At the ten-hours-since-posting mark, with one "like," no comments and no shares, A Quick Visit to Shelfie City is well on its way to being my least-loved post yet. Well, that's OK. I still think those shelfies are adorable and actually hold a lot of information. I wish all authors would solicit and post shelfies taken by their readers. I'm willing to bet the shelf of the typical readers of Tom Clancy novels don't look anything like the ones in this essay.
Hmm. I think of Substack as a textual thing, not an Instagrammy thing. Pictures to illustrate a narrative are one thing, but pictures as the subject....? Category mismatch. For me, anyway.
Interesting. I have an instagram account but my total lifetime experience on that site is about one hour or less.
But I observe that, as you say, this post has pictures as the subject. But what are the pictures? Why, pictures of collections of pages of text! I'm going to end this comment here before I fall into a rabbit hole.
I usually read Substack on my phone, using Reading Mode which gives me a nice cleaned up text experience and skips images. Even if I skip Reading Mode, the images see hard to read on a small screen.....
When I was seriously blogging, using WordPress, I always previewed content on both PC and phone before publishing. The results were often unexpected.
That is a very helpful comment, Geoff. When it comes to using mobile phones, I generally stay in 19th century mode, sometimes twentieth. By which I mean that I use my phone for phone calls, texting if I must, and to take photos. Because I don't read anything on my phone, I forget that most of the world does. I need to reflect on this. Step one, I guess, should be to download the Substack app on my phone and see what it's like.
I responded to a comment about the Category Theory book in the photo that headed the Andreessen post, noting that Category Theory is the most recent of several attempts by Mathematicians to plaster over the cracks in their foundations that appeared between in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When I was an aspiring mathematician, I noted, before Cat Theory was invented, I'd learned a different one.
Unfortunately, I couldn't remember its name.
I am now a code monkey. I know about algorithms. It took only a couple seconds to come up with one that would get me to the name of the approach I'd studied. The professor under whom I'd studied was a legendary proponent of the approach. If I looked him up, I'd be certain to come across its name. Unfortunately I couldn't remember his name, either. All I needed to do, though, was go through the names of all of my former professors. I went to the web page for my school that listed all of the emeritus math professors.
I spent a thoroughly enjoyable half hour, recalling the names of former teachers. There was the guy that, incredibly, bolstered me through his class, because I needed it to graduate, even though I was taking a dance class that overlapped with his. There was the guy that really didn't have a lot of time for students: he left to start his business at the end of the quarter. There was the guy that gave me a B because he was my dad’s student. All great fun until, down in the "S"s I recognized my guy: a genius, a legend, a great guy and a pretty good teacher. A quick trip to Wikipedia and, voila: Intuitionism.
At the ten-hours-since-posting mark, with one "like," no comments and no shares, A Quick Visit to Shelfie City is well on its way to being my least-loved post yet. Well, that's OK. I still think those shelfies are adorable and actually hold a lot of information. I wish all authors would solicit and post shelfies taken by their readers. I'm willing to bet the shelf of the typical readers of Tom Clancy novels don't look anything like the ones in this essay.
Hmm. I think of Substack as a textual thing, not an Instagrammy thing. Pictures to illustrate a narrative are one thing, but pictures as the subject....? Category mismatch. For me, anyway.
Interesting. I have an instagram account but my total lifetime experience on that site is about one hour or less.
But I observe that, as you say, this post has pictures as the subject. But what are the pictures? Why, pictures of collections of pages of text! I'm going to end this comment here before I fall into a rabbit hole.
I usually read Substack on my phone, using Reading Mode which gives me a nice cleaned up text experience and skips images. Even if I skip Reading Mode, the images see hard to read on a small screen.....
When I was seriously blogging, using WordPress, I always previewed content on both PC and phone before publishing. The results were often unexpected.
That is a very helpful comment, Geoff. When it comes to using mobile phones, I generally stay in 19th century mode, sometimes twentieth. By which I mean that I use my phone for phone calls, texting if I must, and to take photos. Because I don't read anything on my phone, I forget that most of the world does. I need to reflect on this. Step one, I guess, should be to download the Substack app on my phone and see what it's like.
Ok... I'll bite. Speaking of books....
I responded to a comment about the Category Theory book in the photo that headed the Andreessen post, noting that Category Theory is the most recent of several attempts by Mathematicians to plaster over the cracks in their foundations that appeared between in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When I was an aspiring mathematician, I noted, before Cat Theory was invented, I'd learned a different one.
Unfortunately, I couldn't remember its name.
I am now a code monkey. I know about algorithms. It took only a couple seconds to come up with one that would get me to the name of the approach I'd studied. The professor under whom I'd studied was a legendary proponent of the approach. If I looked him up, I'd be certain to come across its name. Unfortunately I couldn't remember his name, either. All I needed to do, though, was go through the names of all of my former professors. I went to the web page for my school that listed all of the emeritus math professors.
I spent a thoroughly enjoyable half hour, recalling the names of former teachers. There was the guy that, incredibly, bolstered me through his class, because I needed it to graduate, even though I was taking a dance class that overlapped with his. There was the guy that really didn't have a lot of time for students: he left to start his business at the end of the quarter. There was the guy that gave me a B because he was my dad’s student. All great fun until, down in the "S"s I recognized my guy: a genius, a legend, a great guy and a pretty good teacher. A quick trip to Wikipedia and, voila: Intuitionism.