mjd

For those not familiar with it already, the writing and art style are a well-executed pastiche of Arnold Lobel's ”Frog and Toad” books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_and_Toad

But their record of failing to protect data is rock-solid!

One fun thing about Decameron is that because it's 100 short stories, you can pretty much pick it up anywhere, read a couple, then put it down again. It doesn't require a giant time commitment.

Each day's stories have a theme, so pick a theme that sounds interesting. Except the tenth story on each day is not on the theme, it's told by Dioneo, and it's usually more or less dirty.

There are definitely a couple of those stories that are adapted in The Little Hours. For example, the one about the guy who gets work in the nuns' garden by pretending to be deaf and dumb, and the nuns quickly see the advantages of having a guy around who can't tell tales.

I guess this was written in the early 2000s, while OBL was hiding in Afghanistan?

Short answer: no.

Interesting nevertheless.

You don't think it would be parting the Red Sea?

The comment said that Jaynes's theory was that consciousness historically arose after writing, not that writing or literacy is necessary for individual consciousness.

That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically.

You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.

It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan.

I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.

Incidentally, Ibn Battutah was on the at-my-elbow shelf for quite a while. The elbow shelf is not a static collection. Things move on, then they move off again, as Roget 8th edition did recently.

You've got me thinking that it might be nice to get a translation of _Līlāvatī_ by Bhaskara II to put there. Thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%ABl%C4%81vat%C4%AB

Since you asked, I took a survey around the office. I have the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the one edited by Wallis Budge. I have a Chinese translating dictionary, a Chinese etymological dictionary, and a Hawai'ian dictionary. I have the Yasmine Seale translation of the Thousand and One Nights. I have the Travels of Ibn Battutah. I have Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography. I have a book by Ichisada Miyazaki about the history of the infamous civil service examinations in China. There's a book of poetry by Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah and Weinberger's little book comparing 19 translations of the same poem by Wang Wei. I have "Erotic Art of the East" by Rawson, an illustrated edition of the Rubaiyat, and a history of Iran by someone named Axworthy. I have a couple of books about pedagogy by A. Ya. Khinchin, who was Soviet Russian; I don't know whether you'd consider that "Western".

Of those, only the Thousand and One Nights and the Book of the Dead are anything like canonical. But of the seven I talked about in the article, only the Bible and the Decameron are canonical. I wouldn't have mentioned the dictionaries, except that one of the books in the original article was a thesaurus.

But most of the books I keep in the office are technical (lots of mathematics) or are more or less contemporary Western fiction.

I think some people might see my reading habits as those of a dilettante with a lack of serious focus, and I don't think I would care to dispute that. As I said, my brain is full of stuff, and and what's in it doesn't always make sense or go together with the other stuff.

Thanks! I'm a big fan of David Macaulay's other books, but I've never liked _The Way Things Work_.

_Castle_ and _Umderground_, though I love.

One really nice thing about Pseudodoxia Epidemica is that you don't have to read it cover to cover. You can pick it up, read the bit about whether “a Diamond is made soft, or broke by the blood of a Goate”, or what he has to say about Pope Joan (a woman who supposedly tricked the college of cardinals into electing her pope) and put it down gain ten minutes later. It's great bathroom reading.

I do own more than these seven books.

The Netflix series is an "inspired by", not an adaptation. It does not have much in common with the original book other than the setting and the names of some of the characters.

I enjoyed it, and I absolutely loved Tanya Reynolds, who is hilarious. But Bocaccio's Decameron it is not.

The one in TFA is Harper and Row, and the later 8th Edition, published by Harper Collins, is also organized the correct way. I think you'll be safe if you can get a Harper version.

The current front-runner is “The Crazy Ape” by Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering ascorbic acid.

It's about how war is perpetrated by the old against the young. I've carried it next to my heart since I was fourteen.

Also, it's quite short and will definitely fit in the space.

A bit more about it: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/116411220100252049

And I bet you won't guess what any of them are.

I was surprised that Gruhn didn't include this in his list of problems where the NP-hardness is not that important in practice.

I think the Ford-Fulkerson maximum flow algorithm may be another example.

One of my life goals is to fully understand Jean Gallier's paper about Kruskal's theorem and the Feferman-Schütte ordinal.

Ignore the title of the blog itself (“Funny AI Fails”). I confirmed with the author that he wasn't kidding:

* He gave ChatGPT a single 300-word prompt describing an open problem in his area of expertise, game theory, and asked it to write a complete paper

* It thought for 90 minutes and wrote the paper without any guidance

* “If this had been an advanced undergraduate doing a semester-long independent study, I imagine it would have very easily been an A and I would have encouraged the student to work on it just a bit more to submit it for publication somewhere.”

Something in the main game page runs my Firefox process up to 100% CPU.

I know your comment wasn't. What do you feel you're bringing to the conversation? Are HN readers going to see your comment and say “Good thing this anonymous rando spoke up or I would have wasted my time!”

The author is a mathematician, so when he says “it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code” he does not mean it is completely impossible to find bugs. He means only that it is not possible to find all bugs or even any particular bug.

In “The Origin of Consciousness” Julian James argues that human consciousness substantially predates language and even writing.

For example he contrasts the language in the Iliad (which he claims was written before the development of consciousness) and the Odyssey (which came after).

I've been having fun getting better at understanding where the letters begin and end. Something like this is easy for me now:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-516170388361w7xlt8c...

Next I'm going to learn the rest of the letters and try to start reading menus.

I think you left out an important technical advance: A theory of parsing was developed, parsing was systematized, and automatic parser generators were developed.

Parsing in 1992 was very much a solved problem. In 1974, writing a parser was still hard.

One of the reasons I was so interesting to find this thing I had written was that things had (in some ways) changed so little in thirty years.

Today I was re-reading Donald Knuth's 1974 paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” where he says:

“At the present time I think we are on the verge of discovering at last what program- ming languages should really be like. … My dream is that by 1984 we will see a consensus developing for a really good programming language (or, more likely, a coherent family of languages).”

Hoo boy, was he ever wrong.

Not from the chatbot. From me. I'm the one who sent the message.

And it wasn't inauthentic. I wanted to be polite and inoffensive, but I didn't know how.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but yes, I believe there is. Your own personal preferences are not universal.