ideas

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

Year	Person	My understanding	Idea
1837	Ralph Waldo Emerson	Low	The American Scholar Think for yourself, read, take action
1989	Tim Berners-Lee	Kinda	On combining other's ideas to create the internet "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and -- ta-da! -- the World Wide Web. (Berners-Lee)"
1996	Richard Hamming		The Art of Doing Science and Engineering A religious text.

How can computers help us flourish

Year	Person	My understanding	Idea
1945	Vanevar Bush	Kinda	As We May Think Store linked data to extend human reasoning
1960	Licklider	Low	Human-Computer Symbiosis
1968	Douglas Engelbart	Low	Mother of All Demos
2012	Wilson Miner	Kinda	On the privelege and power of digital design Digital product designers have enormous impact because they "...shape our tools and our tools shape us (McLuhan)".

How to write software

Year	Person	My understanding	Idea
2002	Scott Bilas	Low	Entity Component System On how composition helps code stay out of the way of content.

The history of computers

Year	Person	My understanding	Idea
1938	Claude Shannon		A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits Circuits can do all logic.
1943	McCulloch & Pitts		A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity Networks of neurons can do all logic.
1945	John von Neumann	Low	First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC Describe logic in stored programs (software) not hardware
1968	Archer H. Futch	High	Implicit Two-Dimensional Solutions of the Navier-Stokes Equations 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.

my ideas and questions about the future

I write about my ideas on my blog. These ideas fascinate me, but I think their primary value for now is in teaching me to write and think. Until they mature, I'll leave them for my blog and for those who know me best or care to ask.