Reed Klaeser

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.

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. Link

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." Learn more

1996 The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming
A religious text. Get the book

How can computers help us flourish

1945 As We May Think, Vanevar Bush
Store linked data to extend human reasoning. Read the paper

1960 Human-Computer Symbiosis, Licklider
Read the paper

1968 Mother of All Demos, Douglas Engelbart
Watch the demo

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)". Watch the talk

How to write software

2002 Entity Component System, Scott Bilas
On how composition helps code stay out of the way of content. Watch the talk

The history of computers

1938 A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, Claude Shannon
Circuits can do all logic. Read the paper

1943 A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, McCulloch & Pitts
Networks of neurons can do all logic. Read the paper

1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, John von Neumann
Describe logic in stored programs (software) not hardware. Read the paper

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. Read the paper