111–120 of 176 posts
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No problem. You should setup a Twitter or a blog or something. But I'm sure I'm not the first person to suggest this. Or even better write a book.
Ars longa, vita brevis. I don't have time to do justice to the top three things I'm trying to do.
they being?
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Thanks Alan, that looks like a pretty fantastic list of books to get engaged with. Definitely agree with this sentiment: > I should mention that reading lots of "poor books" is also part of literacy: they help the understanding and appreciation of "good books" considerably. I see parents bemoaning their children reading sort of simple formulaic series like The Hardy Boys but frankly that's how I started out and now t…
I quite agree with this. I don't think of "junk novels" as "poor" in that sense. A lot of getting fluent is just doing, so reading lots of junk fiction that is fun is generally good (I certainly did). To me a "poor" book is one that is not up to its subject and/or its intent. There are lots of great junk novels.
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No problem. You should setup a Twitter or a blog or something. But I'm sure I'm not the first person to suggest this. Or even better write a book.
Ars longa, vita brevis. I don't have time to do justice to the top three things I'm trying to do.
On some level though I think that making more people acquainted with what you are working on might be beneficial to making progress.
> I don't have time to do justice to the top three things I'm trying to do.
I cannot not ask what those top three things are :-). I'm pretty familiar with your work but I'm not sure what the top three things are.
It's a good list, but might just be a bit too androcentric with only 5 women out of the ~90 persons listed, (including anthologies.) Counting: Hannah Arendt, Maria Montessori, Mary Midgley, Sylvia Scribner and Rebecca West.
I don't know about you, but I never check the gender of the author when picking up a book. Your comment suggest that Alan Kay deliberately discarded books written by women, and I find that hard to believe.
That's probably true, and that's good. However, that doesn't mean that the author's gender doesn't influence the work itself. You are not deliberately opting into skewing the data yourself, but you are still consuming a biased input set.
> Your comment suggest that Alan Kay deliberately discarded books written by women, and I find that hard to believe.
I don't think that's the case. I think it's just the more value-free observation that "this set of data points is biased." It doesn't state why it is, just that it is. That might be relevant to someone who expects the list to reflect a certain distribution of perspectives.
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Ars longa, vita brevis. I don't have time to do justice to the top three things I'm trying to do.
Haha, I figured you probably weren't bored. On some level though I think that making more people acquainted with what you are working on might be beneficial to making progress. > I don't have time to do justice to the top three things I'm trying to do. I cannot not ask what those top three things are :-). I'm pretty familiar with your work but I'm not sure what the top three things are.
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Hi Alan, sorry if this is a little off topic, but since we have you here I was wondering if you have any thoughts or opinions on the recently popular discussion surrounding object-oriented versus functional programming paradigms?
It is off topic here. But I'm happy to say something elsewhere.
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I quite agree with this. I don't think of "junk novels" as "poor" in that sense. A lot of getting fluent is just doing, so reading lots of junk fiction that is fun is generally good (I certainly did). To me a "poor" book is one that is not up to its subject and/or its intent. There are lots of great junk novels.
[sent an email]
This wasn't actually for my students, and dates back to the early 90s. A number of people at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) asked for my "top ten" books. This is not possible for anyone who reads extensively, so I came out with that list as a bare start. I should mention that reading lots of "poor books" is also part of literacy: they help the understanding and appreciation of "good books" considerably.
Are there any particularly good books (including fiction) which you've read in the last year or two which you would recommend? (and if so, which?)
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There have been quite a few books since that would be good for this group to look at (I will avoid the trap of mentioning any). Why don't you have a crack at it?
free to choose (friedman), guns germs and steel (diamond), fooled by randomness (taleb). essential contemporary fiction: the road or blood meridian (mccarthy). everybody should read the widely read religious texts that have been circulating for millenia.
"Bible, Talmud, Koran Read them whether or not you believe them! Be sure to read between the lines, and you can discover what people were actually thinking back then. Very interesting documents! Bava Metzia 59b is an interesting story!"