Are Mistakes Inevitable? Reviewing Humble Pi by Matt Parker
Happy 2021, with 2020 being a tough year for many hopefully things will pick up this year! Perhaps not the best start but plenty of room to improve!
Review of the Week
I've fallen into a pattern of reading two books simultaneously - I find it helps to slow things down a bit so I can take in more of what's going on. Usually one of the books is an easier read, so if I've had a hard day in the (home) office it's easier to pick up & go. I'm planning on mainly reviewing the more difficult reads as these have more interesting ideas & concepts, but I found Humble Pi by Matt Parker to be an enjoyable, light read which also contained important messages for those who regularly work with numbers, programming or data.
Bringing a nerdish charm to his writing style, Parker gives a highly readable account of maths errors, some famous and some obscure. These are written to be humorous (the subtitle of the book is A Comedy of Maths Errors), and I did find myself laughing with it. Something that struck me was to think about why these things are funny. A bug in the original Pac-Man code which causes the 256th level to break down is harmless and slightly ridiculous, but then other examples range from a Mars probe that crashes into the planet to tragic bridge collapses and patient overdoses. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that what makes these things funny is that they are relatably human. I feel we've all made similar mistakes, I certainly have, fortunately at much smaller scales than those in the book.
The book also gave a nice couple of practical lessons:
- Quite often I feel like a mug for some of the mistakes I make when writing code (in the office or at home) as well as basic mathematical errors in everyday life (calculating average speeds during runs being a frequent source of errors). The lesson is that these things happen to everyone. I doubt anyone is mistake free. We should simply act to minimise them, rather than beat ourselves up when they do happen.
- Build systems robust to mistakes. This sounds obvious, but really think about not just how something is used now, but also how it might be used in the future. Write systems to raise alarms when things are being misused. Test things that were created for other purposes other than than the one being investigated. Ask questions when you don't fully understand.
So would I recommend the book? If you're looking for an easy book with charm, and find these kind of things funny, then go for it!
Training Thoughts
Training still feeling like it's going reasonably well; I was a bit disappointed with a 5 mile effort round BP on Saturday.
Looking back on my plan for splitting the season into 3 x 12-week blocks, I don't think doing 12 weeks of hard workout & not much mileage in Oct-Dec has paid off - I don't necessarily regret it, maybe if the track was open it would have been a different story (I felt fit in October, training with some Belgrave guys - all the solo hard runs haven't quite been the same). Just need to resolve to make the most of running hard in a group when things get back to normal! But while we're in this lockdown, hoping to knock out some 90-100k weeks with 2 tougher runs & a long run. Nothing too advanced there!
Top Twitter Follows
Someone who I find quite interesting who fires out well-reasoned takes on the other side of debates to where I naturally find myself is Matt Goodwin. He's a politics professor and author of National Populism, which was also a fresh perspective. Not all of his tweets are great, but he makes me think twice about things, which I value.
Other Stuff
- With the extra time I've started a little project to write a Minesweeper game + AI, to try and learn some machine learning, code is available on GitHub if anyone is curious. I might write more about it in future weeks if I get anywhere with it - been fairly pleased with progress so far
- Royal mail has a bit of a backlog in my postcode, which means I'm not reading the books I wanted to be reading at the moment. Undecided if New Logo (Naomi Klein) will get a review, if not it might be 3-4 weeks until my next one of these!
Stay safe out there!