book

A colleague recommended a book called “Computer Age Statistical Inference” by Efron & Hastie. I love the organization. Part I - classical stuff. Part II - Early computer-age methods. Part III - 21st century topics. That’s exactly the type of textbooks that we need.

Finished reading: V. by Thomas Pynchon

An obscure historical note from Thomas Pyhcon’s novel V.: there is a Chopin museum in the Spanish island of Mallorca, where you can see a cast of Frédéric Chopin’s hand. Chopin spent a winter there in 1838.

I found this 2019 New York Times article about the fascinating work of French writer Georges Perec. Note that Donald Kunth called his Life: A User’s Manual “perhaps the greatest 20th century novel”.

I want to see writers use GitHub for literary experimentation. It can be a new form of ergodic literature. Imagine a novel released as a GitHub repo. Readers can read it. They can check out all the branches to explore parallel universes of alternative plots. They can read the revision history as a meta-novel, to learn about the writing process. And of course, they can make new versions of the novel by merging branches.
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