The Information Density of Old Textbooks
There’s a YouTube short making the rounds about how textbooks seem to have been dumbed down:
The upshot seems to be that the venerated classic textbooks of yesteryear — e.g. Thomas’ Calculus and Analytic Geometry; 2nd ed. (~1958) — got to the heart of the matter much more directly than do the bloated, ridiculously-expensive textbooks of the present moment e.g. Stewart’s Calculus. The elder tome covered the derivative about page 24; the latter finally gets there on page 144.
Being a connoisseur of textbooks, and having even bought several ancient ones for my own personal library, I fully agree, and I note that the essential difference is that the authors of older textbooks expected their starter ideas, their directional notions, their dashed and incomplete lines to be finished as part of the reading of the book by the student.
They left the dehydrated granules of knowledge with an eye-dropper of water. They expected the rest of the bulk to be rehydrated by the sweat of the eager learner’s brow.
In an age where attention is fought for against phones; in an age where any resistance or friction summons desk-side genies of the LLM companies, these books are a rebellious, challenging throwback. And they might be a way to get learning back in the classroom. If you have to complete the connect-the-dots (even with the help of an LLM), you’re still connecting the dots and participating instead of consuming. And that may make all the difference in terms of synthesis and retention.
Three examples after the jump.
This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's Kid A and the Beginning of the 21st Century
By the turn of the millennium I had pretty much given up on popular music. It had been a long-brewing shift, which started roughly the first day I got to Austin, when I heard Son Volt’s Tear-Stained Eye on KGSR on the radio. Later that year I’d be introduced to the Butthole Surfers, the sensual Goth of The Cure’s Disintegration, Failure’s Magnified, Björk’s Post, and would start toddling down a decidedly more European and/or Texan path in my music choices. By the time 1999 rolled around, I was listening to Lucinda Williams, Johnny Cash, and Edith Piaf more than any hot performer I could think of.
But in 1999 I happened to be living in a house with a Radiohead fan who introduced me to OK Computer. Also, my friend Mike had kept his ear open to the voice of the times, and thanks to his generosity, I wound up decamping to the West Coast for the first time with Tool’s Ænima and the double gift of Kid A and Amnesiac.
Over the years, I’ve never stopped thinking about Kid A.
Nvim: Configuring Tokyonight for Visibility
As an elder technologist, there’s the danger of sinking into old habits and
never updating them. I didn’t see anything wrong with tmux, and there
still really isn’t. But some (younger) colleagues told me about some of
zellij’s features, and I adopted it. I saw ghostty and thought it was
terminal emulation done right. And while the blood and tears I paid the git
gods are the definition of sunk cost, Jujutsu (jj) has become my daily driver
revision control solution.
And even some of the oldest and most venerable parts of my toolkit got a
freshening. I have been using nvim happily after over two decades on vim.
But something was troubling: I couldn’t get the color theme to be readily
readable. Read on to find out how I got the color scheme in the featured image.