How to Read a Book has a large section on reading nonfiction.

I read physics textbooks all the time, as well as some math. Right now I'm working through Group Theory and Physics. The best advice I have to give is to pick the right textbooks. I have it easy since I can just ask professors what books to read. I tend to read them very slowly (3-4 months for a good sized book) but I'm a busy person. I take notes by hand.

Just a guess: you need more working memory and more complicated processing to parse the second case -- try writing a parser for each!

In the first form (which is like RPN) it's push-on-stack all the way through until the first verb to construct a complete determiner. In the second form you have to first push all the nouns on stack, then keep popping the stack up for each verb to match with the corresponding noun to construct the determiner. Except that the last verb corresponding to the first noun is not a part of the determiner, so you have to check that.

TL;DR: RPN expressions and parsers are simpler than the alternatives.

I learned about Egan's Law, and I'm pretty sure it's a less-precise restatement of the correspondence principle. Anyone have any thoughts on that similarity?

I love these, but only up through Thud! After that V gubhtug Ivzrf jnf birecbjrerq sbe gur ceboyrzf ur snprq

At which point, Polly decided that she knew enough of the truth to be going on with. The enemy wasn't men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. It was just bleedin' stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.

• Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

Fiction Books Thread

To the layman, the philosopher, or the classical physicist, a statement of the form "this particle doesn't have a well-defined position" (or momentum, or x-component of spin angular momentum, or whatever) sounds vague, incompetent, or (worst of all) profound. It is none of these. But its precise meaning is, I think, almost impossible to convey to anyone who has not studied quantum mechanics in some depth.

• David Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. The book is not so good but I liked this quote.

Why is space colonization considered at all desirable?

No, it doesn't. While the current structure of mathematics curricula might not be ideal, the solution won't be found by the means outlined in this post.

It is clear that spaced repetition makes learning material much easier. Start there.

I would've liked to see the letter that he's responding to.