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The ideas that fascinate me tend to be about how computers support thinking. My understanding of ideas is ranked from blank — as in I haven't tried or tried and my mind was blank after, to low, to kinda, to high.

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How computers work, how our minds work, and how we program all fascinate as well but these topics take longer for me to understand. von Neumann is here because of the von Neumann machine not his math and Knuth isn't because I don't much like algorithms.

How to think

1837 The American Scholar — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Think for yourself, read, take action.

1989 On combining other's ideas to create the internet — Tim Berners-Lee

“I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web.”

1996 The Art of Doing Science and Engineering — Richard Hamming

A religious text.

How can computers help us flourish

1945 As We May Think — Vannevar Bush

Store linked data to extend human reasoning.

1968 Mother of All Demos — Douglas Engelbart
2012 On the privilege and power of digital design — Wilson Miner

Digital product designers have enormous impact because they “...shape our tools and our tools shape us (McLuhan)”.

How to write software

2002 Entity Component System — Scott Bilas

On how composition helps code stay out of the way of content.

The history of computers

1938 A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits — Claude Shannon

Circuits can do all logic.

1943 A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity — McCulloch & Pitts

Networks of neurons can do all logic.

1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC — John von Neumann

Describe logic in stored programs (software) not hardware.

1968 Implicit Two-Dimensional Solutions of the Navier-Stokes Equations — Archer H. Futch

My grandfather wrote this paper when he was working at Lawrence Livermore Lab. The only relevance besides being super cool is that I think he was using the CDC 6600, an early supercomputer. No I don't really understand this.