Diskurswelt.de

You are in Bamberg. It’s minus 15 degrees. Celsius. Now add some snow.

I shot these photos yesterday at around five o’clock (except the last two). Please bear in mind that my fingers were almost freezing and I did not have a tripod, so the quality is only sub par. I hope you can enjoy looking at them anyway. Let’s dream of a white Christmas…

A mathematician and a professor of computer science sit down to write a book about Bertrand Russel, a British philosopher, mathematician and logician, and his quest for certainty in mathematics.
Boooooring! you think (unless you study Computer Science). Far from it!

Recently I read a New York Times review on Logicomix – An Epic Search for Truth. The said book by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou is in fact a graphic novel, i.e. a comic!
I was hooked. A moment later I had already hit the buy button on amazon’s marketplace to import it from the UK. Yesterday it finally arrived:

I almost read it in one go and really had to force myself to stop reading late last night in order to be able to get some sleep. First thing I did this morning was to continue.

The book is colored, well-drawn and has a very clever narrative structure that involves several layers. The authors depict themselves struggling to write the book and discussing its contents. They talk about Bertrand Russel’s talk on The Role of Logic in Human Affairs in which he tells the audience the story of his life and the influence of various illustrious characters, such as Karl Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gottlob Frege (my personal favorite).
I do not want to talk too much about it, otherwise I would spoil the fun. Just let me tell you: it is a fascinating piece of art and both money and time is well-spent. Now go and see for yourself!

When you are confronted with some piece of work of yours that has aged a bit already, something like Gosh! Was I so stupid back then? might go through your mind. It can be embarassing and you might try to push these thoughts away.

I am not sure whether that is the right reaction. Maybe you should embrace these moments and pause to reflect on them. Sure, you want your work to be perfect just as I want mine. On the other hand, if I looked at something that I did one, two, three years ago and did not spot something that I would do different, would not that mean that I have not been learning anything since that point in time?

Do not judge yesterday’s work based on today’s ability. Do not feel bad about it. Instead, admire your progress. It is not that your work became worse, it is you who became better.

Today, Guinness celebrates its 250th anniversary. 8750 more years to go. Read more in the Irish Times.

If you’re familiar with Linux, you probably know the ls command. It lists the content of a directory when executed. Sometimes, when in a hurry, you might mistype it and end up with sl.

A programmer named Toyoda Masashi created a program called sl – an easter egg. If you install it and execute „sl“ by accident, a funny ASCII art animation will be displayed in your terminal. Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »