>> I might be unusual in the sense that in my teens I absolutely adored Asimov as a writer of non-fiction rather than as a sci-fi author.
That's because he was only the second-best sci-fi writer but the best science writer in the world at the time [Clarke-Asimov Treaty of Park Avenue|https://sfandfantasy.co.uk/php/the-big-3.php]
I don't remember reading any Clarke short stories, though I do remember a few books favorably - but Asimov's stories were incredible, and stick with me to this day. I should get a few more of his short story collections for the kiddo, I think I have a few of his non-fiction ones on a bookshelf somewhere.
brilliant stories both, but my two favourite asimov shorts are "profession" (I really, really love the trope that a regimented society depends on outcasts and outsiders for any sort of innovation) and "the martian way" (one of his more minor shorts, but it captures the joy and optimism of golden age solar system exploration fiction like nothing else I've read)
If Lem was there, he would likely have agreed to dedicate his books to "the best third-rate scifi writers", given his generally critical view of American/Western scifi as naive, "commercial trash", and shallow entertainment.
Not all Western sci-fi are gadget dangling spaceship displays. That might have appeared as the trend to Lem, and I don't blame him. I have only Solaris that's by him, and gotta admit- it's on another level.
> It's unfortunate that works of great non-fiction writers evaporate away from our cultural consciousness after their death.
That's a bit of an overstatement? There's Confucius, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, ... Darwin, Newton, Einstein, ... Jefferson, Decartes, .... (you get the idea).
It is a competitive field; what's sufficient to win attention in the current generation is often not enough for future generations, which have their own contemporary writers.
In The Building Blocks Of The Universe's section on Calcium:
> Another way of getting round the problem of hard
water is to manufacture compounds that behave like soap
but don't form insoluble compounds with calcium. Many
types of such detergents have been put on the market in
the last ten years, and hard water is far less of a problem
for the housewife than it used to be.
Reads like '90s era comedy, ala "women be cleaning, amirite?", without even the lazy backdoor of "its just a joke".
This is such an uncharitable reading. "Housewifes" were extremely common then and were marketed to quite extensively in those product categories. Acknowledging them in some form is not the same as saying "I have deeply thought about the state of our society and have come to the conclusion that all is as should be."
I don't know if it says good or bad things about me, but I never noticed that.
But maybe it's just because I started reading his works long after their initial release. In particular, I was quite surprised to later learn that "Asimov's New Guide to Science" was originally published as "The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science".
>...The book's title was Svirsky's, chosen as a deliberate homage to George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). Asimov feared the title would be seen as elitist and condescending, and he suggested Everyone's Guide to Science as an alternative, but Svirsky refused. Years later, when he was confronted by annoyed feminists who asked why the book was restricted to men, Asimov would claim that the "intelligent man" of the title referred to himself;[3] thus anticipating the title Asimov's Guide to Science adopted for the third edition.
The problem of predicting tides was so important that it attracted many Physics and Maths heavy weights. You can well imagine how important predicting tides would have been for D-day landing.
One related fascinating historical artifact is the special purpose analogue computer designed by Lord Kelvin in the 1860s based on Fourier series, harmonic analysis. Think difference engine in it's cogs and cams glory, but special purpose.
Possibly one of the first examples of Machine learning, with Machine in capital 'M'. It incorporated recent tidal observations to update it's prediction.
Note that sinusoids are universal approximators for a large class of functions, an honour that is by no means restricted to deep neural nets.
George Darwin (Charles Darwin's son) was a significant contributor in the design and upgrade of the machine.
Other recognizable names who worked on tide prediction problem were Thomas Young (of double slit experiment fame) and Sir George Airy (of Airy disk fame).
> Tacopy is a Python library that provides a decorator to optimize tail-recursive functions by transforming them into iterative loops.
Can this handle mutually recursive calls ? Because those are mostly the only place I use tail calls, rest I translate to iterative loops, list comprehension, maps and reduces.
Nor can you count on Common Lisp to have TCO. People who are new to CL and treat it like Scheme run into this constantly. Basically never recur down a list, since the list could be long.
This problem also shows up in cases where TCO is not possible. For example, suppose we have a syntax tree for some program and need to traverse the tree. Nodes that represent lists of things might have a long list of children, and in a sufficiently large program recursing down that list can blow out the stack. Just recurse on list elements, which one can reasonably assume don't nest too deeply.
I have tingling suspicion that you might have missed the joke.
To date I have not met anyone who thought he summed the terms of the infinite series in geometric series term by term. That would take infinite time. Of course he used the expression for the sum of a geometric series.
The joke is that he missed a clever solution that does not require setting up the series, recognising it's in geometric progression and then using the closed form.
The clever solution just finds the time needed for the trains to collide, then multiply that with the birds speed. No series needed.
It's been argued that light travels at the speed of light in vacuum when it is travelling slower through an optically denser material. The stated logic is, and its Physically correct, that the photons are travelling at the same speed as that of light in vacuum, getting absorbed by the molecules of the medium and re-emitted after a small delay.
Semantically, I don't find it convincing. If a rabbit sleeps and pauses every few yards to end up being slower on average than a turtle, I wouldn't call its speed whatever it is that it travels at in between frequent sleeps.
the quantum world does not have much overlap with common sense, for sure.
Towards the end of the paper, "space and time need not be physical" but instead, "uniquely consistent constructs by which one can describe events" ... so does this mean that space and time simply make the math work?
A PhD bud of mine says jokingly, skip the math, particles can eat each other, swap energy and sometimes emit a LOTof energy. Space is not what we think, apparently time isn't either
For the current generation, I never miss a chance to mention Gamow's non-fiction.
It's unfortunate that works of great non-fiction writers evaporate away from our cultural consciousness after their death.
It makes me sad that there will be a generation, or maybe it's already upon us, one that has not delighted in Martin Gardner.
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