I am currently listening to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and it is by far the most interesting book I've read/listened to. I have been moved to tears again and again by this book.
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (1917) just turned 100, and it is also one of my most favorite books of all time, it too was moving me to tears again and again.
I just finished Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. His writing about the plight of the workers and peasants was striking. It was also creepy to read his fears in 1890 about the threat of a senseless Europe-wide conflict. His criticism of governments, the church, and military service all seem valid to me. However, his advice to improve humanity is based on the assumption that the reader is a hard-core christian who wants to follow the literal words of Christ.
I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks while doing other things; walking, cleaning, cooking, traveling, playing games, etc. Every time I try speeding up, even just to 1.25x, I don't enjoy it as much, as it feels rushed and stressful. I think it could be interesting to learn to listen and read at extremely high speeds, but nothing more than interesting, and I'm even doubting the usefulness of it.
During my recent visit to Saint Petersburg, I visited the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games, and I would highly recommend all the games to everybody who is interested in the games! In case you are in the city, it's one of my top 5 places to visit, at least if you are interested in games. I went there alone, but I would highly recommend bringing a friend, as some of the games are designed for two players, and it's far more fun to play with a friend than a random stranger.
My favorite games were Sniper and Sniper 2, but I would recommend trying everything.
This looks really cool! It seems like it's just what I've been looking for lately, without realizing it. Will look more into this when I get back from vacation. Thanks for sharing and showing.
I visited the library, and saw an advert in the local newspaper about a programming job in a neighboring city (~3 hour drive). The day I saw the ad was the deadline for sending an application, so I hurried home and threw together an application, along with my CV. After just a few days, I was asked to come in for an interview where I got a small task that I then went home and worked on the task for a day or two before sending everything back to the company. They loved both talking to me and what I had done on the task and I was offered a job just a few days later.
That wasn't who I had in mind, but thanks for sharing that example. I think the guy I'm thinking of is at Cornell and still alive. He also might actually be in CS instead of Math. I tried googling it but, unfortunately, "math professor who doesn't read papers" didn't come up with any results.
Shinichi Mochizuki developed a new theory (IUT) which eventually yielded a proof to the abc conjecture. I believe he largely developed it in isolation and thus when it was published it took years to bring the rest of the community up to speed. Not sure if he doesn’t read other’s papers but maybe this is what’s you were thinking about?
You might be thinking of R.L. Moore and his "Moore Method" except it was only used in a teaching context, not in day to day work. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_method
I don't think taking notes is the most important part of learning from a lecture. For me, throughout the years, actively participating in lectures through asking questions or discussing the concept being talked about, either with the lecturer or the person I'm sitting beside. Compared to taking notes, this has lead to me gaining a deeper understanding than when writing or typing everything that is being said during the meeting or the lecture. Usually, the only things I write down in meetings and lectures are words or concepts I don't already understand so I can research those later, or specific tasks that I am going to do as a result of the meeting or lecture.
I've never understood the thing about taking notes myself (mind you I never did any higher education); what is the lecture explaining that isn't in the textbook? The textbook should be all the notes and information you need, maybe supplemented with online; not keeping notes will allow you to focus on the lecture itself, which should be an extra on top of the book.
The actual act of taking the information and processing it into your own words, and then also the act of actually writing those words down, has been shown to improve memory retention and understanding of that information over what you would get from simply reading the same information in a textbook.
The biggest problem with the Discover Weekly is its inability to understand _why_ you're listening to a specific subset of music. It might not be that your taste in music suddenly changed, or that you discovered a new genre that you're incredibly interested in, even though your most listened to genres or songs changed for a few weeks, or your listening patterns changed for a few weeks.
A few examples:
I'm Norwegian, and listen to quite a lot of Norwegian music in Norwegian. Norwegian music is also European music, Scandinavian music, Nordic music, etc., and as a result I get music from Germany, France, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, among other countries and languages. However, the reason that I enjoy listening to Norwegian music is because I speak and understand the nuances in the language perfectly, while this is not the case with any of the other languages.
In Norway, we have «russefeiring» (russ celebration) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russefeiring) from approximately mid-April to mid-May. In the recent years, many groups of «russ» have been making/ordering songs to represent them throughout their celebration, and in that period, I listened to some of those songs because it was fun during that period (around April-May), but it's not interesting to listen to outside of that time period at all, pretty much like Christmas songs. Now it's the second week of October, and my Discover Weekly list still contains a lot of songs (12 of 30 songs) created specifically for the «russefeiring». Imagine getting half your Discover Weekly filled with Christmas songs in May, because that's pretty much my experience with this.
I don't know what they have to do to make Discover Weekly not give me shitty suggestions, but right now it keeps giving me suggestions that are outdated and uninteresting and I have no good way to give that feedback.
I'm really saddened by this, because for the first half year of Discover Weekly, the playlists were so good that I stored them in separate playlists to be able to go back and listen more to them.
I really wish I could get Spotify to "forget" or "reset" my preferences. When I first started using Spotify, I listened to a lot of slow calming music (because I was working). Now ALL my Discover weekly's are just 'Iron and Wine', 'The National' derivatives. Its made Discover Weekly useless to me.
I have the same issue with Iron and Wine and I don't get why. Every recommendation engine I've tried decides I absolutely love them, no matter what seed I start with or what songs I like/dislike.
I don't mind Iron and Wine but they are definitely a 'meh' for me, so it gets frustrating when they dominate every playlist. And, disliking/thumbs down never seems to get rid of them.
Are they generic enough that the algorithm finds something similar between them and everything I like?
My problem as well. I recently was in charge of putting together the playlist for a friend's get-together. They have significantly different taste in music from me, so now my recommendations are all messed up!
We had to build some explicit filters for this at Spotify. For instance we blacklisted Christmas music from being part of the listening data – until them people would get a ton of Christmas music recommendations every January. But to your point, there's a long tail of other contextual things.
Weirdly, some genres seem to be entirely absent. I listen to a lot of jazz and classical, and with the exception of the occasional jazzy pop song, I never get recommendations for those genres.
Granted, Spotify doesn't have a huge amount of contemporary jazz (much of what I listen to are imported ECM tracks that Spotify doesn't have, though not all), but it does have a lot of classical.
I don't think it's ever recommended any Latino or folk music, either, come to think of it.
classical music has notoriously bad metadata on spotify – it just doesn't fit into the data model of artist/album/track. i think that causes the system to filter out a lot of the listening data or fail to find patterns.
not sure what's up with jazz but i'm guessing it could be a similar problem
Maybe they can factor out those event/location-driven trends, or dampen them down.
I think the Christmas example is a good one, I wouldn't want half my Discover to have Christmas songs- but I wouldn't mind having 1 or 2, perhaps from an artist I had never realized had a christmas single.
Maybe don't listen to the discovery weekly playlist for the week and just listen to other playlists you like. If you listen to the genre because it's in your weekly playlist, than spotify is probably going to think you like those songs.
Search for some open playlist you like and don't listen to the discovery weekly. In my experience spotify is fairly good a taking the hint.
One alternative would be the daily selection which seems to be more sorted for genres.
Thanks, but this is what I've been doing for the last few months, although I have also listened to music that is somewhat similar in genre (Norwegian music, electronic, hip-hop, pop, etc). I don't think I should stop listening to the music I like in order to manipulate the algorithms into giving me the music I like and want to listen to. It's counter-intuitive.
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (1917) just turned 100, and it is also one of my most favorite books of all time, it too was moving me to tears again and again.