Alan Kay's Reading List
c2.com
c2.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0PDGZKGAWs
NB The Leó Szilárd he mentions was the Hungarian physicist who had the original idea for an atomic bomb while crossing a road in London in 1933, as Richard Rhodes described it:
"The stoplight changed to green. Szilárd stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come."
I knew it was gonna be a great interview... it was.
I went back and checked the transcript of the interview. He told me he reads "somewhere between 200 and 400 books a year, since I was five or so. Depends on the year. And generally a wide range of genres and things. . . most of the sciences."
I am glad to see Csikszenmihalyi on the list as well. Flow is a very powerful concept; we all know it, but understanding it and using it effectively is a different matter entirely.
After reading The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, I realized that all three books are actually talking about the same subject from different perspectives.
To this list, I would add:
anything by Robert Grudin, but especially:
Time and the Art of Living and The Grace of Great Things
How to solve it by G. Polya
Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adams
Nice to see the Mortimer Adler recommendation as well, but I think his How to Read a Book should be a prerequisite for serious reading.
As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that true understanding requires the kind of depth that comes from knowing one's self intimately. It's a lot harder than it sounds, especially for a technologist.
http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2009/4/6/on-keeping-an-um...
"“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”"
As a child, I've been pretty impressed the first time I've been to some friend's home where there was only a few books, the dictionary, the Guinness book of records and a couple of large, picture books that nobody ever reads. I was so alien to me; even at the age of 12 my bedroom had its longest wall entirely covered in bookshelves.
[NB Audible is awesome - I particularly like how you can return a book if you don't like it, something I've only done a couple of times but is a great feature to have].
I still love books :-)
You could spend months alone reading, re-reading, consulting commentaries and attempting to understand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason alone.
But this means there's still a lot of room for "innovation" to build on top of his "inventions" (distinction he made in a talk that[1] was posted here yesterday: invention being creating new things, innovation being the task of bringing them to market). Or if that's not your deal, he laid out the kind of environment that's required to create new inventions. You could try to work in such an environment or create one.
It's probably too late to have the same "early life" that he did, but you've learned to read, if you're here you've probably learned to code, and chances are you've still got at least a couple "lives"[2] left in you.
On the flip side, remember this any time you read someone else's "recommended reading list"... if YOU sat down and wrote your "recommended reading list" it would probably also be very long and impressive as well.. it would just (probably) have a lot of different titles on it.
[prhodes@captainchaos ~]$ whois c2.com
[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
[Redirected to whois.name.com]
[Querying whois.name.com]
[whois.name.com]
Domain Name: C2.COM
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.name.com
Registrar URL: http://www.name.com
Updated Date: 2013-09-30T16:21:59-06:00
Creation Date: 1994-10-23T04:00:00-06:00Cf. loeb
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blow_your_mind#Other
Understanding type theory and set theory is a common side effect of learning Haskell and are critical in understanding Godel.
Also there's never a bad time to learn Haskell.
http://www.amazon.com/Godels-Theorem-Simplified-Harry-Gensle...
I just did some quick googling, and your assertion is the equivalent of owning 1/5 of a smaller sized Barnes & Noble, the smallest of which are around 3000 sq feet, or a fairly large detached 3 story home with maybe 4-5 bedrooms in a suburban area. Yes, Barnes and Noble doesn't organize it efficiently for storage, but for display, my point still stands that 10,000 books in a personal library is extreme.
What yardstick are you using to determine your level of suckage? Is it true? How do you know? If it is true, do you care? If you care, in what way do you care? Does it matter? If it matters, is it important? How so? Hopefully, the books you have read will help with the answers. You may not be able to answer all of these questions (and honestly, the answers don't matter too much), but they might serve to orient you.
I have read a fair number of the books on the list (and many more not on the list) and can truly say that I am a better human being for doing so, according to my criteria.
Most of the good stuff is still in paper!