Todd Davies

Hamming Art Science Engineering

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming (Amazon, Goodreads) is an excellent book. It distills a career of scientific research and engineering practice into a series of focused chapters, each with a specific theme. Some of the examples of views are a little outdated, but this is principally because Hamming did his work in the mid-20th century. While a lot has changed since then, it is testament to his skill and good-opinions that most of what he wrote is still valuable now.

New Technology That Works

Technology is supposed to improve our lives by solving problems that we face every day, but doesn’t always live up to its promises. This post discusses how the reMarkable v2 tablet is a device that delivers on technology’s promises. The reMarkable in action, with my todo list on it As a political science student, a typical week’s work includes reading about five academic papers. The papers are usually interesting and selected by course leaders for their high quality and relevance, but since starting my degree over a year ago, I often found that while I enjoyed the content of what I was reading, the process of reading itself wasn’t so great.

Uk Cop 2020

This is an open letter to Boris Johnson, highlighting the importance of the UK’s presidency of the United Nations' conference on climate change in 2020. Dear Prime Minister, I have a vision for the future; where foreign conflicts are solved without losing soldiers, disease is overcome before it becomes a pandemic and climate change is avoided while our economy simultaneously thrives. Where countries work together to overcome the many challenges we face across a global landscape; , addressing problems of a size and scale way beyond the capabilities of an individual nation state.

Getting Stuff Down

My life got more busy lately since I started a masters degree, perhaps it’s not the best time to start a blog. But, as the headmaster at my high school would cheekily remark, “if you want something doing, give it to a busy person” (often at the end of a conversation to parents about homework allocation). In order to make the blog successful, it needs to have content. I think if I try to make each new post as good as I can, then this blog will remain decidedly empty.

How to Pull

If you want to skip to the tutorial, click here. Soon after starting at university, I started to become frustrated with the rather poor quality of the lecture slides we would have to revise from. Though all the information was there, and it was (mostly) perfectly clear if you attended all the lectures, when it came to revising for the exams, it was hard to figure out what exactly was happening from the lecture slides themselves.

Starting a Blog

The internet has gotten a lot of flak recently for facilitating information pollution via the World Wide Web, which is a shame, since the internet is also an incredible force for good in the world. I recently realised how much I love looking at what people produce online. It’s easy for me to spend lots of time looking at aggregated content on Hacker News and Lobste.rs, in part, because it’s rich in stuff that represents the best of the web; highly heterogeneous content from individual creators who are passionate about what they’re doing.