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An outstanding presentation both in terms of content and presentation.
by drallison 17y ago
An outstanding presentation both in terms of content and presentation.
- michael_dorfman 17y agoI half agree. The presentation was, indeed, outstanding. The content was half-a-click above 'meh'. Honestly, were there any ideas here that you don't think were common knowledge to the average HN reader?
- pohl 17y agoAre you suggesting that novel-idea-density is the average HN reader's sole metric for measuring content? You might be right. I certainly fall into that rut more often than I'd like. I suspect it gives me a dopamine rush. I liked this piece for the interesting historical miscellany that it pulled together, and for the narrative and visualization on scales of complexity. It got bonus points for including A Humument, which I bought back when I was going through a Douglas Hofstadter phase. (He mentioned it in Metamagical Themas.)
- crux 17y agoI suspect it is the very rare average HN reader who has spent any time this morning idly wondering whether a computer built out of matchboxes to play Go would be bigger or smaller than the Crab Nebula.
- michael_dorfman 17y agoReally? I first came across the matchbox tic-tac-toe concept in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column as a teenager, and the first thing I did was some back-of-the-envelope calculations on how many boxes would be required for chess. If I recall, it was larger than the number of atoms in the universe. Please don't tell me I'm unusual in this regard.