February 2012 Media Thread

RobertLumley

There was a recent discussion considering the idea of a monthly Book (later expanded to movies, links, etc) thread. The poll was pretty unanimous (Both before and after I was karmassassinated) that this was A Good Idea (tm), and daenerys's Janurary thread (from which I obviously stole a lot of this) was fairly successful, so let's see if we actually need one per month.

Post what you're reading or watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing!

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting; this is a thread for sharing subjective experiences, and people should feel comfortable posting their personal opinion without fearing a karma backlash. If you disagree with a person's recommendation, please post a comment to that effect.
If you see something that has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees, which I was apparently too dumb to do.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting; this is a thread for sharing subjective experiences, and people should feel comfortable posting their personal opinion without fearing a karma backlash. If you disagree with a person's recommendation, please post a comment to that effect.
If you see something that has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please use the comment trees, which I was apparently too dumb to do.

For anyone who hasn't read it, I just started Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard Feynman. It's pretty fantastic - not much about rationality - but it's quite funny. He tells one story of how he made his fraternity brothers at MIT look really dumb. One of them asked if French curves were made in any special way. Feynman told them that French curves are specially made so that the tangent at the lowest point is always horizontal to the ground. Of course, this is obvious for any point that the tangent (derivitive) at the lowest point (minimum) is ze... (read more)

2Emile14y

I'm currently about half way through Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature", and I'm enjoying it very much, though I'm taking the exact numbers with a grain of salt after seeing some criticism of his scholarship that looks solid enough to me.

5SarahNibs14y

I read Principles of Product Development Flow recently and was very impressed. It gave me a mostly new, significantly orthogonal perspective with which to view the processes resulting in shipped code. The book, summarized, is: * Let's apply queuing theory to software development! * If you learn nothing else, remember to reduce/control/watch/cost your queue sizes before other things you think are bottlenecks * Translate benefits and costs approximately into dollars. Especially the delay costs of a product sitting in a queue. You will likely be surprised. * Also here are dozens of more fine-grained considerations and interventions like how to push costly variance to someplace less costly, keeping superstar developers at lower load so they can firefight at whim, and the fact that variance isn't always bad like it is on a factory floor.

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February 2012 Media Thread

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February 2012 Media Thread

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