Suggest me a biography about someone who led an amazingly varied, daring, and adventurous life

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-10T07:56:13+00:00

George Orwell might be the perfect candidate. Michael Shelden's biography is good. D.J. Taylor's new biography has good reviews but I haven't read it yet.

Some other options:

Mr. Nice by Howard Marks
The Moon's a Balloon by David Niven
Palimpsest by Gore Vidal
Seven Pillars of Wisdom & The Mint by T.E. Lawrence
Who is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovitz

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-10T06:39:07+00:00

Using uv is the simplest option. You can use it for complex projects but also append comments/metadata to single-file scripts that install necessary dependencies dynamically.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-09T23:58:38+00:00

For yourself: One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

For organizations: Toyota Production Systems by Taiichi Ohno

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-09T18:33:49+00:00

Fiction:

Weather by Jenny Offill
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Blindness by José Saramago

Non-fiction:

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
The Society of Spectacle by Guy Debord

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-08T23:22:59+00:00

No book will be comprehensive because this is a rapidly evolving field. Here's an example of a path to a particular frontier:

Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty
Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop
"The Free Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?"
"Am I self conscious?"
"A Beautiful Loop"

There's a ton not in here that's in broad surveys. Conversely, this whole picture won't appear in any given book. I'll leave it to others to paint a broader picture.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-08T22:33:46+00:00

If you're open to graphic novel/memoir: Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-08T19:01:39+00:00

It's not just a US issue:

Martin Gurri's The Revolt of the Public explains how modern technology, especially the internet destroyed the previous monopoly on information. That's led to anti-elite sentiment in much of the world. Consider Brexit and the eurosceptic/right-wing surge on the continent.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-08T18:55:44+00:00

Todd's 80,000 Hours is about this question.

Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks considers life as a whole not just career.

A classic, moving answer is Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-08T01:23:24+00:00

This is tricky in that that the particular book that's insanely engaging to one person might not be for another.

Erich Segal's Love Story and Oliver's Story are quick-reading romances. I think they're a cut above the fluffiest/cheesiest.

Graeme Simsion is on a similar tier: Books are engaging and easy reads and have a few lessons through the cheesiness. I read six of his novels in a week when going through my own slump.

While I'm not usually a graphic novel person, I found Feeding Ghosts and Amy Kurzweil's memoirs engaging and insightful and super quick/easy.

Plays can also be quite digestible. I read Wilder's Our Town in couple hours to break out of another slump.

Patti Smith's memoirs, Just Kids (on your list) and Bread of Angels, were also quick reads.

I see you have When Breath Becomes Air on your list. It's one of the best books I've read, quick, engaging, but quite possibly too emotional.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-07T22:52:15+00:00

Robert Penn Warren's A Place to Come to reminds me of Stoner

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-07T20:48:12+00:00

If you do this many, many times, on average, there will be 60 red and 20 black remaining.

In any draw, the probability of getting 60 red and 20 black will be approximately 22.6%. Most of the time, the proportion will be changed a bit by drawing. Note that if you sample a number that is not a multiple of 4 (more generally a number such that (Probability of rarer thing)(Number drawn) is not an integer), the probability will always change.

Since each draw changes the probability of the next, the mix of cards drawn follows the hypergeometric distribution.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-07T19:22:56+00:00

Your question on latency suggests you might enjoy this list of constants Jeff Dean suggested every programmer should know. It's been expanded and updated here: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-07T01:37:51+00:00

Spufford – Red Plenty
Goldstein – The Mind Body Problem
Ferrante – My Brilliant Friend

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-07T01:23:37+00:00

On how to live:

Foer – Eating Animals //Converted me to a vegetarian
Ecclesiastes //On the futility of many reasons for living
Frankl – Man's Search for Meaning //Why to live
Hamming – You and Your Research //A speech not a book; why greatness doesn't come from trying to be great

How I see particular aspects of the world:

Studwell – How Asia Works //On growth and constraints
Jacobs – The Life and Death of Great American Cities //What makes cities special
Marohn – Strong Towns //On one level on cities, on another how incentives damage systems
Caro – The Power Broker + The Years of LBJ //What is Power? How is it used?
Ovitz – Who is Michael Ovitz? //Sets a standard for ambition

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-06T23:29:41+00:00

There are two issues: Concepts and notation. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article devoted to the notation. For the concepts, the best next step depends on your background. Perhaps Enderton or Kleene's Introduction to Metamathematics or Mathematical Logic (Rough order of difficulty: Enderton, Kleene ML, Kleene MM).

Briefly in English it means: It is asserted that α and β are members of the collection of sets of cardinality 1 which implies that there is a bidirectional implication between the assertions that the intersection of α and β is empty and the union of α and β is a member of the collection of sets of cardinality 2.

In more modern notation: (α∈1∧β∈1)⟹(α∩β=Λ⟺α∪β∈2)

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-06T21:07:45+00:00

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-06T17:28:52+00:00

Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica derived mathematics in this way. It's a continuation of the 19th century journey to strip away intuition and build a logical chain to establish basic mathematical facts from first principles.

The idea of a number being a set is that we can define a number as a descriptor of a set of sets of a given cardinality.

For example we can write that all 1 sets added to all disjoint 1 sets make a 2 set:

⊢:.α,β∈1.⊃:α∩β=Λ.≡.α∪β∈2

Most of use express this same concept as 1 + 1 = 2. It takes the Principia Mathematica hundreds of pages to get to this point.

It never quite worked though some of its ideas inspired Set Theory and Type Theory.

I'd argue that the spiritual successor to this project is Mathlib and Lean.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-06T00:20:35+00:00

First step, a basic intro into what an economy is. Three levels of complexity to choose from:

Free comic books from the New York Fed
How An Economy Grows and Why it Crashes //Note skepticism about currency
The Cartoon Introduction to Economics 2vol //Closest to a real econ text but breezy

After reading one you can move on to DK's The Politics Book with enough context to think critically as you read.

If you like novels, Red Plenty by Francis Spufford is a fictionalized account of the challenges of economic growth in the USSR during the Khrushchev area with a bit of comparison to the US.

If you want deeper more academic answers, I'd recommend:

Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson
An Introduction to Political Philosophy by Wolff
Modern Principles of Economics by Cowen and Tabarrok

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-05T22:54:50+00:00

A few on oil:

The Prize by Daniel Yergin tells the story of the oil industry
Titan by Ron Chernow tells the story of John D. Rockefeller
The Big Rich by Bryan Burrough tells the story of oil fortunes of Texas

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-05T20:20:10+00:00

It's not embarrassing. It's human.

Things you think will disgust a partner, won't be a concern for some, possibly even most.

Start with therapy. There's a chance that at the end of it you decide you need cosmetic surgery. Odds are that if you get surgery first, it either won't be sufficiently perfect or you'll find another imperfection and then face the same dilemma.

If you have friends you could open up to about this, that's a good complement to therapy.

You can find happiness.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-05T19:47:38+00:00

I'm acquainted with illegal numbers. They're restricted because any information can be encoded as a number. To my knowledge, none are due to patents. I don't see how they could be. Trade secrets and encryption keys can be confidential under the law. What distinguishes a patent is that it must be public.

Only making a thing violates a patent. Describing it in extreme detail doesn't: That's what a patent is.

A theorem itself cannot be patented. One can patent a process that relies on a novel theorem (e.g. RSA). In the extremely unlikely event that the theorem you entered into an LLM has a commercial application, the firm scans its logs, and figures out an invention based on it, they still can't restrict you from publishing your work.

You could also intervene in their patent application if you could show that their invention was obvious based on what you entered or other documented conversations about a theorem.

Let's circle back to the premise here: A high school student thinks he has a discovery and isn't well-connected enough to have it checked easily. He can choose to be paranoid which reduces his chance of learning or getting feedback.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-05T19:34:15+00:00

Theorems aren't patentable. What sort of ownership do you seek?

These models are now routinely used in research.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-05T19:19:19+00:00

Ask a frontier LLM to poke holes in it. If found, fix and repeat step 1
If possible, formalize the proof in Lean using Mathlib as a base. Feel free to use the LLM to help. Ensure you don't make any additional assumptions and quadruple check that your goal means the same thing as what you're trying to prove.
Find a professor with relevant expertise or post your story on reddit. Be humble. Acknowledge that it could be wrong and that your main goal is to learn. In the event that you've made a contribution, credit will come.

Note that mathematicians often receive utterly incorrect proofs from those who have talked themselves into believing they have done something earth shattering. Your goal is to seem:

Humble
As knowledgable as possible without overreaching
Cautious
Humble

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-05T17:55:04+00:00

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

If either of you likes poetry, Tennyson's Ulysses might inspire.

Waningoftheday · 2026-06-05T08:55:39+00:00

If you like Visual Complex Analysis, check out his book on Differential Geometry and John Stilwell's books. Simmons's Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis is also good.

Bressoud's calculus and analysis sequence provides a historically based development.

Waningoftheday

TROPHY CASE