An in-depth look at the five core principles of API design.

Excellent talk!

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ5_u8Lgvyk

via: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/20/ic-leadership.html

see: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/97243.97271

VisuAlgo was conceptualised in 2011 by Associate Professor Steven Halim (NUS School of Computing) as a tool to help his students better understand data structures and algorithms, by allowing them to learn the basics on their own and at their own pace. Together with his students from the National University of Singapore, a series of visualizations were developed and consolidated, from simple sorting algorithms to complex graph data structures. Though specifically designed for the use of NUS students taking various data structure and algorithm classes (CS1010/equivalent, CS2040/equivalent (inclusive of IT5003)), CS3230, CS3233, and CS4234), as advocators of online learning, we hope that curious minds around the world will find these visualizations useful as well.

What holds the protons and neutrons together in the nucleus?   Early work on this question combined Heisenberg’s idea that the proton and neutron are two states of the same particle, and Yukawa’s idea is that the nuclear force is carried by a new kind of particle.   The results were revolutionary, and laid some of the groundwork for the Standard Model.

On the volumes of higher-dimensional spheres

Grant Sanderson is one of the best orators of our time.

Talk from the Roguelike Celebration 2018

Very nice software architecture talk. Patterns discussed: composition over inheritance, type objects, commands/actions.

The Pauli matrices are used to study the angular momentum of spin-1/2 particles.   I won’t merely tell you what they are: I’ll work them out from scratch, and in the process we’ll learn a bit about what ‘observables’ are in quantum physics.

The physics and math of spin-1/2 particles: how states of a spin-1/2 correspond to points on a sphere.

We recall the definition of the fundamental group develop in the previous lecture then prove that it is indeed a group. Finally, we show that the fundamental group of the circle is isomorphic to Z, the integers.

We give a quick review of group theory then discuss homotopy of paths building up to the definition of the fundamental group.

When are two shapes the “same”? Topics covered include deformation retract, homotopy of maps, and the homotopy equivalence of spaces.

A crash course in quantum physics.   I explain states and transition probabilities between states in quantum physics, and the basic rule for computing transition probabilities.

Surprisingly straightforward.

A first tour of quantum mechanics and how the 3 forces in the Standard Model are connected to quunits, qubits and qutrits.  How qubits differ from classical bits and probabilistic bits.

The physics leading up to the Standard Model - starting from the three main pillars of physics in the 1800s and the paradoxes they led to.

We’ll learn about different frameworks for composing dynamical systems, and conjecture about what this has to do with “thing-y-ness”.

Clear applications to processor design, concurrency, and, surprisingly, Smalltalk (i.e. actor programming).

Very nice introduction to sheaves with bog implications on metascience, cryptography, and economics.

see: https://github.com/DavidJaz/DavidJaz.github.io/blob/master/Talks%2FFRA_2021_David_Jaz_Myers.pdf

The creation of categorical logic has transformed both category theory and logic, blurring the traditional boundary between syntax and semantics and expanding the reach of logic to new application domains and kinds of semantics. Categorical logic offers a unifying, “plug-and-play” toolkit for understanding old logical systems and creating new ones. In this talk, we illustrate this principle through examples of categorical logic drawn from topics such as algebraic theories, bicategories of relations, graphical linear algebra, and statistical modeling.

First Patterson talk I actually understood. Very good lay of the land.

TIL behaviorism is very much responsible for the language of reinforcement learning in machine learning writ large.

I’ve heard a lot of negative things about Freud’s philosophy of psychology, but Paul Bloom presents it here in a neutral yet convincing fashion. I see a lot of connections between Freud’s philosophy and compulsion/intrusive thoughts.