The Theoretical Minimum: a very short review

I plowed through Susskind and Hrabovsky's The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics over the last month.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

The Theoretical Minimum is a book for anyone who has ever regretted not taking physics in college—or who simply wants to know how to think like a physicist. In this unconventional introduction, physicist Leonard Susskind and hacker-scientist George Hrabovsky offer a first course in physics and associated math for the ardent amateur. Unlike most popular physics books—which give readers a taste of what physicists know but shy away from equations or math—Susskind and Hrabovsky actually teach the skills you need to do physics, beginning with classical mechanics, yourself. Based on Susskind’s enormously popular Stanford University-based (and YouTube-featured) continuing-education course, the authors cover the minimum—the theoretical minimum of the title—that readers need to master to study more advanced topics.

An alternative to the conventional go-to-college method, The Theoretical Minimum provides a tool kit for amateur scientists to learn physics at their own pace.

The publisher's description is accurate, and the book delivers on the promise. It is well-written, clear, beautifully typeset, and covers the topics it sets out to cover.

The problem with this book, I think, is similar to that faced by the MOOC techniques (Udacity, etc.): it is simply very hard for students, even extremely motivated students, to master this material by reading a book. To really learn to do physics, you need to:

• Hear it explained, in a variety of ways, from a variety of perspectives
• Ask questions; stop and get a tough point explained in a different manner when the first explanation didn't click
• Discuss the topics with other students
• Attempt homework problems on your own; have them graded; return to the questions you got wrong, attempt them again, and continue until you can produce the solution yourself.
• See examples of how to apply these techniques to a variety of problems

And so forth.

Perhaps a reasonable approach would be to combine a text such as The Theoretical Minimum with Professor Susskind's video lectures, then blend in something like Professor Michael Scatz's Physics I class on Coursera, and also add in a more in-depth textbook for additional substance.

But time is short; I enjoyed reading Susskind and Hrabovsky, and I'm now moving on to whatever piques my interest next.

Gaming

I'm having an absolute blast playing The Cave with my grand-daughter. I'm sure it can't be easy to design a video game that 52-year-olds and 9-year-olds agree upon, but somehow Ron Gilbert and the team have done so.

Meanwhile, I'm really enjoying the series of articles that have been appearing in the New York Times over the last few months about video games and the gaming industry:

• The Nerd as Auteur in BioShock Infinite

  The word “care,” however, doesn’t come close to capturing the effort that went into BioShock Infinite, an unusually cinematic shooting adventure set in a floating city in which the ultimate goal is to rescue a mysterious young woman. Mr. Levine and a team of 200 have been toiling on the game, the third BioShock installment, for more than four years.

• Same Story, Different Screens: A Video Game That’s Also a Series

  In an unusual arrangement, neither the show nor the video game is a spinoff of the other. Instead, in a process that took five years and three contracts between Syfy and Trion Worlds, the fictional world of Defiance is a collaboration between the companies. The series and the game were developed simultaneously. Each is designed to be a stand-alone piece of entertainment. Yet they also intersect. Events in the show will influence the game. And events in the game will influence the show.

• Thrown for a Curve in Rhode Island

  “It just felt really good, when this all started, to have the sexy sports celebrity from Boston who seemed to like Rhode Island and showed up in Rhode Island, and who built this exotic new business, even though no one knew what it was,” says the historian Ted Widmer, who grew up in Providence and works at Brown. “It seemed like the digital economy, or biotech, or whatever. But then it turned out that it wasn’t the new digital economy. It was some 13-year-old’s medieval fantasy.”

• Where the Artists Are the Superheroes

  The company is the world’s fourth-largest game maker, ranked by sales, after Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts and Nintendo, according to Michael Pachter, an industry analyst at Wedbush Securities. But Ubisoft’s video game production studio in Montreal, where Mr. Measroch works, is one of the world’s largest, with a staff of 2,500. It is here where an overwhelmingly male staff of writers, producers, coders, directors, animators, artists and others come together to create the fantasy worlds of games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, into which millions of people escape.

All these articles are good, and worth reading, and there are more linked from the top-level page above.

I hope the Times continues this recent activity of publishing well-written, well-researched, enlightening articles about an industry that many are completely unaware of.

Meanwhile, since I'm on this topic, let me also point to The quest for Shadow of the Colossus' last big secret

Ozzy turned to forums filled with likeminded, passionate devotees. At first he was looking for canny ways to defeat colossi faster, but he soon discovered something far more mesmerising. The hidden garden at the top of the Shrine of Worship, glimpsed during Shadow of the Colossus' final cutscene, was accessible in-game. This is Shadow Of The Colossus' biggest Easter Egg, teased by the mossy growths, handholds and ledges that weave around the exterior of the structure, but not actually reachable until you've completed the game multiple times. The Secret Garden, as it became known, is a final reward for the most dedicated of colossi-hunters: one last challenge and a glimpse of verdant green beauty in a starkly austere land. But it wasn't enough for Ozzymandias and his fellow fans.

"Are there other places you can get to?" Ozzymandias wanted to know. "What else is there?" he asked. "What else can you do?"

Well-built games have always inspired this level of devotion; I remember obsessing over hidden corners of The Bard's Tale back in 1985. And, hey, Bethesda, what's next?

But for now, the weekend is nearly here, and that means my grand-daughter will be over and we'll be playing The Cave...

Dune, the mini-series: a very short review

Growing up, Frank Herbert's Dune was one of the books that made a huge impression on me. I think I read the book when I was 11 or 12 years old, and I was totally enthralled by it.

Interestingly, when I discuss the book with others, it's odd how we each have different memories of it. For me, I remember being just fascinated by the details of the people surviving in the desert: the special clothing they wore to minimize loss of water, the recycling and re-use of water, locating their houses underground, etc.

Other people were fascinated by the political intrigue (the maneuvering of the Great Houses).

Others were fascinated by the love stories, and by the relationship of women in the book (the main female characters are concubines).

Anyway, it's been decades since I read the book, but I just loved it.

So when I stumbled across the SciFi Channel mini-series on Netflix not too long ago, I decided to give it a try.

It was surprisingly enjoyable. What's a bit odd about the mini-series is that the producers clearly decided to allocate their budget so that they spent most of the money on screen-writing, and much less of the money on special effects, music, etc. For a show made in the year 2000, the visuals are laughable; much of the time it's obvious that the actors are standing in front of large painted backdrops.

However, since Dune is, at its heart, a story about people, not (just) a space fantasy, the result is oddly pleasing. The richness of the original novel comes through strongly, and the story is given a telling that honors it.

As I watched the mini-series, it struck me how much modern works have built on and learned from Dune. Let's see, just for an example:

• The story is set on a faraway planet
• Rapacious industrialists have arrived, bent on scouring the planet of its scarce and unique natural resource, and taking that resource elsewhere to sell
• The resource is so critical that enormous sums of money are spent, and many parties are fighting over the proceeds
• But there are indigenous life forms, and an indigenous population, who love the planet, use its resources wisely, and are prepared to fight to the death to defend it.
• Though the colonizers have superiority in weapons, the locals are fighting for their lives, and their homes, and they drive the outsiders out.

No, not Dune, I'm talking about Avatar.

Of course, I suppose I could be talking about Lawrence of Arabia, or the Last Mohican, or ...

Anyway, cheesy though it is, the SciFi Channel mini-series adaptation of Dune wasn't the worst thing I've watched on Netflix this spring...

A Mother Lode weekend

On a glorious spring weekend, we took advantage of the unexpectedly nice weather for a weekend getaway to the Mother Lode.

Close to our house, California State Route 4 is a commuting artery, funneling fleets of suburban workers into Silicon Valley each day. Farther east, route 4 winds through the Sacramento Delta, and then across some of the richest farmland in the country.

But as you follow route 4 east of Stockton, it enters the foothills near the Civil War town of Copperopolis, and soon rises above the valley floor. From this point, route 4 is one of the most beautiful highways in the country, if not in the world.

At 4,300 feet, Arnold, California is the last town of any size on route 4. It has a supermarket, a hardware store, and the very fine Arnold Black Bear Inn, our home for the weekend. The Black Bear Inn is a beautiful facility, and Wendi and Bruce were superb hosts.

Arnold is about the same elevation as the Yosemite Valley, and slightly closer to the Bay Area than Yosemite is, so it's about a 3 hour drive from home.

Unless you leave during the worst of the Friday afternoon rush hour, in which case you get an extra 45 minutes or so of conversation time with your wife at 8 miles an hour. Which isn't so bad, if you're not in a hurry.

And we managed to get to Arnold in plenty of time to check in and grab a late dinner at the SnowShoe Brewing Company.

Saturday morning, after a wonderful breakfast, we were off "up the hill" to Calaveras Big Trees State Park. The park is home to two groves of California's Giant Sequoia Redwoods, the most magnificent trees you'll ever see.

Immediately inside the park you'll find the parking lot for the North Grove. Grab a couple water bottles and a comfortable pair of shoes and get out of your car! The self-guided nature trail through the North Grove is one of the nicest nature trails I've ever been on. It is wide and well-marked and gentle, a glorious 1.75 mile loop through the trees, suitable for a fast-paced 45 minute power walk, or, as we took it, a delightful 1.5 hour meander.

The Calaveras groves are located at the northern end of the Giant Sequoia's range, so these trees are somewhat smaller than the more famous groves in the National Parks to the south, but these trees are still remarkable. The nature trail booklet does a great job of educating visitors about the trees and their (human) history, and also includes some great tidbits; for example we were tickled that the guidebook described the highly unusual Snow Plant that we saw next to the path: entirely red, the Snow Plant does not contain chlorophyll and performs no photosynthesis, instead manufacturing its energy in a symbiotic relationship with underground fungi.

When you're finished wandering among the trees, climb back in your car and head further into the park. The park road crests slightly over 5,000 feet, then drops a remarkable 1,200 feet in just over a mile down to meet the North Fork of the Stanislaus River.

This is one of the most beautiful rivers in the Sierra Nevada (which is really saying something!), and the State Park road brings you right to the river's edge. Park in the lot next to the bridge and take any of the 5 sets of stairways down to the river side. Unpack your picnic, find a nice shady rock, and the next 90 minutes will pass like the sweetest daydream you've ever had.

After our lunch, we made our way back out of the park and decided to continue exploring "up the hill". Although we didn't have time to make it all the way to Ebbett's Pass, we did manage to make the 45 minute drive up to Bear Valley Ski Area, located at the 7,000 foot elevation.

This has been an extremely light winter in the Sierras, and the ski resort was already closed for the winter, dark and quiet. There were just enough patches of snow on the shady side of the road for us to stop and make a snowman, and then we headed back down the hill to Arnold. The Black Bear Inn makes a delicious afternoon cheese plate, and we joined the other guests in the common room for a wide-ranging discussion about absolutely nothing at all.

Sunday morning, after Wendi & Bruce's signature Pecan-encrusted French Toast, we packed up and headed down the hill to Murphys, California, one of the most famous of California's Mother Lode towns. Mid-morning found the town quiet and not-quite-yet awake, so we decided to start our day by visiting nearby Mercer Caverns before we lost our nerve.

People have been touring Mercer Caverns for 125 years, but the caves are still in very good condition, carefully tended to by the tour guides and staff. Differently from many cave tours, a Mercer Caverns tour is nothing but stairs: 440 stairs in total, equivalent to climbing down 20 flights of stairs and then back up 20 flights of stairs. The tight surroundings require the guides to take visitors down in small groups of 8-10, but allows each group to view the marvelous underground rock formations at close range; many of the most remarkable formations are just inches away!

Once we were done with the exhilarating tour, we were ready to take it easy, so we headed back to town to stroll down Main Street and soak up the atmosphere. I enjoyed a visit to the Old Timers Museum, with a wonderful docent and the great E Clampus Vitus Wall of Comparative Ovation.

Murphys was one of the most active Gold Rush towns; the diggings were so rich that claims were limited to an 8 foot by 8 foot parcel. Several buildings still standing in Murphys date back to the pre-Civil War days, and Murphys Hotel in particular claims many a historic visitor.

We found much to see in Murphys: we particularly enjoyed our visit to the Spice Tin, where we picked up several dry rubs and some curries and fragrant spices; and we spent quite some time sampling the custom Balsamic Vinegar infusions at Marisolio before deciding on the Fig Balsamic (a close winner over the Blackberry/Ginger Balsamic).

Our shopping urges fulfilled, we picked up sandwiches from the Alchemy deli and headed down the road to nearby Chatom Vineyards, a most pleasant winery with a fine garden and delightful shaded picnic tables. Chatom is perhaps not as well known as several other Murphys wineries, but we thought it was an excellent place and well worth the visit.

It's hard to pick any particular favorite from the weekend, but one thing is for sure: after spending three decades in California and somehow never managing to make it up scenic route 4, I'm sure that this visit won't be our last!

MadMen of the new millenium

I've been just unbelievably busy of late. For one thing, we've got a big event this week at work, which is keeping me quite occupied.

But I did finally find 30 minutes to read through the nice article in this month's Vanity Fair about that other software company founded by a Harvard drop-out: Facebook Leans In.

If you've seen The Social Network or watched the 60 Minutes episode or even if you've just been anywhere but buried in a cave above the Arctic Circle, you probably know a lot of this already.

But the article is well-written, and well-researched, and worth reading if you're at all interested about the way that technology, culture, and business are commingling.

A few of my favorite bits:

• A nice look back at how the advertising industry has undergone a series of technology-driven upheavals:

  Month after month, the technology’s popularity grew astronomically. In just one year, the number of users of the free service exploded by 2,500 percent, but still, no one could quite figure out how to make money from this gigantic audience. We’re talking not about Facebook here but about radio, which, at first, like social networks, seemed destined to be a financial flop. And in that tale—and in the history of advertising, from newspapers to Google—lie lessons to remember when considering the prospects for Facebook.

• A succinct summation of how advertising adapted to the Internet, and vice versa:

  companies had access for the first time to people on the verge of buying, with ads displayed only after users signaled their interest in particular products by the words in their searches. Click-throughs, pay-per-click, and marketing based on someone’s intent to buy became widely accepted as the long-hidden secrets that had cracked the code

• A great sound bite about how Facebook once again stood the world on its head:

  There was no click leading to a quick purchase, as with Google, or a push to buy a particular product, as with broadcast commercials. “There was a period when all the [chief marketing officers] said, ‘If you can’t be TV, can you at least be search?,’ because they understood that,” Sandberg says. “But we’re not search, and we’re not TV. We’re a third thing.”

• A solid illustration of that tangling of technology, culture, and business that I mentioned earlier:

  entire divisions have been created within companies with the job of interacting with customers on Facebook. For example, L’Oréal, the cosmetics company, has a staff of 400 people who post content on Facebook every day, according to Marc Menesguen, the company’s chief marketing officer. “It’s a lot of work and requires a lot of commitment,” he says.

• And, although it's just a few words in a long article, a peek at the thought process of the man behind it all:

  “The way we look at it is that, if we are doing our job well, then people will come to Facebook to consume a lot of content,” he said. “If people don’t connect to the advertising content, then it’s not good for anyone. It’s not good for the people using Facebook, it’s not good for the advertisers, and then ultimately we don’t make money.”

Zuckerberg's assessment reminds me of the words of Engine Charlie, who once said

for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa

Our modern Internet behemoths (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, ...) are reshaping the world: The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

It's important to pay attention to the perspective that Eichenwald's story in Vanity Fair brings, because the changing of the world is not simply due to technology; it's more complicated than that.

But that's all about that for now; big day tomorrow, and so to bed...

Spring is in the air ...

... and an old man's thoughts turn to Abe Maslow's (corrected) hierarchy of needs...

• Essentials of Garbage Collection

  How do we teach students the essential ideas behind garbage collection?

  A garbage collector (GC) implementation must address many overlapping concerns. There are algorithmic decisions, e.g., the GC algorithm to use; there are representation choices, e.g, the layout of the stack; and there are assumptions about the language, e.g., unforgeable pointers. These choices, and more, affect each other and make it very difficult for students to get off the ground.

• Stanford NetSeminar - Teemu Koponen (Nicira/VMware)
• Privacy technologies: An annotated syllabus

  Last semester I taught a course on privacy technologies here at Princeton. Earlier I discussed how I refuted privacy myths that students brought into class. In this post I’d like to discuss the contents of the course.

• Jeremy Cole: InnoDB

  I’ve written the following posts about InnoDB internals, structures, and behavior

  I particularly liked B+Tree index structures in InnoDB

  However, the root page itself can't actually be split, since it cannot be relocated. Instead, a new, empty page is allocated, the records in the root are moved there (the root is "raised" a level), and that new page is split into two. The root page then does not need to be split again until the level immediately below it has enough pages that the root becomes full of child page pointers (called "node pointers"), which in practice often means several hundred to more than a thousand.

• The Matasano Crypto Challenges

  Most of the challenges take the form of practical attacks against common vulnerabilities, many of which will be sadly familiar to you from your own web apps. To keep things fun and fair for everyone, they ask you not to post the questions or answers online. (I cleared this post with Thomas to make sure it was spoiler-free.)

• The Planetary Super-Surface of San Bernardino County

  As it happens, though, huge volumes of empty space framed by walls and ceilings are something of the ultimate testing ground for robot intelligence: "Once upon a time, a warehouse was where you stored things for weeks or months, such as toys and canned food that retailers would grab to restock their shelves. Sorting, organizing and moving the inventory was a constant challenge."

  However, now, in this age of empty architectural airspace, "Tracking goods in the modern age of bar codes, scanners and computers is a comparative breeze. The location of every widget can be identified with pinpoint accuracy and fetched by robots that can lift and carry 3,000-pound loads with ease."

• Text of SXSW2013 closing remarks by Bruce Sterling

  And yes — the moral here is that you’re a lot like that. Only they managed to pull that off for one hundred and fifty years, while you’re only twenty-six years old. If I was going to compare you to the Sinagua people of the Southwest, we’d have to imagine this as South By South West 150.

• What are Ethernet, IP and TCP Headers in Wireshark Captures and How Headers Encapsulate in the OSI stack

  Each device along the path from source to destination (user to Youtube in this case) strips the header it is concerned with and imposes the new information in another header wrapping the packet back up for its next hop. The payload remains the same along the way outside of fragmentation but these days Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) has alleviated the need to fragment packets thus reducing overhead on devices in the path.

• The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator, Visionary and Genius

  The graphs were made by a new block chain analysis technique I tested that consist on tracking the ExtraNonce fields in the coinbase field of the coinbase transaction, which is the one that creates bitcoins.

• A Practical Intro to Data Science

  There are plenty of articles and discussions on the web about what data science is, what qualities define a data scientist, how to nurture them, and how you should position yourself to be a competitive applicant. There are far fewer resources out there about the steps to take in order to obtain the skills necessary to practice this elusive discipline.

• Lastly, my former colleague Dave Kellogg is blogging again (Hurray!)
  • Startup CEOs and the Three Doors

    I think most people fail to grasp the commitment that hired (non-founder) CEOs make when joining a startup. First, the new CEO is are typically leaving a perfectly reasonable job to join the startup, so there can be a significant opportunity cost. Second, and more importantly, the new CEO is voluntarily signing up for a situation from which there are only three exit doors — because from the board’s perspective (and the venture capitalists on it) there are really only three possible outcomes

  • The Self-Fulfilling 3x Pipeline Coverage Prophecy

    What management should do is to beat on salesreps to show the real pipeline, as they believe it exists, using well-defined staging and valuation rules. They should never mention the 3x, nor institutionalize any coverage ratio because, once you do so, you can be certain of only on thing: you will have that coverage ratio in your pipeline.

Enjoy your weekend!

Bringing back memories

I lived in west Cambridge when I was 4.

More recently, I lived in Brighton in my mid-twenties.

My daughter went to kindergarden in Brighton; my son was born at St Elizabeth's Hospital.

I worked on the east edge of the MIT campus and rode my bike to work along Western Avenue and through campus everyday.

My wife took the Green Line to the Back Bay to attend classes at Boston University.

I took the Red Line down to Dorchester to attend classes at UMass-Boston.

We used to go grocery shopping at the mall in Watertown.

Boston has had a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week.

But Boston is a Very Wonderful Place, and I know it will recover.

Best wishes, and may the healing begin.