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Week 53

December 31, 2020

This is the last edition of “In Crampons to the Museum”. I wanted to make last week of the year uplifting and pioneering. The year 2020 sounded so futuristic. Our modern folklore is not short of references how 2020 was supposed to be the epitome of the future. We (all of us) wanted 2020 to be momentous. Significant. We thought it would be the year heralding new decade. We spent the beginning of the year making forecasts and foretelling trends. We loaded 2020 with our expectations, and “expectations are resentments under construction” wrote Anne Lamott.

Yet, 2020 was momentous in spite of anything. Besides a very thoroughly discussed “search for vaccine”, the year have been filled with scientific discoveries and breakthroughs. This year we discovered antigravity, timecells, electronic skin, fungus that eats radition and brain implants that allow mind control of computers). We are challenging material sciences by making materials that remember their shape, non-cutable material, paint that can cool buildings, tweezers for molecules, interactive paper, artificial photosyntesis to make clean fuel and metallic glass that can withstand freezing temperatures. Or we can just create matter from light. We are building supersonic jets), or better yet hydrogen jets), and hydrogen electric supercars that achieved 220mp/h and trains that achieved 1000 km/h. We are dashing to sustained long-distance quantum teleportation) and commercial long-distance wireless power transimission. We can do the ‘impossible’: reverse aging, place humans into biostasis , make the blind see or restore the vision), grow forest in the middle of the desert) or colored cotton, create diamonds at room temperature in minutes) , interact with dreaming brain and make quantum computing that performs 2.6 billion years of computation in 4 minutes.

If this is not “the future” I don’t know what is…

Yes, I know it’s a lot, even though I have refrained myself from including another couple of dozens of links. I have been collecting them the whole year in anticipation of culminating the year with an examination of the progress. I am frustrated that the above announcements get frequently buried under the insignificant foam of our daily life. I used to refer to above announcements as “optimistic news”, but it is incorrect because “optimism” is confidence about the successful future. A more proper term for this would be “hopeful news” - we don’t have confidence, but we have grounds to believe in a better future. You might call me a Pollyanna, but it is hard to dispute that the above accomplishments were “unprecedented”. So let’s celebrate the progress made and not be afraid to get excited about the next year, next decade or next century. “The future” is already here.

“Cure for an obsession: get another one”
Michael Cooley

The MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer) also known as Financephalograph, was created in 1949 by economist [Bill Phillips to model the national economic processes of the UK. The MONIAC was an analogue computer which used fluidic logic to model the workings of an economy.

‘I think we’re high on the hard here. The harder it gets, the more you’re like’’ from Love Letters

In a world obsessed with innovation, the necessity of maintenance, repair, and caretaking is often neglected. There’s plenty of short-term pleasure and intrinsic motivation when it comes to pursuing something novel, but the effort to keep up unsexy maintenance on what we’ve already got takes real intent. At the doorstep of the new year, as we make new plans and plan new habits, I am pondering on the importance of maintaining what we have and building to last.

Further Reading:

* In Praise of Maintenance in a World Obsessed With Innovation

* The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession With the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most]()

* Maintanence.org

* Fix, or Toss? The ‘Right to Repair’ Movement Gains Ground - The New York Times

Lewis Wickes Hine (American, 1874-1940). ”Power House Mechanic”

Week 52

December 27, 2020

I have been putting off my research on Augmented Reality (AR) for a while. Over the course of the year, I have been accumulating references to interesting AR projects, but have refrained from consolidating my notes. I guess I have been saving my thoughts on the state of XR ( X Reality - or mixed reality) for the end of the year, with sufficient headspace to reflect and analyze. If I could make one definite post-pandemic prediction I would not bet on the adoption of sweatsuits as new uniforms or prolonged anthropauses (taking a step again from humanity, social interplay and all types of transport, journey and human bodily)- I would bet on AR. During 2020 pandemic, both development and adoption of AR experienced have drastically accelerated, confirming the usability that was preached about for years, as well as creating the new use cases. This week we will be taking a look at the most exciting AR projects of the past year under the influence of quarantine and social distancing.

Definitions:
> Augmented reality(*AR*) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory
> *Virtual reality* (*VR*) is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world.
> *Mixed reality* (MR/ XR) is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations, where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time.

Working-from-home in AR:

* Harry Potter’s wand feels like a malfunctioning oddity compared to a new real-life copy-paste tool. Meet my new favorite app ClipDrop (AR Copy Paste). Quickly grab visuals from the real world and paste them into digital documents feel like magic. This is probably how people felt in 1850th when they saw the first photographs of themselves. No, not magic - we (humans) build it… And this is so much better.

* We, humans, have dreamed about teleportation ever since Fred T.Jane published the novel [To Venus in Five Seconds] where the protagonist is transported from Earth to Venus. While physically transporting ourselves to a different location might be physically impossible, holoportation is our most feasible alternative. The technology becomes extremely handy in the time of “Zoom-fatigue” and unbearable non-stop conference calls. I first saw holoportaion in 2017 as a demo by Microsoft research as a use case for Hololens. Since then, companies like PORTL can “beam” anyone from anywhere to anywhere else in real-time. But companies like Spatial is a more accessible alternative with avatars in the workplace and collaborative pieces in the living room.

* I always thought that Microsoft’s bet with Hololens was a very visionary: they were never in the market to compete on the hardware - they were trying to shape the ‘virtual office’. For many modern workers, Microsoft Office is the beating heart of business productivity. Where would today’s workplace be without ever-faithful staples like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint? In my opinion, Hololens was never a play to create an AR device - it was always a bet to create new staples and bring Word and Excel into the new age. Virtual office set-up has been dreamed up for years, like trade desks at home, but unfortunately, they only remained demo-es. While I have not yet seen (or just not aware) of functional AR office set-ups, with remote work becoming a standard, I am anticipating to see some solid examples that will be accessible to the majority.

* For those for whom “only online” work is not an option(people who work in locations requiring physical presence), new techniques of capturing 3D objects, remote repair does not seem to be far-fetched. Some manufacturers seriously consider AR technology to address the labor issues created by COVID-19 and create opportunities for social-distanced work. While manufacturers like Boeing and Thysenkroop have been experimenting with AR-work and CADs for years, many more manufacturers are increasing usage of real-time 3D visualization and CAD for design and manufacturing and training cycles with overlay techniques. The example that was trending during the pandemic was remote repair of ventilators.

Experiences and Entertainment in AR

Creativity thrives under constraints. Before winter 2020 AR/ VR companies had a hard time alluring audiences with digital alternatives to exciting physical experiences whether tops of mountains or museums. This year with traveling out of question, no sales pitches were necessary. One type of institution became the poster child of AR - museums.

* MET is one of the first museums to jump on AR bandwagon - early on they published a project to bring an Island Deity to Life with Augmented Reality. It looks like they have been improving their photogrammetry techniques since they brought many more artifacts as Instagram AR filters.

* While virtual museum tours are not AR experience, they do offer a preview. Google’s Art and Culture intiative allowing you to explore and zoom in into artworks into the privacy of your own living room. I hope this experience can tame some people’s appetites to own the artwork in order to truly appreciate it.

* A lot of artists started bringing their signature styles online. Olafur Eliasson turns elements from nature into augmented reality artworks, KAWS allows to float it’s characters over landmarks like Grand Central, and Acute Art platform is planning to bring many more experiences online. In fact, AR assets become much more advanced. This year Google AR started rendering prehistoric creatures and Apollo 11.

* Beyond just assets, augmented outdoor location-specific art experiences started to take off. ArtechHouse collaborated with Vince Fraser to bring his Afrosurrealist art to life in augmented reality through mobile app. Nancy Baker Cahill awed with her geolocation specific work appeared in June 2020 in Rockaways and over the capitol in DC. Sure, we have seen something like this in the past, like Apple Art walks in Central Park](), but these works engaging with the medium in a much more intricate interplay, rather than just rendering holograms.

* And of course we would not be human if we would not use the new technology for gaming. It is hard to outdo the notorious Pokemon Go experience that people around the world have engaged in 2016. But the next big AR thing promises to be: [New Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit Uses Augmented Reality to Race Inside Your Home.

Rendering KAWS on my balcony on lake Canadagua, December 2020.

Shopping in AR

Shopping was always the most obvious of the AR experiences.

* IKEA AR was probably one of the first ones to do [AR shopping right, allowing you to drop Billy’s into any space. Amazon also released AR room decorator not that different from IKEA’s but that will probably facilitate faster adoption.

* Virtual try-on experiences becoming more widespread being adopted by multiple retailers from Kohl’s to Gucci.

* But also a potential market for *pure virtual goods* emerges with some examples of [Louis Vuitton Virtual Goods and zoom fashion.

I am not going to debate the hardware. While I am a huge fan and proponent of lenses, phone accessibility makes phone-friendly AR experiences trump specialized use-cases. But what truly impresses me is the proliferation of AR “in-spite of hardware”, rather than because of it. It is happening smoothly. But in my opinion, it is coming…

** Fun note: during my research, I have stumbled on this article from [BBC on how holograms will replace conference calls](), where the author states that “nearly half of the US workforce is expected to work remotely by 2020 – but does the technology exist to support the trend?”. I find it funny how off were the numbers…

Business model: “picks and shovels”.

There’s a story often shared in the startup world: during the California gold rush, it wasn’t the miners who earned the most money, but those who sold picks and shovels. Hence, in the gold rush, sell shovels.

“So one must begin again from scratch, announced the French

philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in 1948. Modest, immediate, and direct, drawing was the ideal medium to begin. MOMA in NYC recently assembled the exhibit on drawings of various artists who have experimented on paper. The plain white papers are filled with simple black ink, but it reduces geometries to communicate universal ideals. The most interesting thing is that doodling on paper, drawing on paper requires so little, yet so many flavors and forms exist: from the abstract to the figurative, from the organic to the hard-edged. Without a doubt, the black and white aesthetic of this exhibit magnetized me and I must share the discoveries:

* Wyllys de Castro - I always had an obsession with abstract artists in Latin America. He is considered to be a pioneer and founding contributor of the Neo-Concrete Movement

* Herculres Barsotti - helped Wyllis with kick-starting Ne0-Concrete movement

* Chryssa - art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture

* Dick Higgins - co-founder of the Fluxus and had his own newsletter Something else

* Vera Molnar is one of the pioneers of computer and algorithmic arts

George Mathieiu - credited as the founder of abstraction lyrique

As the year is coming to an end and it’s the time to reflect on the past year and dream up the next one, I hope the drawing metaphor can inspire all of us for brevity to start with a blank page.

During the 1960s, Op Art —short for “Optical art”—combined the two disciplines by challenging the role of illusion in art. While earlier painters had created the illusion of depth where there was none, Op artists developed visual effects that called attention to the distortions at play. The notion that eyes are drawn to areas of contrast is foundational to visual neuroscience. Hard-edged boundaries between light and dark attract attention and become exaggerated through visual perception.

Various artists made their works move through radiating lines or make their work simultaneously hard-edged and blurry through the combination of contrasts. The longer one looks at the painting, the more these areas seem to float towards the viewer and into the three-dimensional world. Kinetic illusions seem to be misunderstood, but I think they represent a lot of potential with advances in computational art and rendering of 3D graphics.

In the other news, I have been finishing the projects that I have put on hold during the year. One of the projects finished is Accidental Reading my experiment with tracking my random online content consumption in 2020 with conclusions on an information diet.

Photogrammetry is the science and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images and patterns of electromagnetic radiant imagery and other phenomena.

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Week 51

December 21, 2020

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” ― Mason Cooley

Generative Pre-trained Transformers are all the rage. Recent language models, such as GPT-3, generate written text of such quality that is often difficult to differentiate from a text written by a human. In May 2020 OpenAI a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research lab published the paper about GTP-3 and hundreds of media outlets have written about the system and its capabilities: The New York Times published an op-ed about it , Guardian published an article written by the machine.

Over the past couple of years as I have experimented with NLP algorithms I have seen the evolution from simplified bag of words to drastic contextual word representations that allowed for leapfrogging in in human language translation. As I played with these algorithms my main use case was the desire for the computer to comprehensively summarize things for me, yet without losing specific details. However, here are the additional interesting use cases:

text to command - you write plane English and algorithm will translate it into computer language
classification - given high volume of information, come up with good taxonomy to classify content (beyond generic categories)
“summarization -“ aka “summarize for a 2nd grader - take a complicated text (think legal papers) and translate it into a big body of work.

But it seems like GPT-2 and GPT-3 have made huge progress in these areas as well as tackled additional ones such as conversation (Q&A/Chatbots) as well as variations (given a prompt machine completes the sentence). But there are lots of skeptics about the robustness and usefulness of transformers. One of the most vocal critics is Gary Marcus (There is an amazing debate of Yann LeCun vs. Gary Marcus about the nature of Artificial Intelligence. I am definitely team Gary). He makes an argument that machines do not learn about the world - they learn about the text and how people use words in relation to other words. and hence no matter how impressive are the results, they remain “spotty and pointillistic, arguably useful and certainly impressive, but never reliable”. He points out the necessity for biological, physical, social and commonsense reasoning when dealing with text and these are the intricacies that unfortunately can not be grasped from the high volume of tests.

More data makes for a better, more fluent approximation to language; it does not make for trustworthy intelligence.

He is not alone, here is additional skepticism on transformers:

* Douglas Summers-Stay gave this methaphor : “GPT is odd because it doesn’t ‘care’ about getting the right answer to a question you put to it. It’s more like an improv actor who is totally dedicated to their craft, never breaks character, and has never left home but only read about the world in books. Like such an actor, when it doesn’t know something, it will just fake it. You wouldn’t trust an improv actor playing a doctor to give you medical advice.” Douglas Summers-Stay

* nostalgebraist compared GPT-3 to a 10-year-old prodigy: “No, my 10-year-old math prodigy hasn’t proven any new theorems, but she /can/ get a perfect score on the math SAT in under 10 minutes. Isn’t that groundbreaking?”

As OpenAI is gearing up for commercial applications I started examining how I would feel about linguistic augmentation of humans. Overall I think I am a proponent of human augmentation - getting marginal advantage with the help of genetic enhancement and algorithmic thinking should be considered a natural extension of using technology as an aid in our lives. However, I am uncertain how I would feel getting emails from my friends, knowing that they did not necessarily write them and just fed “bullet points” to the machine.

Week 50

December 13, 2020

Artificial curiosity - Curiosity is what drives most self-directed learning in humans. When we encounter a gap in our knowledge, our interest may be sparked, creating a desire to seek out the missing information. Emulating the behavior of a curious human in an algorithm could enhance the potential for self-directed machine learning so that an AI system would be driven to seek out or develop solutions to unfamiliar problems.

According to Juergen Schmidhuber’s simple formal theory of surprise & novelty & interestingness & attention & creativity & intrinsic motivation, curious agents are interested in learnable but yet unknown regularities and get bored by both predictable and inherently unpredictable things. His active reinforcement learners translate mismatches between expectations and reality into /curiosity rewards/ or /intrinsic rewards/ for curious, creative, exploring agents who like to observe/create truly surprising aspects of the world, to learn novel patterns. It is important to highlight the importance of the capability to “get bored”.

“Self awareness combined with an absence of self-absorption”
from “Triumphs of Experience” George E. Vaillant

Many of us spend this year observing and reflecting. Nine months into the pandemic many artists are sharing the work that reflect their experience. This is the work by Ariel Orozco called “Have a seat and let me tell you”. Each “painting” in the exh… — Many of us spend this year observing and reflecting. Nine months into the pandemic many artists are sharing the work that reflect their experience. This is the work by Ariel Orozco called “Have a seat and let me tell you”. Each “painting” in the exhibition was made to mimic the back of a truck and its tail lights, and the flickering, a looped record of one route com muricated in Morse code. An interesting example between painting, installation, and performance.
Work reference: [Have a seat and let me tell you | Artsy]

Last week I have attended an exhibit ‘Sleeping Giant’ at the Poster Museum. The exhibit explores China’s economic relationship with the world through poster design. A couple of years ago, I have roamed the residential area of Shanghai in search of Propaganda Poster Art Museum that hosted old propaganda posters. This exhibit in New York was much easier to find: 23rd and 7th Ave.

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An interesting discovery was the style called yuefenpai. Yuefenpai is a type of calendar poster that was prevalent in Shanghai during the early 20th century and were influenced by Western advertisements. They were a marketing sensation and became key publicity tools to promote everyday products including cigarettes, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. These posters are a striking visualization of shifting societal values as relates to position of women in society and position of products in our lives.

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But then the exhibit also had an interesting selection of posters that communicated the modernization of China. In the 1980th Shenzhen became a hotbed of graphic design talent. Designers explored international styles and their own creativity by making ads for China’s new domestic products, marketing global brands to local audiences and las. These posters had striking original design without loosing the traditional aesthetics.

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Further reading: The Representation of Modern Women in Yuefenpai in 1920s and 1930s Shanghai:

Visualizing relationship with algorithm by Andreas Töpfer

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Week 49

December 6, 2020

I have learned to type in Chinese in 2018. It was surprisingly easy. As I would type in the pronunciation of the word and the suggested characters will appear at the bottom. For every word, a couple of options would appear to accommodate for deficiency of pinyin (romanization system of the Chinese language) to accommodate for the tonality of the language. However, I have never thought about how people in China had typed before the computer era. In my imaginary timeline, there was handwriting and then there was the digital age. However, turns out there was a typewriter in between - a Chinese typewriter. There are over 50,000 characters in Chinese, which makes it laughable to attempt a standard typewriter with 44 keys. But Chinese typewriter does not have a keyboard. Instead, it has a layout with a choice of 3000 characters. The operator uses the lever to pick up one character at a time. It gets more interesting - every machinist could arrange their own order so there was never a standard arrangement for a machine. Imagine getting a new computer just to discover that operating system and word processors are nothing like what you have used in the past.

So where are these amazing machines?

Chinese typewriters were incredibly expensive to make (which made them also incredibly expensive to purchase), so they’re very rare. Very few Chinese have ever laid eyes on one, even. Typewriters were simply not common objects in China, not only because of their forbidden price but also because since the Communist era began, they were literally forbidden objects to own. Since then they became controlled objects and had to be registered and licensed by the police, so it’s very unlikely that any hopeful fiction writer ever wrote his or her novel at home on one of these. With a weight ranging from 15 to 40kg, they were also not exactly portable either.
source: Before the computer, there was something almost as complex: the Chinese typewriter

As I have started my research into the typewriters, coincidentally pictures of Keaton Music Typewriter have landed in my inbox. Patented in 1936, Robert H Keaton from San Francisco has created a machine to help print music. These days it became something of a rare collector’s item. I have tried to look for it on eBay, but the only next best thing I have found was unesco typewriter/music box, titled “Take this job and love it”

Design Behind the Keaton Music Typewriter

Just when you would think that typewriters could not get more obscure, I found Chromatic Typewriter. Chromatic Typewriter- a typewriter modified to produce colorful works of art - where the letters are replaced with colors. The shortcoming of this creative machine is that the color needs to be replaced every time it is used.

Further Reading:

Cargo culting is the performing of rituals that have no effect or mechanism and can’t affect the thing you care about. The term arises from the observed behaviors of indigenous islanders in the South Pacific, who copied the appearance of airfields in the early twentieth century in the hope that planes filled with cargo would appear and land. The term is pejorative.

Speaking of fascinating machines: I am surprised we do not marvel of databases. Despite the dire predictions that we will drown in the information, we as humans are doing relatively fine, in spite of the fact that we are generating copious amounts of data. According to IBM 90% of the world’s data has been produced in just the last two years. And yet, we found ways to organize, query and efficiently retrieve this information as fast as never before. Go figure. Here is a nice piece on the brief history of databases: “A Brief History of Databases”

Among other initiatives, Thomas J. Watson Sr. insisted on well-groomed, dark-suited salesmen when leading IBM from 1914 onwards. | Image composite from J.L. Jolley , Data Study, 1968.

Image from a paper presented by G. A. Barnard, III & L. Fein at the December 1958 eastern joint computer conference.

Selenography is the study of the surface and physical features of the Moon. Here is the list with fascinating moon terms Moon Glossary: Lunar Terms and Definitions

One of my all-time favorite festivals is Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF). Kyle Bergman and his team every year do an outstanding job of selecting incredible movies that you would usually not encounter in movie theaters or on streaming devices. But I always find movies about architecture inspiring to Usually during the ADFF week I indulge in a couple, but since this year the movies are streaming I had a handful. To say that it was ‘ a lot of work’ would be an understatement. You can find the selection here ADFF 2020 Films. This is what I have watched:

* “A Machine To Live In” ) - a kaleidoscopic trip to Brasilia (as if the city itself could not be more bizarre by itself. Accompanied by no less bizarre website: Abecedarium : Machine

* “Charlotte Perriand, Pioneer in the Art of Living” - a movie about a remarkable furniture designer who left her mark on 20th century - especially the reclining chair.

* “Escher: Journey Into Infinity”- documentary dedicated to revolutionary art of MC Eshesher with narrative from his letters and diaries

* “Frey I: and Frey 2” - two-part documentary about Albert Frey. Should be mandatory viewing before a visit to Palm Springs

* “Making a Mountain” - the movie about converting our factories into new format and challenges that come with it. Can not wait to ski on top of Copenhagen. And

* Richard Leplastrier: Framing the View” - you have not heard about this architect and it’s unlikely you will hear about his work. Yet his work had an impact on so many.

* “Saving North” - an obscure documentary about wooden Russian churches.

* “The Arch” - kaleidoscopic overview about the buildings that we build.

* “Tokyo Ride” - a charming and free fall portrait of one of Japan’s most influential architects — Ryūe Nishizawa

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Week 48

November 30, 2020

This fall I have stumbled on the podcast by Steven Levitt People I (Mostly) Admire. The podcast is engaging, but the title is priceless. The frisky word “mostly” vindicates us from finding idols and allows for selective inspiration from a wide variety of people. It made me think about people I admire. Perhaps it’s an overgeneralization, but when someone asks us about people we admire we tend to either name the most colossal personalities in human history (Einstein, Bach) or someone in our closest circle (our parents, friends). But then, in my opinion, there is a middle layer of people, who do not immediately spring to mind, nor do we put them on the posters, yet their contributions and achievements can have a tremendous impact on our view of the world. This year, I had an opportunity to discover absolutely awe-inspiring personalities with admirable personal and professional stories. Jørn Utzon, was a great testimony that one can create beautiful things but also have a beautiful character (this is refreshing after last decade admiration of Steve Jobs and "similar aggressive personalities). Richard Hamming taught me about the value of perseverance and the importance of "style" of thinking. Charles and Ray Eames surprised me with the volume of experiments and iterations required to produce truly unique pieces. Jeff Atwood reminded me about the magic of writing code - something that I forget in the daily foam of debugging of enterprise software. Maria Yablonina, an architect-roboticist reminded me about looking at things from a very different perspective by showcasing robots that can build things by climbing on walls. It’s marvelous to encounter people who are preoccupied with experimenting, creating, and collaborating. In the end, we feed off each other and we must step outside of our internal imaginary world and engage with others whether in person or through an examination of their work, to get an extra notch of inspiration.

Maximilien Luce “Morning Interior” 1890. The intimate scene depicts Luce’s close friend and fellow painter Gustave Perrot “getting up” and dressing as morning lights stream through a garret window.

Postel’s law: “Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send”.
*In my humble opinion, the law applies to both software development and day-to-day communication.

Jean Alaux, “Leon Pallaire in his room at the Villa Medici, Rome” 1817/ Both the intimacy of the scene and its subject - an artist in his studio - capture Romantic sensibility.

A Byzantine generals problem is a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine Generals Problem", developed to describe a situation in which, in order to avoid catastrophic failure of the system, the system’s actors must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of these actors are unreliable.

Imagine divisions of a Byzantine army, attacking a completely encircled city. To proceed, the generals of each division, who are dispersed around the city’s periphery, must agree on a battle plan. However, while some generals want to attack, others may want to retreat. In the official description of the Byzantine Generals’ Problem (described in this paper), there is a leader-follower set-up. In order to achieve consensus, the commanding general and every lieutenant must agree on the same decision. To complicate matters, the generals are so far apart from each other that messengers are required in order for the generals to communicate. Also, one or more lieutenants may be a traitor, intending to sabotage the situation.

So, given these conditions and the commander-lieutenant set-up, can the army execute a strategy? The solution to the problem relies on an algorithm that can guarantee that:

* All loyal lieutenant generals decide upon the same plan of action, and

* A small number of traitors cannot cause the loyal lieutenants to adopt a bad plan.

The loyal lieutenants will all do what the algorithm says they should, but the traitors may do anything they wish. The algorithm must guarantee the first condition regardless of what the traitors do. The loyal lieutenants should not only reach an agreement but should agree upon a reasonable plan.

These days the problem is used to illustrate the requirements for distributed ledger technology as well as resistance for modularized software infrastructures.

Week 47

November 23, 2020

MC Esher’s work did not change my life as it did for some people. But this week I have watched “Journey into infinity” - a movie about MC Esher that provided a fantastic overview of the evolution of his art. The film is based on more than 1000 letters, dairies and lectures that Escher wrote during his lifetime. We hear him speak in his own words, about his life, his fears, doubts, politics and work. The film travels to sites that were major inspirations for him. I think a lot of this correspondence was never intended for such a large audience, that makes the movie especially “intimate”. The film looks at Escher’s legacy and how his work even today inspires comic strips, advertising graphics, movies and video art.

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Watch: Journey into infinity

Read: How M.C. Escher Transfixed the World with His Mind-Bending Works

I thought that initially, MC Esher has come up with “the impossible staircase”. However, after further investigation, it looks like the credit goes to Oscar Reutersvärd, a Swedish graphic artist, and independently and Lionel Sharples Penrose (1898 -1972), British psychiatrist, geneticist, and mathematician. The “impossible stairs” (referred to as “Penrose Stairs”) - is a two-dimensional depiction of a staircase in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form a continuous loop so that a person could climb them forever and never get any higher. This is clearly impossible in three-dimensional Euclidean geometry. The effect of the illusion is is that you see something which appears physically possible yet which you know is not.

I did not start this newsletter for marketing or commercial purposes. I just felt like I wanted to share all of the interesting things that I discover and research during the week. Being surprised and amused by discoveries one has a rushing feeling to share it with others. That’s why more often than not we “disseminate information”, rather than “hoard ” it. To my delight, I discovered I learned that the great computer scientist Edgar Dijkstra (1930-2002) wrote a newsletter for his colleagues in CS. He just photocopied and mailed it. In the early years he typed it up, like [this], but as time went by he made it a little more personal like [this]. Yet another proof, that some concepts exist in spite of technology.

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In 1959, Dijkstra began writing a series of private reports. Consecutively numbered and with his initials as a prefix, they became known as EWDs. He continued writing these reports for more than forty years. The final EWD, number 1,318, is dated April 14, 2002. In total, the EWDs amount to over 7,700 pages. Each report was photocopied by Dijkstra himself and mailed to other computer scientists.

You can find his “blog” here: E.W.Dijkstra Archive

Further Reading: The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

Our senses are remarkable. They have evolved to enable us to accurately perceive a huge variety of things in very different conditions. However, occasionally our senses let us down, and we fail to perceive the world accurately. The resulting illusions give us great insight into how our senses work, and how they usually manage to do so astonishingly well. The illusions are well complimented by logical fallacies. This site is a trove of the most famous ones: The Illusions Index

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Week 46

November 15, 2020

Epistemic humility is being humble with your assumptions about understanding. It’s recognizing that you may not know something—may not know a great many things—and that this is natural and okay.

It’s fall 2020, and if you live in the urban environment and go out to dine, chances are that your restaurant has replaced paper menus with printed QR codes. In fact, the pandemic has accelerated the use of QR codes for anything “contactless” form retrieval, information reference. It is paradoxical because QR codes were frequently mocked as the primary showcase of “futile technology”.

The QR code stands for Quick Response and is just a 2-dimensional barcode. These 2D barcodes store information such as webpage URLs, text, and contact information. The information in QR code can be static (coded once and always stay the same) or dynamic (so we just encode a URL). A QR Code has the capability to remain scannable even if it is somewhat damaged – up to 30%. A lot of modern QR codes contain images, which is possible because of this error correction - the scanners just treat the images as errors.

I was surprised to discover so many artists have experimented with QR codes. Some turn the QR code itself into art while others embed code into their art to provide dimensionality of information.

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In early 2010th multiple museums have tried using QR codes as a replacement for image caption. However, those efforts were frequently mocked and were largely unsuccessful. I saw a more contemporary version at the Barnes foundation that used image recognition instead of QR code - point your phone at the image and you get detailed information about the painting. So it seems that we don’t really a QR code per se, rather we need “gates” in our physical world to get us to the digital world. QR codes just happen to be convenient. But what is awe -aspiring is that this technology is free and available to anyone to use. No patents, no leasing, no pay per services, as in 1994 Denso Wave decided to make it publicly available for anyone to use. Whether you are an owner of a small hair salon or an international conglomerate, you can create as many QR codes as you need for free.

While rarely trying to make technology predictions I am actually anticipating the increased usage of QR codes and potentially some interesting interplay with AR (Augmented Reality) resulting in a mishmash of the physical and digital world. In the end, QR codes are just doorknobs into our rich digital world.

Further Reading:

* How QR Codes work: Everything you need to know and more

* History of QR Code

Bernard Silver and his friend Norman Joseph Woodland created the first Barcode. These are their sketches

Procrustean bed

Procrustes was son of the Greek god of Poseidon. He took great pleasure in fitting his house guests into an iron bed. To make the guest fit, he would either amputate their feet or stretch them on a rack. A Procrustean bed is a behavior that doesn’t fit its intended purpose; it only perpetuates a superstition.

Dave Pollot Altered Thrift Store Paintings Transforms Discard into Contemporary Art

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Week 45

November 8, 2020

What persists through time? Benchmarking on the remains from previous civilizations (Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge), I think contemporary sculpture parks will be one of that bizarre residue of contemporary times. In the US creates one can find these esoteric creations are almost in every state from Storm Kind (New York) to DeCordova(Massachusetts). These parks become handy when we need to satisfy our art urges in a socially-distant way in the time of the pandemic. This week I got to finally visit Art Omni (sculpture park next to Hudson, NY). The highlight was the ReActor- a habitable sculpture by architects Alex Schweder + Ward Shelley that rotates based on inhabitants movement.

*On sculpture parks in the US

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We tend to think of our buildings as eternal. In anticipation of finishing new flashy architectural marvels, we tend to neglect the maintenance and ignore factoring the erosion of time. This week I have attended a lecture (virtual) on the renovation of the United Nations. It took 6 years and $2 billion to update the building that is only 70 years old. But this renovations also demonstrates how drastically the world has changed. Across all the rooms the layers of nicotine had to be scrubbed (remember, humans, used to smoke inside). All in-build into furniture ashtrays are replaced by electric plugs, allowing visitors to trade cigarettes for laptops. The fluorescent lights that used to be the epitome of modernity were replaced by more efficient and safer LEDs. The new building broke the walls of the offices in favour of open offices that reduced heating and air-conditioning costs by 50% (1). The renovation of UN building is a captivating physical manifestation of shifting values of humans. Our values evolve, and usually for the better.

Further reading: process documented in UNITED NATIONS AT 70: RESTORATION AND RENEWAL | Rizzoli

“Egypt’s largest pyramid took only 20 years to complete. The Parthenon, a simple post-and-lintel building but one possessing perhaps the best-ever proportions required only 15 years. And the astonishing Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, a relatively light structure deriving it’s impact from enormous vaults, did not take even five years to complete. “ In contrast centuries could elapse between the laying of the foundation stone and consecration of many European cathedrals: construction of Notre Dame took nearly two centuries, St Vitus, dominating the Prague Castle, was begun in 1344 and was completed only in 1929. “Materials and Dematerialization” by Vaclav Smil

Are we using more or fewer materials than we did in the past? How much do we use per year? What are the most popular resources that we need? Will we run out of resources? It is baffling to me that in the age of ability to pull any statistic under a couple of seconds I am largely ignorant of the overall fundamentals of contemporary civilization. In the search for answers, I have turned to a brilliant book by Vaclav Smil “Materials and Dematerialization”. To say that I gained a new appreciation for all the materials that I use daily would be an understatement. Here is an interesting fact from our everyday life:

“The car I drive to work is made of around 2,600 pounds of steel, 800 pounds of plastic, and 400 pounds of light metal alloys. The trip from my house to the office is roughly four miles long, all surface streets, which means I travel over some 15,000 tons of concrete each morning.” *

I had no idea that the most important man-made material is concrete, both in terms of the amount we produce each year and the total mass we’ve laid down. Concrete is the foundation (literally) for the massive expansion of urban areas of the past several decades, which has been a big factor in cutting the rate of extreme poverty in half since 1990. And we use so much concrete. China used more cement in the last three years than the US used in the entire 20th century. Let this information be digested. In 100 years U.S. had used 4.5 gigatons of cement. In 3 years China had used 6.6 gigatons of cement.

I am surprised that even though we make more with less, but we are so energy intensively hungry and we consume so much more than our “minimal production” has almost no impact.

As we try to come up with solutions for more sustainable living, it is baffling to realize how little we actually know about our current state of consumption and production.

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Week 44

November 1, 2020

We, contemporary humans, are surrounded by marvels. We have tools that make our dwellings colder or warmer on demand to the highest precision and variable preferences. We don’t rely just on the sun as we can get bright lights outdoors on indoors at any point in time. We even control those lights with voice. We made objects to store our food for prolonged weeks and to cook it instantaneously when desured. We use these tools so frequently that due to their practicality we consider them very facile. Almost no one gapes or gawks at vacuum cleaners and refrigerators. We think we know how they work, yet I challenge you to explain to 5 years old how a refrigerator works. In fact, this exercise made me realize that all my life I had no idea how a refrigerator works.

This phenomenon has recently been termed as an Illusion of explanatory depth (IOED). “people believe they understand the world more deeply than they actually do and only realize that this belief is an illusion when they attempt to explain elements of the world”1. Forget about trivia or discussions on the morality of artificial intelligence - try explaining in five steps how a sewing machine works. Only by forcing yourself to explain does it become apparent how little one understands.

The way to avoid the IOED, as well as learn about anything the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman proposes the following steps:

1. Choose a concept you want to learn about

2. Pretend you are teaching it to a student in grade 6

3. Identify gaps in your explanation; Go back to the source material, to better understand it.

4. Review and simplify (optional)

This is known as the Feynman Learning Technique and it is a great solution to any illusions about our own understandings.

This week, as I was pondering on the utilitarian beauty of surrounding objects, my sister has sent me “The Way Things Work” - “The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Technology by Bibliographisches Institute . The book was published in 1963(!), yet it is brilliant in terms of explaining how anything works from semiconductors to zippers. I have spent 20 minutes reading just a chapter on dry cleaning feeling deeply ashamed that all this time as the clean clothes were magically delivered from dry cleaners I had no understanding how it became clean.

Week 43

October 25, 2020

Last week, I and five of my friends cycled around New York City on a hunt for sites that still stand as the evidence and testament of the hardships that the city has endured. We did not come up with it ourselves. The organization Open House NY organized the scavenger hunt called “Now What- New York?”. We spend the weekend deciphering clues and roaming the city to photograph them with our mascot(purple unicorn). Our unexpected discovery was ‘The City College’ with its dramatic gothic revival architecture(titled by some “Hogwarts of the Manhattan”), which besides being captivating used to provide free education to poor immigrants.

The scavenger hunt was an exceptional reminder about city’s and in general, human's resilience and perpetual rebuilding. As humans we tend to be fatalistic and melodramatic, rereading our history helps us put things in perspective and remind us that things used to be much worse and the best is yet to come.

Further Reading:

* If you are curious about the scavenger hunt and want to replicate it at your own pace - [here is the brochure, but it contains the answers]

* There are lot’s of books about the history of New York City, but “Gotham City” is a fundamental work that provides an extremely detailed account of how New York became New York. My friend Kenneth M said: “This is one of those books that you find on everyones shelf but which few have actually read.” He also gave me a tip to opt for an audio book instead of reading: “It’s 67 hours and fifteen minutes long but only one credit on the audible subscription or $16. So, for $0.50/hr you can hire a scribe to follow you around all day and read this book to you in your spare time. “ I “read” the book when I am cleaning, driving, walking and doing other menial tasks. To say that it is an `impressive history` would be an understatement. This book is especially handy in the pandemic- while my fellow New Yorkers are shocked with current life in the city, while listening to this book there is a disaster occurring almost every 30 minutes (the book is 67 hours) - cholera outbreak, pandemic, fire, revolution. And yet, the city is coming back stronger and more wonderful every time. I am certain that this time would not be an exception.

* Another book that puts things in perspective and showcases how as a general trend things are getting better for humans is “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinkert. While the name sounds like evangelical propaganda, the book is almost a perfect reminder on how much progress humans have achieved.

* I predict *scavenger hunts* will be big in the pre-vaccine future: Paris is also doing a city scavenger hunt: WANTED!, an immense quest for contemporary art, taking place on Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 October 2020.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The Gross Clinic” is recognized as one of the greatest American paintings ever made. The young and little known Thomas Eakins created it specifically for Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, depicting the city’s world-famous surgeon Dr. Gross… — **“The Gross Clinic”** is recognized as one of the greatest American paintings ever made. The young and little known Thomas Eakins created it specifically for Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, depicting the city’s world-famous surgeon Dr. Gross. The subject shocked viewers unused to seeing such a frightening event depicted in such. Realistic detail.

Do you read your news in the morning with a cup of coffee and wonder how bad is the world? Revolutions are happening, elections are rigged, the internet is addictive, crime is on the rise. Yet, if you delve into the science section and only science section you will see the incredible progress that we are doing as humans. Just this week NASA mission has managed to intercept, interact with, and collect samples from an asteroid and *Impossible Foods is now working on a food replacement that looks, tastes, and behaves like cow’s milk*, and [our cars might look soon as skateboards with custom tops. I mean isn’t it the best time to be alive?

One last thing - if you are planning to buy a book, any book, please consider ordering it from [Strand Bookstore). The sales of bookstore is down 70% and it’s fighting for it’s survival. Let’s fight for our bookstores!

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Week 42

October 18, 2020

You know that feeling when you discover something you and suddenly you see it everywhere? This is phenomena has a name - The Baader-Meinhof. (Now you can not unlearn it, and you will probably hear this name “more often”). Also called Frequency Bias (or Illusion), recency bias and selective attention bias, The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the seeming appearance of a newly-learned (or paid attention to) concept in unexpected places. Apparently our brains are trying to reinforce newly acquired informationAfter watching the documentary about Ray and Charles Eames this spring, suddenly everywhere I see their furniture, their movies, their designs and books about their furniture, their movies and their designs. Last weekend I “found” a coffee table book about their work for $2. Oh, brain…

Side note: The phenomena is named after West German terrorist group that was active in the 1970s. It may go back to a discussion board in the mid-1990s, when someone became aware of the Baader-Meinhof gang, then heard several more mentions of it within a short period. Lacking a better phrase to use, the concept simply became known as Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. And it stuck. It is pronounced “bah-der-myn-hof.”

When I first saw paintings by Henri Rousseau I assumed he was a daring adventurer-painter, venturing through jungles of Latin America or Asia and immortalizing the “far, far away” places for those who could not visit them. I was shocked to discover that he never left France or saw any jungle. He also never obtained any formal training as a painter - he worked as a customs officer for toll-collecting service. He started painting seriously in his early forties. His also did not receive recognition or acceptance. Yet you can find “a Henri Rousseau” in any major impressionist collection.

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Rousseau’s flat, seemingly childish style gave him many critics; people often were shocked by his work or ridiculed it. Many observers commented that he painted like a child and did not know what he was doing. He is considered to be a naive or primitive painter, but few paintings in classical sections can make you feel so innocent and childishly awed like the paintings of Rousseau.

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His most famous paintings, The Sleeping Gypsy and the Dream hang in MOMA, NYC. Barnes foundation owns 18 of his works. Flipping through his works I was truly surprised how many works were in American Museums (Washington, Philadelphia, Giggenheim, Detroit, Pittsburg). Similarly, we know that most of the Greek statues are not in Greece…

Further Reading:

[When Henri met Pablo | Art and design | The Guardian]

Someone is maintaining his website

I like this chronological presentation from Art story

Heuristics -can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Simple heuristics explain the world to you in ways that allow you to keep moving without putting too much thought into a situation.

Further reading: if you want to go down the rabbit-hole of Wikipedia, may I recommend various forms of heuristics

“What is especially needed is great sensitivity: to look upon everything in the world as enigma….To live in the world as in an immense museum of strange things.” So wrote the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, who made paintings of classical piazzas populated with spectral figures and shadows, knitting together purposefully distorted perspectives and tilted grounds. These claustrophobic dreamscapes, with their atmosphere of melancholy and uneasy menace, captivated the French avant-garde of the 1910s and later inspired the Surrealists.

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Week 41

October 12, 2020

How often do you check the weather? Once a day? Twice? Do you complain when the forecast is inaccurate? Do you think that “your phone is stupid” when it inaccurately reports rain when it is just cloudy outside? Do you ever wonder how your weather app knows what is happening outside? Do you ever marvel that you can find out the current weather in any corner of the world right now?

Until recently, like most modern humans, every morning, on my phone I would pull up a weather app to make some basic decisions about my day: “can I go for a run outside?”, “Do I need an umbrella?”. When I have something important (a trip, an event) I would check it multiple times. Like hitting refresh will help to change the weather forecast to the desired outcome (yes, that day when I was planning to wear new velour shoes and it was pouring rain).

But when I started taking pilot classes, the weather status “about 15C and overcast” was not enough for my daily decision making. On my ‘flying days’ I need to know not just the temperature but also the dew point, pressure (sea level and airport), humidity, visibility, wind direction, wind strength. Until recently these atmospheric properties have not been significant in my decision making - now they were dictating everything from aeroplane performance to the active runway. I have discovered for myself the terms like METAR, SIGMET, AIRMET, isocurves, ATIS, AWOS, ISA. Sure I have learned about some of them in the geography classes, but there is a difference in learning something to pass the test versus to learn something because your life depends on it. (Another case in point for high involvement in decision making.

Another interesting thing that I never thought about is how “apolitical” is the weather. There are big countries who have huge weather research agencies and send multiple satellites that orbit the earth(GEOs and LEOs)^1, and countries that don’t have any satellites. Regardless of political geography, I can look up that right now is 24C in Shanghai and 13 in Kuala Lampur. Since we are sanitized with information availability it might not impress you, but think about it for a second - you don’t need a country permission to know what is the weather there. Global weather services are probably one of the best examples of the shared commonwealth of human knowledge: open and free to use by everyone. The United Nations agency responsible for (among other duties) for coordinating weather observations is the World Meteorological Organization. Regional Basic Synoptic Network consists around 4,400 surface stations around the world.

Another remarkable thing about current human weather monitoring is the fact that weather models (including forecasting algorithms) are not assembled in secret by a corporation but out in the open, collaboratively amount scientists and government agencies from all around the world, albeit so slowly that their construction and sophistication has mostly gone unnoticed. Pardon my excitement - but such beautiful human collaboration it almost utopian.

In the mid 18th century to know the weather outside (just in your immediate surroundings”) you needed a very expensive thermometer. But you would nobly be able to measure temperature - what about wind, pressure, humidity you will need additional instruments. And if you have measured all of them, you did not have data to make a forecast of what will happen in a couple of hours other than your experience and intuition. With the invention of the printing press, you could read in your morning newspaper someone else’s thermometer measurements and interpretations. As we have created a large weather data collection network, came TV meteorologists would stand in front of the maps to give a twist on now more robust data stream. Today in 2 phone taps you can get current weather status or a forecast for the next 7 days around any point in the world, for free. As we are sanitized with easy information access, I wonder if we lost the ability to marvel. And marvel we should at what seems a banal daily activity, cause it almost must be true magic.

> When we look at the forecast for tomorrow we often forget(if we ever knew) that someone’s job to look at the sky there

^1 GEO- geostatetionary satellite that orbits in the same direction as the erth’s rotation, making them appear motionless in the sky. LEO - the polar or low earth orbiters, fly low and fast and circle the planet from north to south, overflying a different geography with each orbit.

Week 40

October 4, 2020

For a while, humans have been inching to redesign books, newspapers and print media. Alas, with little success. Most of the online publications, similar to traditional print, are black text on white background. However, recently I have noticed the more intensive emergence of article design with the integration of simulations, newsgames and scrollytelling. Interactive articles offer unique capabilities to help people to learn and engage with complex ideas that traditional media lacks. As we move kids to more self-directed online learning, interactive explanatory communication offers incredible potential enhancing monotonous video lectures. In addition, humans of all ages can benefit from more engaging explanations of complex phenomena without the need to “google” while reading.

My personal favorites:

The Financial Times’s/ “Uber Game”
Cutthroat Capitalism: The Game | WIRED
The Beginner’s Guide to Dimensionality Reduction
Experiments in Handwriting with a Neural Network
Different languages: How cultures around the world draw shapes differently — Quartz

Further Reading: Communicating with Interactive Articles

I have finally finished the project “Fleeting Opulence” about Long Island mansions that leverages the “scrollytelling” aspect of letting users leverage maps

Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup is perhaps the single most notorious Surrealist object. Its subtle perversity was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, and the photographer Dora Maar at a Paris café. Admiring Oppenheim’s fu… — Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup is perhaps the single most notorious Surrealist object. Its subtle perversity was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, and the photographer Dora Maar at a Paris café. Admiring Oppenheim’s fur-trimmed bracelets, Picasso remarked that one could cover just about anything with fur. “Even this cup and saucer,” Oppenheim replied.
Meret Oppenheim. Object. Paris, 1936 | MoMA

The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.

Further Reading: The Hedonic Treadmill - Are We Forever Chasing Rainbows?

In my opinion, on-demand streaming has devalued the art of cinematography. This week I have stumbled on “Playtime” made by Jacques Tati about confusion in an age of high technology. Today, the movie is acknowledged as a radically innovative marvel, as no other film uses space, architecture and crowds quite like this. As I am hearing my friends gush about the latest Netflix drama, I crave more mesmerizing visual strangeness mixed with the delicate jokes about modernism and technology.

Trailer: [Jacques Tati Playtime - Trailer - YouTube]

Further reading: [Jacques Tati’s Playtime: life-affirming comedy | Film | The Guardian]

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Week 39

September 28, 2020

I have named this newsletter “In Crampons to the Museum” since usually spending my leisure time either in crampons on the mountain or in the galleries of museums I assumed that this is what I would be able to write about. However, this year visiting either became preposterous. Before the world shut down for the pandemic I have visited MOMA. In March New York becomes the stage for the jamboree of the art world known as Armory Week. Every year MOMA hosts “The Armory Party” where it converts the lobby into the dancing floor at guests are allowed to wander through galleries with champagne glasses. I have frequently reminisced this party in the middle of spring lockdowns.

This fall the city museums cautiously opened their doors. Or to be more correct, they gently gaped their doors to socially distant, timed, masked visitors. And while I have hesitated to join the art-starved first wave visitors, this weekend I dawned my Sunday best and went to the Brooklyn Museum.

The experience was remarkable. Not enough time has passed to make the experience sufficiently bizarre, but I was reminded why I would always prefer to meet a friend next to Brancussi instead of Balthazar’s. Mentally electrified by the visit I was reminded that a museum is not just a collection of objects on display.

What is a museum? The American Association of Museums (AAM) defines a museum as *an organized and permanent nonprofit institution, essentially educational or esthetic in purpose, with professional staff, which owns and utilizes tangible objects, cares for them, and exhibits them to the public on some regular schedule*. I am not going to go into a topological discussion of the definition, but I will rail that museums are so much more. They are the paragons of the cities culture, the tourism magnets, the bastions of ideas, the visual manifestation of history, and the urban aesthetic sanctuaries. Even though most of the museum collections are viewable online, the exploration and experience of the works in physical presence is incomparable.

Right now the timed tickets restrict visitation to only a quarter of the capacity. I imagine museum snobs and elitist residence rejoice while visiting significantly airy galleries. But I have always found the people being a crucial component of making museums. Despite mild irritation and noise of the crowds, seeing how and what the other people experience makes museums magnificent. I am sure I will complain again about strollers blocking me from my favorite Miro at Guggenheim, but a part of me was nostalgic for weekend hustling. Looking forward to going to more museums soon, so far only in snickers.

Further reading:

* in Season 5 Slate Podcast “Working” has interviewed a lot of crucial people who work at MOMA about their job and gives a glimpse behind museum operations. This is one of my favorites: [How MoMA’s building operations manager does his job.

* “Merchants and Masterpieces” is one of my favorite books that covers the complexity of museums, their origins and maintenance through the example of the MET in NYC [Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Calvin Tomkins](s)

* American Alliance of Museums - because I did not know they existed.

* New Yorker about the reopening of the museums: The Met Is Back, and So Are We | The New Yorker

* New York Times about the reopening of the museums: [The Met Is Reopening: Grab Your Timed Ticket and Give Your Bike to the Valet

*A View of the Two Lakes and Mountain House, Catskill Mountains, Morning* by Thomas Cole. Thomas Cole was a famous American painter who has started Hudson River School art movement. You can hike a mountain named after him in Catskills

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space. >
Orhan Pamuk

A MODEST MANIFESTO FOR MUSEUMS

I love museums and I am not alone in finding that they make me happier with each passing day. I take museums very seriously, and that sometimes leads me to angry, forceful thoughts. But I do not have it in me to speak about museums with anger. In my childhood there were very few museums in Istanbul. Most of these were historical monuments or, quite rare outside the Western world, they were places with an air of a government office about them. Later, the small museums in the backstreets of European cities led me to realize that museums—just like novels—can also speak for individuals. That is not to understate the importance of the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Topkapı Palace, the British Museum, the Prado, the Vatican Museums—all veritable treasures of humankind. But I am against these precious monumental institutions being used as blueprints for future museums. Museums should explore and uncover the universe and humanity of the new and modern man emerging from increasingly wealthy non-Western nations. The aim of big, state-sponsored museums, on the other hand, is to represent the state. This is neither a good nor an innocent objective.

1. Large national museums such as the Louvre and the Hermitage took shape and turned into essential tourist destinations alongside the opening of royal and imperial palaces to the public. These institutions, now national symbols, present the story of the nation—history, in a word—as being far more important than the stories of individuals. This is unfortunate because the stories of individuals are much better suited to displaying the depths of our humanity.

2. We can see that the transitions from palaces to national museums and from epics to novels are parallel processes. Epics are like palaces and speak of the heroic exploits of the old kings who lived in them. National museums, then, should be like novels; but they are not.

3. We don’t need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are richer, more humane, and much more joyful.

4. Demonstrating the wealth of Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Iranian, or Turkish history and culture is not an issue—it must be done, of course, but it is not difficult to do. The real challenge is to use museums to tell, with the same brilliance, depth, and power, the stories of the individual human beings living in these countries.

5. The measure of a museum’s success should not be its ability to represent a state, a nation or company, or a particular history. It should be its capacity to reveal the humanity of individuals.

6. It is imperative that museums become smaller, more individualistic, and cheaper. This is the only way that they will ever tell stories on a human scale. Big museums with their wide doors call upon us to forget our humanity and embrace the state and its human masses. This is why millions outside the Western world are afraid of going to museums.

7. The aim of present and future museums must not be to represent the state, but to re-create the world of single human beings—the same human beings who have labored under ruthless oppression for hundreds of years.

8. The resources that are channeled into monumental, symbolic museums should be diverted to smaller museums that tell the stories of individuals. These resources should also be used to encourage and support people in turning their own small homes and stories into “exhibition” spaces.

9. If objects are not uprooted from their environs and their streets, but are situated with care and ingenuity in their natural homes, they will already portray their own stories.

10. Monumental buildings that dominate neighborhoods and entire cities do not bring out our humanity; on the contrary, they quash it. Instead, we need modest museums that honor the neighborhoods and streets and the homes and shops nearby, and turn them into elements of their exhibitions.

11. The future of museums is inside our own homes.

The picture is, in fact, very simple;

WE HADWE NEEDEPICSNOVELSREPRESENTATIONEXPRESSIONMONUMENTSHOMESHISTORIESSTORIESNATIONSPERSONSGROUPS AND TEAMSINDIVIDUALSLARGE AND EXPENSIVESMALL AND CHEAP

Orhan Pamuk

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Week 38

September 21, 2020

People write books about different things. We have books about big concepts things universe and small things like bacteria. We have books with instructional information like pilot manuals and abstract information like novels. There are books about the lives of other people, detailed records of historical events that were created by people, descriptions of scientific observations made by people, and discussions on our aesthetic evolution. And then there are books about very strange things like one line of code.

The book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 is a book written about one line of code. Under the examination of this simple program, the book touches on a variety of topics ranging from computer-generated art, the history of mazes and labyrinths, forms of randomness, the psychology of repetition, the history of hardware among some. The book is free to download, but I highly recommend getting your own physical copy.

Victor Vaserely is widely accepted as a “grandfather” and leader of the Op art movement. His work is so systematized that he invented a notation system to enable the team of assistants to assemble his work using instructions and modular, prefabricated color pieces. (Looks like even before Sol Le Witt)

As I was reading 10PRINT I went down the rabbit hole of thinking of other famous one-liners in programing. *One liners* in general have a very expert quality in it - it is almost bragging rights for a developer to make computer do something with as little lines as possible. But a one-liner is an entirely different game. Here are some interesting one-liner programs.

``` # basic : generating graphical demos

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

```

# c L glob pattern matching a winning entry in the "Best one-liner" category of the IOCCC)

main(int c,char**v){return!m(v[1],v[2]);}m(char*s,char*t){return*t-42?*s?63==*t|*s==*t&&m(s+1,t+1):!*t:m(s,t+1)||*s&&m(s+1,t);}

```

```
#perl  This regular expression matches strings whose length is prime.
/^.?$|^(..+?)\1+$/
```

``` #bash Shows 10 largest files

$*lsof / | awk ‘{ if($7 > 1048576) print $7/1048576 “MB” “ “ $9 “ “ $1 }’ | sort -n -u | tail

```

“Generative art is a form of art that is either completely or partially created using an autonomous system. This system can be represented by any kind of algorithm: mathematical, mechanical, or biological.”

Brief history:

*AN 18TH CENTURY GAME* One of the earliest examples of generative 18th century musical game Musikalisches Würfelspiel, where a specific melodic line was assigned to a number on a dice after it was rolled.

* *THE KALEIDOSCOPE* -byproduct of light polarization study, visually shows an algorithm of hypothetical polarization patterns.

*THE GRAPHIC EDITOR* - as computer technologies started to be widely adopted, the new graphic display in combination with various algorithms can generate uniquely aestethical patterns.

This is an interesting compilation from dribble

As our daily activities are moving move online, more and more people join trade schools(known as coding bootcamps) to learn how to write code and build infrastructure for our online world. Contemporary modern webpages are written in Javascript and the backend data manipulations done by scientists are written in Python. Github publishes a popularity index based on the volume of code committed: PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language index . But there is a very tiny universe that has the minimal number of users: *Esoteric Programming Languages*(ess-oh-terr-ick), or *esolang*, is a computer programming language designed to experiment with weird ideas, to be hard to program in, or as a joke, rather than for practical use. The purposes vary from minimalism to exploration of new concepts, to just pure humor. For example Shakesphere computer languages: The Shakespeare Programming Language was designed to make a language with beautiful source code that resembled Shakespeare plays. Here are some more:

* The earliest known resoling is INTERCAL containing commands like DO, PLEASE, or PLEASE DO. (Proposed extensions allow other statement identifiers such as MAYBE.) The politesse of a program’s statement identifiers is checked to make sure it stays within certain limits.

* The most popular: *Brainfuck* has inspired the creation of a host of other languages. Due to the fact that the last half of its name is often considered one of the most offensive words in the English language, it is sometimes referred to as brainf***, brainf*ck, brainfsck, b****fuck (as a joke)

*Piet* is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian, who pioneered the field of geometric abstract art. A Piet program is an image file, usually, a gif, which uses a set of 20 colors and the transitions between blocks of those colors to define a series of instructions and program flow. For example this program prints the first 100 Fibonacci numbers

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Week 37

September 13, 2020

** This essay is a draft for the new project I am working on about the vanishing opulence of the north shore of Long Island, known as “The Gold Coast”. Current working titles are “ Fleeting Opulence” or “Evanescent Ritziness”. The project is an interactive map and personal reflections on the grand mansions . As the project is work in progress, your feedback is very welcome and highly encouraged - just respond to this email. You can find the draft here.

Fleeting Opulence

I was always surprised by how Americans are magnetized by the old buildings and historical sites in Europe. Every summer they eagerly cross the ocean to experience “history” and touch the antiquity. I never understood this infatuation, since the history of a lot of American cities is as captivating as the intrigues of the Versailles. As a matter of fact, right before crossing the Atlantic, there is a region that can rival the most palatial castles of Germany and England - the North Shore.

The opulence of the North Shore mansions and the corresponding lifestyle were so glorious, that it used to be called “the Gold Coast”. In the beginning of the 20th century the inordinate concentration of wealth allowed for the exclusive enclave to hire the greatest artisans, architects, landscape architects, and designers to erect awe-inspiring residences. These days few people refer to it that way or are even aware of the history. As fame has faded the names of "Great Neck" and "Old Westbury" mean little to the new wave of vacationers rushing on I-495 to the currently fashionable “Hamptons” and "Montauk". But even if a curious wanderer will venture into those parts, without proper research one can not “stumble upon” or “drive-by” historical mansions. The original owners- the Morgans, Woolworths, Vanderbuilds, Philips have elaborately hidden their royal pied-à-terres in lush greenery and wavy roads of the Long Island. They concealed their palaces on the edge of the cliffs (like Falaise mansion) and high hills (like Manor Neck House). And when they ran out of hills, they have artificially erected them made them ( Otto Kahn build his the Oheka Castle is built on a man-made mountain).

The lavishness of the Gold Coast mansions became synonymous with Scott Fitzjerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby”. The novel has immortalized that historical period but did a disservice by capturing only the festive ceremonies. While the dining halls and ballrooms of the mansions leave little doubt that copious drinking and dancing were a big part of the entertainment, the life in the mansions had a lot more to offer. There was golf. There was tennis. There were numerous equestrian activities like polo and coaching. There were fox hunts. There were car races. There were aviation clubs (in fact LI boasted the first aviation club). There was sailing. There were gardens. In fact, the gardens surrounding the mansions are/were sometimes even more impressive that the houses themselves. The contemporary cleanly shaved lawns seem dismally modest compared to manicured arboretums, orchards, rose gardens, greenhouses and fountains.

A handful of these majestic castles have survived. By some accounts, only one third out of the original 1200 remains. Some have become foundations and museums. Few were repurposed into universities and schools. During the weekends, the visitors from diverse backgrounds, flood the grounds of those 'open to the public' to engage in more populist activities like hiking and picnicking. The current state and fate of the mansions would probably have baffled the original owners. For example, the snow-white 'Greentree' mansion ( now offices of AHMC) does not have elaborate landscaping but instead a spacious parking lot. The glorious Old Westbury gardens became the backdrop for engagement or recreational photoshoots. The Manor House became a hotel with the pool that blasts pop music and serves keenly priced alcohol. The Clayton mansion was turned into the museum, whose grounds host obscure contemporary sculptures by Richard Serra and hoards of shouting kids playing frisbee.

But the majority of those mansions have vanished. Erected to outlast generations, scarcely any have lasted a century. The historic records cataloging the mansions are full of sad stories of demolitions and abandonment. Some have been captured and archived in photographs. However, the lost mansions of Long Island raise an important question of legacy. We, as humans, subconsciously try to leave a mark and prolong our contribution beyond the lifetime, whether it's in form of our children, creative projects, or architectural marvels. But the stories of the Gold Coast vividly demonstrates that few, despite grandeur, will withstand the passage of time.

I have recently ventured to the North Shore in search of the former magnificence of the mansions. The spirit of ritziness is gone, but the lessons in evanesce remain. And while we can nostalgically postulate on bygone opulence, there is something endearing in seeing on a Saturday afternoon a family of four, parc their hybrid sedan next to a Tudor-inspired palace and enjoy the lunch out of tupperwear on a perfectly manicured lawns decorated with marble angels. In my opinion, it is uplifting that our society allows the many more people to enjoy beautiful earthy delights in a more environmentally-conscious way.

Scherzo di Follia 1863–66, printed 1940s by Pierre-Louis PiersonThis belongs to the Met, but it is not on view. How can one request to view an art piece owned by art museum? https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/269214 — Scherzo di Follia 1863–66, printed 1940s by Pierre-Louis Pierson
This belongs to the Met, but it is not on view. How can one request to view an art piece owned by art museum? https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/269214

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
Anais Nin

Enclothed cognition is a term coined by Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky in their experiment from 2012. It relates to the effect which clothing has upon a persons mental process and the way they think, feel, and function, in areas like attention, confidence, or abstract thinking. So yes, go ahead, buy the shoes…

Futher Reading: [Enclothed cognition - ScienceDirect]

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Week 36

September 7, 2020

Due to the holiday weekend (Labor Day), this newsletter is short on content and late. Apologies. Next week will make up for this in full. Hope you had a good long weekend or a productive Monday. :)

“Since she had other man what does it matter if it was yesterday or two years ago? Since she’ll have other men in the future, does it matter if it’s tomorrow or two years’ time? Since she can love you only for a set period, and since she does actually love you, what does it matter if it lasts two years or one night? “
“The Confessions of a Child of the Century” by “Alfred De Musset

The week’s discovery - sinking sculptures:

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Week 35

August 30, 2020

“Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants and futurologists. It is not a business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. “
Ursula K. Le Guin

Few questions can surpass the question “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” in cliched and banality. Yet, there are no cliched answers to this question. If you ask me, before responsibility, empathy, and common sense will kick-in, my impulsive answer would be “Buy a plane”. So this week we are going to indulge in conjectural research of small aircrafts that one can purchase on a budget of a million dollars. This research may seem ostentatious, but I hope it will surprise you with curious facts like “The air capital of the world” is Wichita, Kansas and a tiny country of Czech Republic supplies a quarter of world’s Light Sport Aircrafts.

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Top Single Engine Aircraft Manufacturers:

Textron Aviation - formed in 2014, it has acquired Hawker, Beechcraft and Cessna. Primary manufacturing facilities are located in Wichita and Independence, Kansas; Columbus, Georgia; and Chihuahua, Mexico. *
- Cessna. Since it first flew in the mid-1950s, the Cessna 172 Skyhawk has become the world’s most-produced aircraf. It is utilitarian, more affordable than its counterparts and simple to fly. Factories are based Wichita, Kansas
- Beechcraft The Beechcraft Bonanza was introduced in 1947 by Beech Aircraft corporation. The six-seater, single-engined aircraft is still being produced by Beechcraft and has been in continuous production longer than any other aircraft in history . Also based in Wichita, Kansas
Piper Aircraft, Inc is a manufacturer of general aviation aircraft, located in Vero Beach, Florida, United States and owned since 2009 by the Government of Brunei. It was distinguished in the late 20th century as being one of the top “Big Three” in its field of general aviation manufacturing.
Mooney is a Chinese-owned aircraft manufacturer based in Kerrville, Texas, United States. It manufactures single-engined piston-powered general aviation aircraft. Mooney’s achievements are: the first pressurized single-engine, piston-powered aircraft, the M22 Mustang, production of the fastest civilian single-engine piston-powered aircraft in the world, the M20TN Acclaim Type S.
Diamond Aircraft Industries - Diamond Aircraft Industries is a Chinese-owned manufacturer of general aviation aircraft and motor gliders, based in Austria. It is the third-largest manufacturer of aircraft for the general aviation sector
Cirrus Design Corporation* was founded in 1984 to produce a single-engine pusher-propeller homebuilt aircraft originally sold as a kit. The company is owned by a subsidiary of the Chinese government-owned AVIC , and is headquartered in Duluth, Minnesota, United States.

Light Sports Airplanes - this is a separate category defined by FAA. *light sport aircraft*, is a fairly new category of small, lightweight aircrafts. They are cheaper and simple to fly, but have a lot of limitations (like a speed limit of 120 knots). Although these airplanes are categorized as for recreational use, they are also very capable cross country airplanes. Surprisingly a lot of companies producing LSAs are from Czech Republic (I saw a statistic that 24% of LSA are produced in CZ).

BRM Aero Bristell is a family company that focuses primarily on individual orders also based in Czech Republic. Founded recently - in 2009.
TL–Ultraligh is an aircraft manufacturer based in Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. The company started out as a builder of ultralight trikes and now specializes in the design and manufacture of composite ultralight aircraft.
Czech Aircraft Works (CZAW) - (successor of Czech Aircraft Works) is an aircraft manufacturer based in the Czech Republic.
Sling Aircraft is a South African two-seater light aircraft designed and produced by Sling Aircraft in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Costruzioni Aeronautiche Tecnam* is an Italian aeronautics manufacturer. It was founded in 1986. The company has two primary activities: producing aircraft components for various other manufacturers, and manufacturing its own range of light aircraft
Blackwing - The Blackwing is a Swedish ultralight and light-sport *aircraft* introduced in 2015. The aircraft is supplied as a kit for amateur construction or complete and ready-to-fly.

** As I was finishing the research, my friend Andrew has sent me the tip to investigate OTTO AVIATION, whose Celera 500L. Bold claims of the website promise a six-person private craft that promises to fly at jet speeds, but with eight times lower fuel consumption and a range that’s twice that of a comparably sized craft. Will it become the new Cessna 172 or would it become another overhyped Lily drone?

Reference and further reading:

* [In the Market for an Airplane? Here are 8 Popular Single-Engine Aircraft You Should Consider | Inflight Pilot Training]

* [5 Sport Airplanes You Can Buy For Less Than $200,000 - YouTube]

Open-source software development, in my opinion, is the most beautiful manifestation of the human ability to collaborate. Without a doubt, it has transformed the world of software development and as a consequence, the way we do business, build companies and develop tools. Currently, most of the open-source software projects are happening on Github. Some in Bitbucket. But the new kids just arrived on the block. Getee and Coding might not have the latest kicks, but popularity contest rarely won on objectivity and historical track records.

Further reading: China is building a GitHub alternative called Gitee – TechCrunch

[The New Dating Timeline: Comparing Before-Times to 2020 - Man Repeller](https://www.manrepeller.com/2020/08/the-new-dating-timeline-comparing-before-times-to-2020.html)

Mountains - they aspire poetry, adventures, paintings, narratives, cliche metaphors … and a new data visualization genre “stock art”

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Week 34

August 24, 2020

Usually, museums vigorously guard their exponents under the glass, allowing the visitors just to "look, do not touch". Surprisingly American Airpower Museum offers to take it cherished historical aircrafts into the air, (for a significant fee, of course). But how cool would it be to enter the skies on 1940s Waco UPF-7?

A stag, in the clear mirror of a stream,
Was considering his appearance. His self-esteem
Was gratified by his fine antlers, but his spindling
Shanks, whose image he saw dwindling.
Unimpressive away
Filled him with pained dismay.
Dolefully eyeing his reflection, he said:
‘What disproportion between feet and head!
My branched head overtops
The branches of the highest copse,
But my legs do me no credit.’
Scarceky had he said it
Than a bloodhound appeared and forced him to make
A dash to the woods for safety’s sake
There his antlers, those splendid
Ornaments, hindering every step, denied
The help his legs were eager to provide,
Upon which his life depended.
Now he unsaid those words, regretting dearly
The gifts which Nature renewed on his brow yearly.
What is beautiful we prize;
What is merely useful we despise;
Yet what is beautiful is often our destruction
The stag scorned the legs which lent him speed
And cherished the horns which in his hour of need
Were a dire obstruction”
“The stag who saw himself in the water” By Jean de la Fontaine

The question “What is your favorite book” always seemed nonsensical to me. How can one pick a favorite when each book (yes, even the bad one) can edify. We need different books at different periods of our lives. Sometimes we need books that challenge our beliefs and sometimes we need the ones that shore-up them. Sometimes we need books that will take us away from reality and sometimes we need the ones that will take us too close to familiar. And we also change our opinions over time: a book that seemed inspiring, in retrospect can feel banal; a book that seemed dry can be reclassified as rousing upon further re-examination. How can there be “the one”? I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist.

However this week I have preoccupied myself with buckets of favorites - the reading lists. I have an obsession with reading lists. The first list that I have ever followed was “20 books to read before you are 20”. Yes, it might be a little silly, but this list has exposed me to world literature that my school teachers, unfortunately, could not have. By reorganizing my “reading bucket list”, I have decided to compile the books that have impacted me to date. While my reading tastes and preferences have evolved (and hopefully will continue in doing so), this list reflects the up to now personal journey. In my opinion, few things are as personal as our reading choices. The book piles on nightstands inadvertently reflect our interests, aspirations, and current frame of life. Whether it is stories of escape, self-help advice to, or information-dense non-fiction, it does captures what is on top of our minds.

So here is my list of favorite books(to date). There is no particular order - just a list. I wanted to cap it at 10, just because the top 10 lists are so popular. Yet, as I wandered around my library, I could not exclude some treasures just because of an arbitrary number. Some books I have read recently and some books have stayed with me for a while. I am curious if this list will withstand years and how it will evolve. This is a written down time-capsule of one’s exploration of literature. The intention to write it down similar to that one of journaling - to time-capsule our experiences. Or maybe, it will help someone to accidentally stumble on their next “favorite”.

Anything by Richard Halliburton. The daring adventurer chronicled his adventures (highly embellished, some claimed) in eight books, including his most famous one, /The Royal Road to Romance./ Highbrows dismissed him as a dilettante and his audience as garden-club housewives, but he sold millions, lectured to packed houses around the country, and was billed as “the World’s Most Popular Non-Fiction Writer.” He practically invented the modern travel-adventure genre. Whether truth or invention, I feel it takes guts, imagination, and style to write the way Richard Halliburton does.
“Code” by Charles Petzold. It is my perception that in general people are intimidated by computer code. This book is an approachable guide to the world of computers. Charles Petzold exposes the readers to the inner workings of hardware and software through very intuitive scenarios and well-summarized history. I think this should be mandatory reading for computer literacy in every high school around the world.
“You and Your Research” by Richard Hamming. What is the meaning of life? This book is extremely inspirational without trying to be a traditional genre. R. Hammings is trying to make paints vivid images of greatness and it’s unapologetic pursuit. Not only it allowable to aim for greatness, it is cowardly not to. The book is made extra special as he frequently refers in the book to the year 2020, trying to anticipate marvelous inventions. While he has missed the mark on a lot of his forecasts, I find the foundations that he cites to be timeless.
“Critical Path” by Buckminster Fuller. It is very easy to get bogged down by human-invented concepts of normalcy - ideologies, clubs, believes. But this book abstracts from common conventions and in a way zooms out to the “Spaceship Earth” scale to remind us what matters to us as human civilization. Bucky Fuller invites you to make up your mind and look at things without the blinkers on. Some might consider this techno-utopian madness, but I’ll take it any time over pragmatic reality reported in the news.
“Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” by Edwin A Abbott. The importance of a multitude of world views, the difficulty to explain scientific concepts (or even different) to somebody whose world view is different, dogmatism, empiricism; importance to constantly challenge our conventions and believes, the relativity of perspective; the absurdity of those unwilling to admit their ignorances; class divergence. All these complex concepts and issues have managed to fit in 100 pages in a language accessible to a five-year-old child. The brilliance and Edwin Abbott is hard to describe, just can be experienced by reading and rereading his novel multiple times.
“Mount Analogue” by Renee Dumal - It’s a miracle that this book even exists. The book is not even half-finished as Rene Daumal has passed away at the age of 36. He literally ends mid-sentence, which seems appropriate for this type of book. Yet even the first couple of chapters showcase the possibility of this literary work. I find it delightful that the book was published and is inactive circulation, despite containing barely five chapters ( my paperback was printed in 2019 by the publishing house Exact Change). This short allegorical novel neatly synthesizes the exploratory experiences of the search for the meaning of human existence. Mountains are one of the most popular analogies for perseverance, self-discovery, wisdom, enlightenment, hardship, and Rene Deumal uses it to showcase our search for meaning. The tone of the book is of a hybrid between spiritualist/occult tract and mountaineering adventure diary. It feels like a child’s adventure tales with a mature cosmic purpose.
“Society of Mind” by Marvin Minsky - As AI (artificial intelligence) is all the rage these days, it is essential to read musings on artificial intelligence by one of its pioneers written at the dawn of the discipline. “The father of AI” and co-founder of MIT’s artificial intelligence labs, Marvin Minksy spent his life figuring out how to make machines that are intelligent, “whatever that means,” as he liked to say. This is a framework for thinking about thinking. I would summarize this book as the “AI hype solvent”.
“Power Broker” by Robert Caro. When I try to recommend or advertise the books by Robert Caro to my friends I frequently say that he has spoiled the biography genre for me. Impeccably researched, the book tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and misshaping) of New York by Robert Movses. The book teaches invaluable lessons about the acquisition and ramifications of power. But not only the content is impressive, but also how it’s written. I recommend complimenting this book with Robert Caro’s shorter book “Working” where he describes his working process and the process of how he wrote “Power Broker” - which is a story in itself.
“Mariage and Morals” by Bertran Rusell. There are plenty of great books written by Bertran Russell, but this one had the most impact on outlook on the construction of family and love relationships. This book challenges conventional understanding of the relationship between men and women, gender roles and concepts of family. The book gave me comfort in personal choices in love and family affairs.
“Merchants and Masterpieces” by Calvin Tomkins I have always been fascinated with museums, and spend a significant time running around them. Yet before reading this book it seems that I knew so little. How did collections get formed? Who decides which pieces should be acquired by the museum? How museums can afford expansions? What is the origin of blockbuster exhibits? Who appoints curators? The book is the history of MET museum but also investigates the purpose of the existence of museums in general, it’s operational management rules, and politics. Crucial guide for lovers of museums and MET in particular.
“Obedience to Authority” by Stanley Milgram. Before popsci (pop-science genre ) books have adopted a fashion of quoting psychological studies to support their arguments, Stanley Milgram was one of the first scientists to design experiments to research human psychology in lab conditions. This controversial book describes his famous and controversial experiments to test the boundaries of people’s obedience to authority and determine how far normal people would go in inflicting pain on others just because they were told to.
“Chinese Pleasure Book” by Michael Nylan. I have attended Michael’s talk on pleasure in a small bookstore in New York. I don’t think that the cover or the name would have ever picked up my interest in passing (yet another lesson not to judge books by covers), but her talk in that bookstore changed my viewpoint on leisure and pleasure. This book is based on very rigorous research in Chinese literature and philosophy and investigates how to seek and take pleasure. The word “pleasure” currently has a strange perception in our culture, yet is essential for human existence. Friendship, music, reading, sharing - life is full of delights, Michael Nylan just reminds us that they are wonderful and should be taken daily.
“Coding Freedom” by Gabriela Coleman. While our history museums are mostly filled with works of anthropologists who study ancient societies, Gabriela Coleman is a contemporary anthropologist, who has been investigating the subculture of hackers. The book is an introduction into the world of the community that produces free and open-source software. The study is her ethnography of the underworld of computers and a great resource to understand what hacking is and the technical, aesthetic, and moral sides of hacking.
“Hardware Hacker” by Bunny - This is a great book of the sublime art of how things are really made. Inventive hacker Bunny takes you on a journey of how our daily devices come into being. In the book, he provides insight for anyone who aspires to manufacture things at scale. While the world of manufacturing keeps evolving, I think this book will stay relevant as a reminder of the importance of disassembling and building things.
“Prophet” by Khalil Gibran. “The Prophet has been recited at countless weddings and funerals. It is quoted in books and articles on training art teachers, determining criminal responsibility, and enduring ectopic pregnancy, sleep disorders, and the news that your son is gay. Its words turn up in advertisements for marriage counsellors, chiropractors, learning-disabilities specialists, and face cream.” I found myself in multiple situations when I have encountered some of the very simple sermons when encountering difficult life situations.

** /Vaclav Smil this is a recent discovery. I have read his only complete guide to energy but I am looking forward to expanding more of his books. this one will be a new addition for the next “list of favorites” **

“Fantastic Work” by Andre Martins de Barros

“Who doesn’t build castles in Spain?
Which of us isn’t mildly insane?
Pichrochole, Pyrrhus, the dairymaid,
Wise men and fools alike , we all daydream
(No pleasure in life is so sweet)
And each of us is betrayed
By flattering self-deceit -
The world’s riches and honors seem
Ours then, and all lovely women at our feet.
Whenever I’m alone
My imagination rambles, I browbeat
Heroes, topple the great Shaw from his throne,
The adoring populace hail me instead
And diadems are showered on my head
Until some little mishap ends my reign
And I’m my old fat self again.”
“The dairymaid and the milk-can” By Jean de la Fontaine

To stem the spread of #covid19 , the CDC recommends social distancing, or as I like to call it, a career in computer science.
Bored Yann LeCun

“boy reading adventure story” by Norman Rockwell