A snippet for LibraryThing

A very short one, to extract book titles from the widget "Your list" on the right, in a format suitable to paste in a Org document. Unfortunately I could not find an API endpoint to do the same thing in a more structured way.

$$('ol#list_yourlist li a').forEach( book => console.log('[[' + book.href + '][' + book.textContent + ']]'))

Alfred Wainwright

Alfred Wainwright

A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells is a series of seven books by A. Wainwright, detailing the fells (the local word for hills and mountains) of the Lake District in northwest England. Written over a period of 13 years from 1952, they consist entirely of reproductions of Wainwright's manuscript, hand-produced in pen and ink with no typeset material.

Books I finished in 2019

Books batch

• Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise
• The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
• The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu. I heard about Cixin Liu for the first time when he was nominated for the Hugo Awards, but never tried reading anything. This one is ideal, as it is a collection of shorter novellas.

Latest batch

Latest loot from the used-book store.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell was repeteadly recommended by colleagues. Years ago, when the book was published and gained attention and success, I somehow didn't notice: I have only a vague idea about the subject and the plot, so I'm excited about what I'm about to discover.
• I took Greek Mathematical thought and the origins of Algebra largely because of a casual conversation I recently had about mathematical formalism and its history. I had only sketchy ideas about the subject, so I thought this one could be useful reference material.
• I am curious about Decoding the Universe (let's see if the book can hold up to the hype of that subtitle)
• The Mathematical Theory of Communication is a classic, picking it up was an easy decision.
• I have never read anything by Ray Kurzweil so when I saw this The Age of Spiritual Machines I put it on my pile without hesitation.
• For quite opposite reasons, but with the same effect, I grabbed this copy of I am a strange loop

Pocket Perl ebook

The publisher released an ebook version of my book.

Melvin Decimal System stats on LibraryThing

I just noticed LibraryThing released a new feature.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

I started reading last Neal Stephenson's (and Nicole Galland's) novel. I'm only a few dozen pages into the book: it's soon to tell but it seems to be less "hard" SF than then other things I read from Stephenson. We'll see.

Mindstorms

Mindstorms

Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms was published by Basic Books in 1980, and outlines his vision of children using computers as instruments for learning. A second edition, with new Forewords by John Sculley and Carol Sperry, was published in 1993. The book remains as relevant now as when first published almost forty years ago.

The Media Lab is grateful to Seymour Papert’s family for allowing us to post the text here. We invite you to add your comments and reflections.

Status update

Some days off, not very much done. Somehow relevant in the context of this stream:

• Writing some simple Common Lisp, for exercise. The Wireworld simulator and editor –which has some significance per se besides being interesting as a CL exercise– is on pause (while I try to figure out Lispbuilder-sdl's ways of treating surfaces), and I'm now on something simpler. It's a Sudoku solver assistant. It's not clear to me what the scope of the project will be, however I'm discovering handy techniques and tools useful for a "real" system: for example I borrowed from scmutils the idea of using TeX to obtain a representation of the Sudoku problem (it's faster than I initially thought).
• Reading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. I hope to write something more substantial as I reach its end.

Alan Kay's reading list

Alan Kay's reading list

(reproducing it here for archive)

Black Hole, by Bucky Sinister

Early Christmas present

The only way to beat this would be giving me more time to read it. (It's a wonderful boxed-set edition of the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics)

Land of Lisp

Land of Lisp

Finished Anathem

Genius at play

A biography of John Horton Conway. Arrived on Monday.

Urania 1622

I'm told that Bruce Sterling now lives in Italy, in Turin. This is a collection of stories set around Italy. Just skimmed the very first pages so far, I noticed an overflow of the word "occult".

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

I'm currently approximately 5% through the novel. I still have only faint ideas about what's going on. Not yet alarming, by my count.

Meeting J-Bob: Notes on "The Little Prover" Chapters 1-5

Meeting J-Bob: Notes on "The Little Prover" Chapters 1-5

The Little Prover

The Little Prover

Just arrived. It's printed in colours!

I didn't have the courage to ask the courier about two more books I'm waiting for: he seemed very pissed off for the problems he had finding my address.

Measuring things

I use org-mode for registering the books I read. Here some code to produce stats.

;; Is there a better (more idiomatic) way to aggregate values?
(defun aggregate (aggregate-function lst)
  (let ((hash (make-hash-table :test 'equal)))
    (loop for key in (mapcar 'car lst)
          for value in (mapcar 'cdr lst)
          do (if (null (gethash key hash))
                 (puthash key value hash)
               (puthash key (funcall aggregate-function value (gethash key hash)) hash))
          finally return hash)))

(defun pages-per-month-raw ()
  (with-current-buffer (get-file-buffer "~/org/books.org")
    (mapcar (lambda (b)
              (let* ((month (format-time-string "%b" (date-to-time (cdr (assoc "TIMESTAMP" b)))))
                     (pages (string-to-int (cdr (assoc "PAGES" b)))))
                (cons month pages)))
            (books/in-year "2015"))))

(defun pages-per-month ()
  (let ((ppmr (pages-per-month-raw)))
    (aggregate '+ ppmr)))

(defun month-list ()
  '("Jan" "Feb" "Mar" "Apr" "May" "Jun"
    "Jul" "Aug" "Sep" "Oct" "Nov" "Dec"))

(defun complete-hash (hash)
  (let ((new-hash (make-hash-table)))
    (loop for month-name in (month-list)
          do (if (null (gethash month-name hash))
                 (puthash month-name 0 new-hash)
               (puthash month-name (gethash month-name hash) new-hash))
          finally return new-hash)))

;; Poor man's TSV export
;; TODO check the implicit assertion on the ordering
(maphash (lambda (k v) (insert (format "%s\t%s\n" k v)))
         (complete-hash (pages-per-month)))

Then, for example:

stats <- read.csv("/tmp/stats.tsv", sep = "\t", header = F)
names(stats) <- c("month", "pages")
stats$month <- factor(stats$month, month.name )
p <- ggplot( stats, aes(month, pages)) +
    geom_histogram() +
    theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=45, hjust=1))
p

2011 in books

Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer

Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer by Tim Hartnell, published 1983

(I found this reference in an excellent post by Michael Fogus)