Notices by Strange Attractor (strangeattractor@refactorcamp.org), page 25

@vr00n @akhil

Yes, I heard the Giant Pool of Money podcast shortly after it came out. It's great.

@adrianmryan

Hell is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Is_the_Absence_of_God

@johnhenry You're welcome.

@johnhenry

I also liked Fry's English Delight, especially the part about how language is full of words that are dead metaphors.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15789122-fry-s-english-delight

@johnhenry

A non-fiction audiobook that I've enjoyed listening to recently is "36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan" by Cathy Davidson
https://www.amazon.com/36-Views-Mount-Fuji-Finding/dp/1511396237/

It has essays by a professor about the things she noticed while living in Japan a few decades ago. Mostly stories about people she met and observations of cultural differences.

@akhil

I also liked reading about Amartya Sen's work. The summary for the 1998 Nobel prize in economics is an ok starting point.
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1998/advanced-economicsciences1998.pdf

Sen is known for the observation that there has never been a famine in a democracy. Famines occur because people do not have access to food, which is not necessarily because there isn't enough food. It's an important distinction, especially when making policy for foreign aid.

@akhil

The Misbehavior of Markets by Benoit Mandelbrot

A look at the statistics that describe markets that are more accurate than the standard bell curve, using power laws and fractals.

The book itself isn't an easy read. It probably could have used a better editor. If you find a summary of the ideas somewhere else that might be better. I'm not sure the extent to which Mandelbrot's ideas have made it into the mainstream models. His models were better than the standard models of the time.

@akhil

Adults In The Room by Yanis Varoufakis

This gave me a better understanding of how European governments are operating these days. With their heads in the sand, and their claws out. Or something like that.

I think Varoufakis has a clear-eyed view of what is going on in Europe, and what can fix it. However, many people disagree, so YMMV.

@akhil

The Crash of 2008 And What It Means by George Soros

It's not a book length idea, though the book is written decently well. The short version is that for convenience, economists often model various factors as independent of each other, when they are actually interdependent. Then they sort of forget that they've made these assumptions and get all surprised when conditions make that interdependency apparent. Soros calls it "reflexivity."

@adrianmryan @vgr

Reminds me a bit of Charles Stross's fictional ladies who lunch, on each other, due to advances in vat-grown meat. They were mentioned briefly in his novel Rule 34, and also in his talk at Worldcon in 2009.

http://www.steussy.com/blog/2009/08/krugman-and-stross-transcript/

@vgr Problems with mitochondria leading to difficulties with aerobic exercise is one possible cause for chronic fatigue syndrome.

http://drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/CFS_-_The_Central_Cause:_Mitochondrial_Failure

"If the body is very short of ATP, it can make a very small amount of ATP directly from glucose by converting it into lactic acid. This is exactly what many CFS sufferers do and indeed we know that CFS sufferers readily switch into anaerobic metabolism."

@zacharius There are worse ways to spend time. 😀

@zacharius I'd be happy to talk about music sometime if you like.

What are some country and folk songs that you like?

A couple of examples that I've enjoyed:

Barrett's Privateers - Stan Rogers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0CvSIhF_tA

Beautiful and Broken - Terri Clark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roKS4v7GpRI

@zacharius
I don't think it's a natural process of aging because music appreciation and skill can grow over time at any age. There are 80 year old musicians who have grown musically all their life and are demonstrably better than their younger selves. Presumably they are still moved by music.

However, as I notice more things, and pattern match better, my tastes change, and I get bored faster, and I have to seek out different inputs. Same with reading books.

@alper Yes, it has been getting harder to find the RSS feed for podcasts in general, but I can usually find an RSS feed and download an episode so I can listen to it using my computer or MP3 player. The ones that annoy me the most are the ones that don't seem to have an RSS feed at all, and just post to Soundcloud, or some javascript player.

#introduction

Living in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Studied systems design engineering.

Some of my interests include chaos theory, composing music, olfaction, software freedom, healthy buildings, Shakespeare, fluid mechanics.