The Hamming lectures are fantastic. Each one is worth watching. The book that serves as a foundation for the lectures, "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn," is worth reading.

Lecture Series -> https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30

Book -> https://a.co/d/3RQL1wX

#hamming #compsci #computerscience #computerengineering #research #learningtolearn

Perhaps some of the readers of this fine thread (https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109729242613811062) will be interested in a diversion into statistics? It turns out that while you can easily calculate the average of a population’s various dimensions (age, region, etc.), it turns out that the number of people who are “close” to the average in more than a few dimensions becomes vanishingly small. This strange feature of high-dimensional vector spaces surprised people when they looked for the “average woman” most resembling Norma, a sculpture of a woman with average features (none were found who were close to average in all ten anatomical measurements), as well as the US Air Force when they found that 3-sizes-fits-most approach to designing airplane cockpits didn’t fit anyone but caused crashes (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076608-the-end-of-average-tells-us-why-we-should-discard-a-mean-idea/ has the Norma story, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/15/08/beyond-average is a nice recap of the pilot story and it’s relevance to education, and here’s the popular podcast you might have heard this from https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/).

In this case, because so many of these variables are correlated, you can definitely imagine at least a few Chinese-speaking Christian adults living in urban Asia who are literate but didn’t graduate college, and who don’t have Internet but do have shelter and safe drinking water. But even though you can visualize such a sub-population and know it’s size is non-zero, I think it is notable how thin a sliver of the whole it is. The average person in all these dimensions is quite unusual and interesting!

(Math nerds will also enjoy revisiting the fact about higher dimensional spaces where, as the dimension increases, all but the most infinitesimal part of the volume of a spheroid is along its shell. I and many others discovered this through Richard Hamming’s book “Art of Doing Science” but here’s a YouTube lecture of him delivering the same discussion! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uU_Q2a0S0zI) #Hamming #statistics

Explainer: Error-correcting files

https://eclecticlight.co/2022/06/04/explainer-error-correcting-files/

#errorcorrecting #Reed-Solomon #Technology #checksum #Parchive #Hamming #storage #Macs #hash #DVD #CD