2020 stocking stuffers
Hey there,
It's been a long year, and there are many Important Things you should be reading. Here are three of none of those things.
- A short article I wrote about "busy beavers"—simple computer programs that are purposely designed to be as tedious and pointless as possible. Weirdly, they'll also give you the answers to some of the greatest unsolved problems in all of mathematics... if you can wait long enough.
- "Who Can Name The Bigger Number?" This stone-cold classic was written 20 years ago by Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist I quoted in my busy beaver article. If you had 15 seconds to write down the biggest non-infinity number you could, what would you write? And how? This is the kind of essay you curl up with next to a fire and lose yourself in. It's like "Consider the Lobster" but for math.
- "I Should Have Loved Biology" is a blog post that James Somers wrote about the challenges he faced in researching his New Yorker article about COVID-19. But it's fricking better than the New Yorker article! Reading it is like hanging out inside someone's mind, Being John Malkovich-style, while they are fascinated with something. It's direct, unpretentious, and easily the best piece of science writing I've read all year.
That's all for 2020. Take it easy,
J
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