John > Recent Status Updates

Surprised at Sowell's characterization of preference for black-letter law under the constrained vision, versus the tradition of common law from precedents.

Also funny to almost characterize Rand as of the unconstrained vision.

The bit about the origin of the wreckers meme as part of the unconstrained vision makes sense; if human reason can overcome nature, the reason your plan is failing must be reasoning enemies.

Some of the diagrams in the weather section were unintelligible, and the explanation of VMG probably should've come before the discussion of using a lee-bow tide to point higher.

Also would've loved to see more discussion of single-handed docking/launching under sail.

I'm not sure I buy his central dichotomy here. It's an interesting account of conservatism derived from Enlightenment thinkers (who are a blind spot for me), but I'm surprised he hasn't connected it to classical or biblical ideas like original sin or Plato's philosopher-kings.

Skimmed vectorization, threading, and multiprocessing chapters. Multiprocessing and threading are tightly-bound to implementations (OpenMP and MPI) and not very general. Discussion of halo cells / ghost cells buried in OpenMP chapter was interesting.

Verdict on algorithms chapter: wrong level of abstraction. Very concrete: here's an incomplete description of a problem that we solved with spatial hashing in our research, here's the code for the spatial hashing technique, graph of speedup. Preconditions unstated. Poor job conveying general structure or intuition behind techniques. Critical parts of eg parallel prefix-sum buried in diagram and not described in text.

I did like the note on better cache behavior of quadratic probing over double hashing at least

This algorithm for finding neighbors of irregular polygons doesn't work correctly if the edge of a single cell continues without bending while in contact with edges of two more cells (like, say, the eastern edge of Wyoming abutting both Nebraska and South Dakota).

Forward reference to prefix sum, a concept introduced later in the chapter, makes this paragraph on performance characteristics of sorting using spatial hashing require rereading later

"The neighbor list of each cell on each side is just one of the [possibly multiple] neighbor cells and the choice is to be the lower cell or the cell to the left of each pair" - sounds like knowingly sacrificing correctness?

This explanation of hashing and hashtables is atrocious; provides a concrete example of inputs and outputs but doesn't clearly describe the hash function being used, and terminologically unclear around hash vs hashtable.

Interesting bits so far: perspective on benchmarking (measure the machine you're running on), fortran array layout, structure-of-arrays vs array-of-structures choice depends on cache access patterns, simple performance models for small kernels, dense representations of sparse 2d arrays (but this approach doesn't generalize to 1d)

This is basically RibbonFarm but trying to be Chaotic Good instead of Neutral Evil, and I think RibbonFarm's Gervais Principle series did it a decade earlier.

The "skin in the game" metaphor is perhaps an interesting lens to evaluate Seeing Like a State high-modernist failures through.

Not sure how I feel about the attitude chapter. This is probably something I need to work on in many areas of life. The logging chapter was alright but an area where I am strong. The concentration chapter is very interesting in light of the meditation literature; power of concentration as something you can "peak" for a particular race like physical fitness is an interesting perspective.

The explanation of apparent-wind sailing left much to be desired. The exercise/fitness advice seems mostly reasonable, if overly-conservative about lifting. The diet advice is unimpressive (as diet advice usually is). Rags on salt as a bad thing in food, completely neglecting its role in retaining water.

The tactics chapter was illuminating for a novice racer. The strategy chapter wasn't bad per se but overlapped with venue preparation. Exercises in the starting and boat-handling chapters look promising. The rules chapter didn't explain mark rounding room well/at all, went straight from definitions to edge-cases. Neat practical explanations of cloud-types and stable/unstable winds in the weather chapter.

A lot of the advice so far has been brief and unspecific. Probably sound, but perhaps difficult to remember due to lack of being linked to specific examples.

This book seems to be assuming a lot of context that I'm missing, and it's hard to say how much of that is temporal (1975-2001), regional (UK), or nautical (What is chine? What is a tabernacle? What is cold molding?).

The chapter on concentration is delightful. Many parallels with meditation literature (including "mind-wandering" as a term, usefulness of setting intention to return the mind to its object of concentration, practicing for half an hour per day), but from a straightforward American Pragmatist perspective aimed at solving problems.

Avoid strong smells when feeling prone to seasickness.
Also, put ten cloves of garlic in the "Heavy Weather Hash"

These tight turn maneuvers combining prop walk and weather-vaning are slick. Which makes the counter-clockwise back and fill all the more puzzling.

This seems like a really weird description of the back-and-fill maneuver, where he's trying to turn counterclockwise rather than clockwise? No wonder he claims it often fails...

The recommendation to eat minimally-cooked sprouted pinto beans seems absolutely crazy to me, seeing as phytohaemaglutinin concentration supposedly increases in soaked/sprouted pinto beans and isn't destroyed by light cooking. I'm wondering if he ever actually tried this with pinto beans or just generalized from mung and adzuki without evidence.

Slow-cooking food in a thermos is genius. The solar still designs are interesting but seem like they're not really built to be taken apart and cleaned / repaired. I'd also be a little worried about the various glues offgassing. The "live food" stuff continues to strike me as crankery.

Ah, the 80s, when you could bring dried fruit back into the US from foreign countries to sell without a permit or anything.

Dude's wrong about spirulina's B-12 content too (it's not bioavailable).

Going through the list of exercises for use of reference material, I think the internet has made the average case much better (I didn't have to go to a library) but there are still lots of types of queries that we don't have good tooling for.

And it took 71 years to complete the Oxford English Dictionary, despite having at least 1300 people working on it at one point

I had no idea the scale of reference works in the pre-computer age - "574 pages of which are given over to the index, which contains about 124,000
entries."

Some of these graphs are wildly misleading, and some terms are used in ways which seem inconsistent with their (rare) uses in the literature. The one claim that I was really interested in when I bought this book seems to have come from only a single source, and I haven't found anything else corroborating it. I'm getting really skeptical here.

This is a pretty unpleasant read so far. Hyperbolic and pop-sciencey, poorly organized, lots of quotes from primary sources taken without context, a fair number of editing errors. I suspect I'm going to just end up mining this for its bibliography.