Stuff I've read

George Orwell's What is Fascism?
A meditation on everything that Orwell heard referred to as 'Fascism' when he wrote this. Short and light.

Paul Graham's What You Can't Say
Stuff you can't say because they don't fit the fashionably arbitrary mores of the times. Like fashion.

Mark Twain's Corn-pone Opinions
On the two things people's opinions are based on: self-interest and self-acceptance. The latter entirely based on the acceptance of one's peers. Also eerily like fashion.

reading Jerome N Frank's Some Reflections on Judge Learned Hand
"Based on the manuscripts for two talks delivered to students of the Yale Law School in November, 1955."
more

A long-ish but very engaging essay by his hon. Jerome N Frank about his colleague, a guy called Judge Learned Hand. Topics include the fallibility of judges; and the belief that judges 'discover' law; and that they make it up out of whole cloth. Apparently lawyers' opinion went from the former to the latter in the US (by the 1950's); seems it's still the former here.
Excerpt: Liberalism

"...we shared an admiration for George Savile, Lord Halifax. In 1684, attacked as a political "Trimmer," Halifax replied in a tract that he delighted in that label. "This innocent word Trimmer," he wrote, "signifies no more than this, that if men are together in a Boat, one part of the Company would weigh it down on one side, another would make it lean as much to the contrary: It happens there is a third opinion, who conceive it would do as well if the Boat went even without endangering the Passengers." Halifax's definition of a Trimmer satisfies, in large measure, Judge Hand's definition (and mine) of a true liberal. Liberals, we both think, should be proud to be tagged as Trimmers, in that sense. But they should know that often the way of the liberal is hard. Often he will be denounced as a shameless appeaser. Seldom will he be backed up by a militant crowd. For, as the Bible reports, men do not follow an uncertain call into battle. Extremists on one side breed extremists on the other. The true liberal will be wary of both. His function, however, is to acknowledge that frequently, although not always, the extremists on each side have a point, but one that is exaggeratedly stated; to perceive that these exaggerations foster undesirable ways by which each side pursues its aims; and, if possible, to discover some resolution of the differences which allow for whatever is sound in the respective polar positions."

On page 16.

reading Arthur Schopenhauer's The Art of Controversy
How to one-up the other guy with dialectic. German on the left, English translation on the right. Written to mock certain strains of philosophy.

Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich
Written over 20 years in Spandau prison, on scraps of paper smuggled in by a gentleman whose former vocation was slave laborer in Speer's department. Utterly bereft of histrionics.

meta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Kaminer
American lawyer and writer; famous feminist*, took on the feminist establishment; on the board at the ACLU, took on the board; someone to follow.

meta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriana_Fallaci
Partisan, journalist, author, political interviewer, feminist, badass.

meta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M._Disch
Science fiction author, wrote the book that Disney's Brave Little Toaster was based on.

to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_and_Technics
By Oswald Spengler. Posits that "western culture" will be destroyed by "economic warfare". Sounds ludicrous, very influential in the depression years of the early 1900's. Possibly relevant?

Justin Erik Halldór Smith's Out on their ears
The fall of postmodernism in phil/lit departments, making way for other crap.

Class warfare and Guido van Rossum's defence of the self
more

I've always wondered why instead of
'def some-method(self, arg1, arg2)'
we couldn't get Python to make the self implicit -
'def some-method(arg1, arg2)'.
So TIL Bruce Eckel thought so as well, and Van Rossum disagreed while grudging that
'def self.some-method(arg1, arg2)'
as syntactic sugar might be acceptable.
The 'solution' to that and more: attr (also see namedtuples on the same link)
Even better: dataclasses (new in Python 3.7; apparently has elements of both attrs and namedtuples)

An interview with Bruce Eckel where he endorsed (excerpt) teaching Python as a first language

"For me, I find it's more powerful to understand concepts than particular languages. Of course, you do have to understand languages in order to have implementations, but if I were designing a computer curriculum, I would teach Python first so that people could easily acquire depth in concepts, and then much later introduce languages like Java, C++ and C#, after they had reached the point of not getting confused by details. I think students could acquire the important skills much more quickly that way, and it would make a better use of their time. I'm not alone in this idea; there are more than a few college professors who feel the same way."

Also great: on impact

Q: Which software project/product that you have participated in are you most proud of?
Eckel: Oddly enough, I just found out about it this past year. When I worked at Fluke near Seattle (they make multimeters) I never considered myself the best employee in the world, and while I wasn't fired I was eventually encouraged to leave. But while I was there I created an assembly-language program to drive a vacuum-flourescent display. I put a lot of time and effort into carefully designing and documenting that program, and after I left I assumed that it had only ever been used in the Fluke 45, the meter I worked on while I was there. Last fall Fluke asked me to come back and speak at their company conference. I couldn't refuse because I had never felt great about the way I had left; I was just too curious. When I was there, some of the engineers told me that my code was still being put into new projects. So no matter how mediocre I felt I was when I was there, the project I created saved the company tons of money over the long term, so I more than paid for all the time that I had spent goofing off (actually, I was always learning, it just didn't always apply to the project at hand). It turns out you just never know what kind of impact you have, even if you think you're being a slacker.

to read https://www.cs.rochester.edu/~nelson/courses/courses.html
to read https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mitra/csFall2018/cs313/lectures/recursion.html
Looks to be simple and terse general programming courses.

to read https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
Getting under the hood of regex.

reference https://www.xsede.org/web/xup/online-training
Everything you ever wanted to know about high-performance scientific computing.

to read https://realpython.com/fast-flexible-pandas
Data science, eh.

to read https://www.aaonline.io/welcome-to-coding/1.0/welcome-to-app-academy-open
to read https://launchschool.com/courses/c1ae9a44



* Unless otherwise specified, all feminists here are second wave.