with a bit of a focus on computational finance. Rather than watching TV tonight, take 15 minutes to watch this.
This is freakin’ awesome. Learn more here.
"… you tend to regress to the mean of your peers, so surround yourself with the best peers you can find, and learn from them. You definitely learn something by being the biggest fish in a small pond, and you should make sure you get that experience a few times, but you learn more from being surrounded by the best in your field."
"So the short explanation of why this 1950s language is not obsolete is that it was not technology but math, and math doesn’t get stale. The right thing to compare Lisp to is not 1950s hardware, but, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort."
— I enjoy re-reading things that I’ve read before. The above quote is from Revenge of the Nerds. I really like this quote as it is completely in-line with my philosophy on engineering and that is summed up by something John told me about six years ago and it really stuck: “Mathematicians are the best engineers.” This was followed up by “You can never take enough math courses” … so, next time you are thinking about investing in your career, don’t build your vanity muscles, exercise your core, take a math course.
Here is a gentle introduction to the Kalman Filter. As the blog post says, “If you’re humble enough to admit that you don’t understand this stuff completely, you’ll find this material very enlightening.” If you need to get more in depth and apply this to your work, I suggest moving on to this and potentially buying this.
"Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting"
