Stellar Links

date:Dec 23, 2008

We must expect posterity

to view with some asperity

the marvels and the wonders

we’re passing on to it;

but it should change its attitude

to one of heartfelt gratitude

when thinking of the blunders

we didn’t quite commit.

–Piet Hein (Grooks)

Urban Legends

Millions of “Urban legends” are sent every day. How do you recognize one when it arrives? For example, you get a list of terrible injustices, each one where a criminal sues the victim (and wins!) for an injury acquired in the process of committing the crime. We obviously need tort reform . Or do we? Are we being had? The gold standard resource for getting at the truth is the snopes web site.

Open Source

Here is a selection of old open source software links, borrowed from various home pages. For a unique and entertaining set of views on the open source “movement,” you can start with a collection of Eric Raymond’s writings on his home page. This includes his The Cathedral and the Bazaar and follow-on essays, as well as his new book, perhaps finally finished, The Art of Unix Programming. Raymond authored The New Hacker’s Dictionary and is a true character. His writings are required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the roots, influence and significance of the hacker culture.

Particle physics

The Particle Data Group of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab provides a great set of links on particle physics. You can find excellent introductory articles, interactive websites with educational games, and the most recent experimental data. There is also a fine site maintained by Fermilab that gives plain english explanations of recent particle theories and experiments performed at Fermilab. Jatila van der Veen at UCSB has an unusual site with educational materials she developed for teaching physics and astronomy.

History of science

Those of you with an interest in the history of scientific and literary thought and accomplishment will be well rewarded by visiting the Nobel e-Museum. In addition to introductory educational resources such as an educational primer on the structure of matter, this site has biographies, presentation speeches, and nobel lectures of every honoree since the inception in 1901!

Pseudoscience

What is pseudoscience? How can you recognize it? What scams are out there? Here is a nice page on pseudoscience that gives a number of good links. Robert Park has written an interesting book, Voodoo science: the road from foolishness to fraud, Oxford Press, 2000, and he recently wrote an article giving a list of the The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science (original version).

Skeptic’s Dictionary

Assembled by philosopher Robert Carroll, the Skeptic’s Dictionary is an informative, well-hyperlinked and well-researched web document on many topics of contemporary interest. Anyone with a femtogram of curiosity will find it easy to get absorbed in the articles.

Cargo Cult Science

Feynman’s pithy 1974 Caltech commencement address, also reprinted in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!.

Linux computers

If you’re in the market for a Linux computer and are willing to pay a small premium for a good set of components and outstanding service whenever a problem arises, check out Los Alamos Computers, run by mathematician and computer wizard Gary Sandine.

Internet Search

Google, of course.

Google ~Guide

Nancy Blachman has made an excellent web tutorial, licensed under Creative Commons, for search and other features offered by Google. It’s worth spending a couple of hours going through, and if you want more background and tricks, she has co-authored How to Do Everything with Google with Fritz Schneider and Eric Fredricksen.

Great essays and other fun stuff

• Paul Graham’s essays. Paul Graham is an original thinker, and his essays are written with clarity, simplicity and depth. Always provocative and original, Graham goes way beyond programming to some of the central issues of social organization and creativity. And you can buy the dead tree rendition of some of the best, Hackers and Painters, O’Reilly Media, 2004.

• Joel Spolsky’s blog/essays. Joel Spolsky has written hundreds of essays since 2000 on software and many aspects of programming, design and related business. The essays are always well-written, thought-provoking and fun to read. To get a feel for his writing style and approach to programming, see this essay on Making Wrong Code Look Wrong. An outstanding set is collected in two books, Joel on Software (2004) and More Joel on Software (2008).

• Tales from the Mac development team. These are anecdotes about some interesting days at Apple, neatly organized by categories, and recited by Andy Hertzfeld and other key developers. Some of it reads like Dilbert.

• Larry Lessig’s Free Culture. Lessig is one lawyer you don’t want on the proverbial bus at the bottom of the lake. The creator of Creative Commons, (a copyright mechanism for everything), his current ambition is to change the implementation of copyright law for the digital age. We wish him success.

• History of Burma Shave. A journey down nostalgia lane for old timers — some of the best doggerel ever written.

A (true) fable for our time

Ron Avitzur and Greg Robbins tell the story of how the graphing calculator came to be included with the Mac in 1994. Two engineers, in the face of gross managerial incompetence, and working in an Apple culture where defying authority was acceptable, refused to give up their dreams and did something amazing.