The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn A Book by Richard Hamming www.amazon.com The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived. Gifts of knowledge to humanityHamming-greatnessIt cannot be taught in wordsPreparing for problemsStudent's future, not teacher's past+33 More You and Your ResearchChance favors the prepared mindSerendipity learningscienceengineeringdiscovery
You and Your Research A Speech by Richard Hamming www.cs.virginia.edu This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?" Important problemsOpen doors, open mindsInverting the problemIntellectual investment is like compound interestGreat people can tolerate ambiguity+2 More The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn researchdiscoverycreativitylearning
Against the survival of the prettiest An Essay by Samuel Hughes www.worksinprogress.co What has emerged here is that although survivorship bias probably does contribute to that to some extent, it is not the main explanation: premodern buildings may on average have been a bit less beautiful than those that have survived, but they still seem to have been ugly far less often than recent buildings are. The survivorship theory sought to explain the apparent rise of ugliness in terms of a bias in the sample of buildings we are observing. There is another kind of bias theory, which seeks to explain it in terms of a bias in the observer, saying for instance that every generation is disposed to find recent buildings uglier than older ones, and that this is why recent buildings seem so to us. This is a complex and interesting idea, which I am not going to assess on this occasion. Suppose, though, that our eyes are to be trusted. If this is so, strange and eerie truths rise before us: that ugly buildings were once rare, that the ‘uglification of the world’ is real and that it is happening all around us. urbanismarchitecturebeauty