Blog

Good Stuff

Ricky Takkar
Created on May 6, 2021 (updated every now and then)

If the internet was a country and I was a travel blogger, these links would be my recommendations.

If you ever want to dive deep into a topic from first principles, have a physicist walk you through it. If you don't believe me, try reading How the Bitcoin protocol actually works by renowned quantum physicist, Michael Nielsen. Similarly, here's Nielsen's attempt to elucidate what implies causation if not correlation.

CS 61B is a course offered by EECS at UC Berkeley and taught by Professor Josh Hug. Revise OOP, recursion, lists, and trees prior to diving in.

Of the myriad Intro to Programming courses available online, the “Pythonic” Intro to Data Structures and Algorithms by Grow with Google on Udacity is one of my favorites due to its concision, structure, and price (it’s free).

While I doubt Google Search is Dying, at least in terms of revenue and usage (the author agrees), more of my queries on search engines end with “reddit.” Sure, shilling and botposting exist on Reddit (an inevitable side-effect of having an API), but perusing threads with relative awareness generally (and hopefully) safeguards users from making decisions influenced by an army of SEO experts. Here is a bit about one of my favorite search engines, and websites, in general.

As a researcher, I aspire to live up to this guide shared by Dr. Richard W. Hamming of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

It's so comforting to know that there are so many people in the world that are so good at what they do, so many performances of exceptional talent that I have yet to witness. One of the key incentives to learn guitar for me, like fellow classic rock aficionados, was to, one day, play “Sultans of Swing” like Mark Knopfler. While I have yet to achieve that, I've further extended my goal to now emulate Lucas Imbiriba's fingerstyle version of the classic. Be sure to also check out Lucas’ other videos, especially his “Bohemain Rhapsody” and “Hotel California” covers. PS: Check out guitar Geo… I mean, Josh Turner's cool version of “Sultans of Swing” - he really does know all the fancy chords…

Now that the iPod has officially been discontinued by Apple, here's a worthy homage to what began as a mere effort to boost Mac sales: Tony Fadell, inventor of the iPod and founder of Nest Labs, walks through CT scans of different iPods and shares the developments over each iteration. Two decades ago, the iPod redefined the entire consumer products category along with the music industry and arguably led to the birth of the iPhone.

Something is alluring about a tool on your wrist that tells time sans electricity. Bartosz Ciechanowski makes a valiant effort to elucidate the complexities of a mechanical watch in this interactive blog. While the visualizations are brilliant, the fact that he codes everything by hand in WebGL is icing on the cake.

This link points to a \(\LaTeX\) style guide for a convex optimization course at Stanford. It includes tips not only related to \(\LaTeX\) but also academic writing in general..