Ludwik Trammer
I'm a former teacher, a student, a programmer and a computer geek. I like teaching, learning, programming and geeking out.
3. Books
(books doesn't really qualify, since there is no single book I'm "addicted to". Nevertheless here come couple of books that made the biggest impact on me recently)
Science
- "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins - Jeff Hawkins (best know as the founder of Palm Computing) proposes his unified theory of the brain, based on a "memory-prediction framework". Interesting insight into a possible mechanism (or shall I say "an algorithm"?) behind inner workings of the brain (or at least a possible mechanism behind inner workings of the neocortex). Challenging but fun.
- "The Ancestor's Tale" and other Richard Dawkin’s books on evolution - it may sound weird, but evolution is really exciting to me. It's a process (or shall I say "an algorithm"?) that's as simple and elegant as possible and at the same time so powerful it created the world as we know it. It's easy to grasp the basics of evolution, but then you can spend the rest of your life thinking about consequences of the simple rules. It's great to have Dawkins to facilitate the thinking.
- "The Descent of Woman", "The Scars of Evolution" and "The Descent of the Child" by Elaine Morgan - more books on evolution. I don't feel qualified to judge whether Morgan's "aquatic ape" hypothesis really makes sense. I like her books, because their force you to think, constantly questioning conventional ways of thinking about evolutionary processes.
Famous IT people
- "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary" by Linus Torvalds & David Diamond - an (auto)biography of Linus Torvalds, the men behind the development of the Linux kernel. The book is light and funny, but at the same time succeeds in showing (and maybe even explaining) a great passion for programing.
- "iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way" by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith - Steve Wozniak is the brilliant inverter of the personal computer, one of the sweetest and humbles people out there, and a well known practical joker. Read about his quest for the perfect design, about his jokes and about the computer industry at its beginnings. I think the book is more interesting than the Steve Jobs biography.
- "Free as in Freedom" by Sam Williams - Richard Stallman, the man behind the Free Software movement, is a legend. This GPL-licensed biography doesn't shy from showing his flaws (like his legendary stubbornness), but even if you believe Stallman's ideas are too hard-line you have to respect his devotion to the idea of freedom and his ability to notice its new frontiers.
- Other people I should definitely read up on include Alan Turing, Grace Hopper and Augusta Ada King...
Documentaries
- "Gang Leader for a Day. A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets" by Sudhir Venkatesh - it's a true story of a sociology student, who decides to visit a notorious housing project in Chicago, as part of his research on urban poverty... and finds himself coming back over and over again for the next 7 years, getting to know "the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials", befriending J.T. - the leader of a local drug gang. The stories told are exciting, touching and thought-provoking.
- "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle" by Daniel Everett - to be honest, this book is not very well written. But the subject matter is so fascinating it's still worth it. Pirahã is an isolated tribe living in the Amazonian jungle. Everett's account of Pirahã language seems to counter everything we thought we knew about human language.
- "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal" by Eric Schlosser - it's not just a book about food. Schlosser uses the fast food industry, with its impact on environment, work conditions, animal rights, health and epidemiological issues to illustrate more universal points (or at least that's how I read the book). At one point it had a great role in evolution of my political beliefs.
Fiction
- "Daemon" and "Freedom™" by Daniel Suarez - it's a technothriller about a computer daemon. The amazing thing about this book is that it reads like a far fetched science fiction, but at the same time all the technology described in the book is here already, ready to be used!
- "Harry Potter" series by J.K. Rowling - you know Harry Potter. It's magical. I was always about Harry's age when the books were coming out.
- The "Millenium" Trilogy by Stieg Larsson - great characters, captivating story... you probably have read it already.
Other
- Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood by A. S. Neill - Sumerhill is a free school, a democratic community where all lessons are optional. It functions in this fashion since 1921. The book will challenge most of your preconceptions about the way we should think about education.
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4. Movies
(I know. Movies doesn't qualify either. I'll try to be brief...)
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Colophon
This site was hand-coded using the Sublime Text editor. It uses the Bootstrap css framework. The icons used are licensed under a Creative Commons (by-nd) license and were created by Jan Kovařík of glyphicons.com (with exception of Filmweb ans StackOverflow icons - they were created by me and you can use them however you want). The fonts used are called "Nixie One" and "Ledger" and are hosted on Google Web Fonts. This fonts combination was inspired by an article from designshack.net. The photo of a fox was licensed via iStockPhoto and was originally created by Eric Isselée of lifeonwhite.com.
The site was initially created around 2005. The current version went live on July 15th, 2012.