Inspired by Tim Ferriss on Fridays I will be writing my list of five interesting things I saw/read/heard/discovered during week. Technically it is coming out on Saturday and that’s because I’m lazy and a chronic procrastinator.

“You and Your Research” by Hamming

This is a recording of a lecture by the great scientist Richard Hamming. I thought it was very inspiring to hear from the great scientist several personal anecdotes, including interactions with other great scientists and moments of self doubt. It is also awesome to know more about how a very productive person works.

Watch it on YouTube

Mahler, The Symphonies

I’ve known Mahler for a long time, but had never got much past the first symphony, the fifth and an occasional Das Lied Von Der Erde. Not anymore. Prompted by a BBC article I decided to give the 2nd, 3rd and 9th symphonies a shot. I have to say I have been listening them for a few days now and I’m enjoying. Granted, I’m still mystified by the way Mahler develops themes sometimes and his notion of form in general.

Sapiens - by Yuval Harari

History of the humankind and human society, from prehistoric days to now. I’m enjoying so far and I hope to review it after I finish.

The Little Elixir & OTP Book - Benjamin Hao

Nice book about Elixir and Erlang OTP. Still working my way through it, but I think this book is a nice complement to Introducing Elixir by Laurent and Eisenberg. The former illustrates the contents of each chapter with a small project which is nice for retaining information while the latter provides a more comprehensive treatment of Elixir the language.

Elixir is an extremely elegant language and it was love at first sight for me. I’m now trying to settle on a personal project to practice it.

The Tidyverse

Recently I took a short course on Literate Programming and Statistics. The purpose of the course was to introduce the packages of Tidyverse for handling data in R, Markdown documents and some statistics basics. I was aware if not familiar with all three subjects but it never occurred to me that Markdown documents could be considered a form of literate programming. More specifically, it was nice to finally get to learn and use dplyr and other associated packages. They are great for tidying up data and a great improvement over equivalent base R functionality. Magrittr package offers a pipe operator (%>%) similar to Elixir pipe operator.

To know more take a look at the incredibly useful book R for Data Science.