In extension to this news and the press conference, one thing I am super excited about, is the private SPARC project and the MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). If you don't know about it already, I would highly recommend checking it out (e.g. by searching YouTube for "MIT Sparc Fusion Reactor" for some fairly accessible videos on the theory behind why they should achieve fusion way faster than the current roadmap with ITER and DEMO).
In the press conference just ended, they repeated how exactly the JET reactor worked as predicted by theory. In my layman's understanding, for the exact same reason (seemingly very sound theoretical groundwork), the SPARC reactor should exceed breakeven within the next few years.
From Wiki on CFS:
* Back in September 2021, they built the strongest high-room-temperature superconducting magnet (20 Tesla) suitable for a fusion reactor
* Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can be scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly), and thus cost and time to develop
* Back in November 2021, they raised $1.8 billion from the likes of Bill Gates
But doesn't that in and of itself therefore make it useful? In fact its useful in enabling discussion on HN right now.
The paper was about ideas and exploration about crossing from not-useful to useful and the requirements for that to happen to accumulate a lot of not-useful's for the future to draw on.
This also reminds me of Taleb referencing Umberto Eco's book collection for his anti-scholar/anti-library concept where the 'value' of the library was in the unread books rather than the read ones.
One time I was reading Sherlock Holmes as a kid and ran upon this passage:
"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
I thought it was right. It was a horrible decision to make. There are so many times I have looked down upon people who make silly side-projects, going "It will never succeed" or "You could be starting a business instead!" and it is subconscious and terrible. I think that learning new things, and gaining a new skillset, are important, and I wish I knew that earlier instead of just wasting my life away trying to feel superior to people toying on some problem with FPGA's or something. It's a horrible mindset to culture.
SymPy is a bit of a niche so I don't know that many books based on it, specifically. In general, I don't know that many math/phys/engineering books that take the "computation first" approach. I'm sure they exist (e.g. using Maple or numerical using MATLAB). I guess you don't need to have a book that is explicitly designed for SymPy—you could follow any basic math/science textbook and reproduce complicated calculations and derivations using SymPy in parallel with the narrative of the book. I bet most of UGRAD physics will be one-liners...
Here are some links to the best computer-based-science stuff I was able to find in my bookmarks:
Explains how we got from Boolean logic to microchips and software.
Also, the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley has an excellent exhibit containing both early computing devices and the seminal papers that were the precursors and enablers of modern computers: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/; https://computerhistory.org/timelines/;