Month: August 2023

The inventor of the programming language C++ talks about an education beyond just technology:

So you can’t just do code. You have to do something about culture and how to express ideas. I mean, I never regretted the time I spent on history and on math. Math sharpens your mind, history gives you some idea of your limitations and what’s going on in the world. And so don’t be too sure. Take time to have a balanced life.

There are many lenses one can choose from to look at life. Having a good set of them and knowing when to use which one is a skill acquired through a broad education.

I read this in the context of the Open AI creator Sam Altman’s comments on the movie Oppenheimer:

i was hoping that the oppenheimer movie would inspire a generation of kids to be physicists but it really missed the mark on that. let’s get that movie made!

It wasn’t meant to be a movie about science – but Altman doesn’t seem to realise that. This is a problem of lenses.

The USA abolitionst Frederick Douglass used rhetoric effectively to lionise his contemporary John Brown:

“His zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun. Mine was bounded by time. His stretched away to the silent shores of eternity. I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave. I could live for the slave. John Brown could die for the slave.”

A few weeks ago I created a custom, ‘paper size’ to print PDFs of articles on the web. The paper had the dimensions of a mobile screen instead of an A4 sheet.

The results are striking. The same article appears very differently on each paper size. Left is A4, right is my custom size.

Here’s how I calculated the dimensions of the paper in cm based on screen size in pixels.

And here’s how I select the custom paper size when printing

It’s one of those things I should have done years ago.