Nerd Wisdom

My goal with this web-site is to communicate about what I know, mainly about technical subjects, but also about games and other amusing things. It is a contribution to my general objective of helping spread as much useful information as rapidly as possible to as many people as possible.

Of course it’s possible to communicate technical information in many ways, such as in one-to-one conversations, lectures and conference talks, or formal publications, but I don’t believe that these are always the most effective ways of sharing information. Most formal technical publications are very hard to understand unless you already have a pretty detailed knowledge of the field; good tutorial-style publications are few and far between. Lectures give you a somewhat better chance to explain things, and one-to-one conversations are best, but the number of people you can reach in this way is limited.

Popularizations (in book form) and textbooks are other options, and often do an excellent job. I will be reviewing the best technical and popular books I know about here at this web-site.

Nevertheless, I think there is the possibility of doing something different on the web. I will try to give you a “brain dump” of as many of the useful and interesting things I know about as possible.

This web-site will discuss all sorts of topics, from reviews of books, software, or games, to full expositions of research that is at the state of the art. You will find that my reviews will nearly always be highly positive, not because I like every book I read or game I play, but because I just want to pick out the really good stuff out there, and let you know about it.

I will try to make the research expositions be of publishable quality (I try to be careful to only write things that I’m pretty sure are true), but I will focus on clear and informal explanation rather than academic comprehensiveness.

Please look around! I am trying to write posts that will still be relevant years after they’re written, so if this is your first visit, please explore beyond the front page. I’ve also listed some other web-sites with useful technical information that I like to visit.

your host,
Jonathan Yedidia