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What’s the name of that textbook? It sounds really interesting.

Isaac Asimov wrote a couple books that follow the narrative of science from the beginnings up until the 80s or so, which I highly recommend. One is called Atom and is more focused on how we got to our “present” understanding of particles. There’s also one that takes a broader view, it’s something like History of Science (? not at my bookshelf right now).

There’s several books in this genre for math as well. IMO it’s a much better structure for pedagogy since we can piggy back the education on our natural wiring to care about narrative and mystery/puzzles.


You're referring to The History of Physics. An excellent read for a budding mind.

Asimov was incredibly talented.


I was looking at my parent's bookshelf and saw a book on Shakespeare and I recognized the author's name: Asimov!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov's_Guide_to_Shakespeare

It's like 800 pages, I haven't read it but I think I'll keep that one. Seems like it might be hard to find another physical copy. He was definitely prolific on a number of topics.


Not surprising!

"Asimov was so prolific and diverse in his writing that his books span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for category 100, philosophy and psychology" - from his Wikipedia page.


He was also incredibly talented in phrasing ideas so that they stick in the reader's mind. I am right now sitting next to a dog Asimov named after him.



His book "Understanding Physics" is amazing. Similar in spirit to Petzold's "Code" that is often praised on HN.


There's a youtube channel called "Kathy Loves Physics & History"[0] that goes over all these things in video form.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@Kathy_Loves_Physics


Also, George Gamow's work is exemplary in making complex ideas understandable.

See, for example:

>One, Two, Three... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (1947)

https://www.amazon.com/One-Two-Three-Infinity-Speculations/d...

PDF: https://archive.org/details/OneTwoThreeInfinity_158

..........................

>Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory (1966)

https://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/04...

PDF: https://archive.org/details/ThirtyYearsThatShookPhysics-TheB...


I just started working on a cli tool to easily create, manage, and spin up dev environments in docker containers. The initial impetus for starting the project was to try out Doom Emacs without messing with my current Emacs setup, so an example session could be:

dv new emacs dev-img-emacs:latest

dv start emacs

dv conn emacs

The first line creates a new "development environment" named emacs, based on the docker image dev-img-emacs:latest. The second line starts up a docker container based on the saved image. The third line connects to the running image via mosh (or ssh).

Mostly I just meant to use it as a learning experience, but it's actually been really convenient in a lot of ways, so I think I might develop it further.


Have you considered using LXD instead of docker?

LXD container instances are much better suited for portable dev environments. They are persistent by default and are intended to run multiple processes within a container instance. They can also be copied/migrated between lxd agents.

In contrast, docker was created to run a single ephemeral process per container. It's nice in production environments, but its also a huge pain for some tasks. That's why were seeing folks create things like docker s6-overlay.


Thanks for the suggestion, this looks great! At a glance LXD seems to be a much more robust version of what I've built. Time to learn something new I guess lol.


> Time to learn something new I guess lol.

Yeah there’s the downside. The interface is a bit unwieldy. Documentation for lxd is far lower quality compared to the massive and mature docker ecosystem.

However if you know a lot about what docker does at a lower level, that knowledge is transferable to something like lxd. Most of these containerization tools are all using the same Linux kernel features under the hood!


I have done something in a similar vein. DEW. https://github.com/efrecon/dew.


Nice! It's cool to see that other people had the same issues I did, and solved them the same way (though you're much further along than I am). How are you hooking into the environment container? Are you running an editor in the terminal, or maybe something like tramp or vs code dev containers?

Have you considered adding an option to "virtualize" the container's home directory? It's probably pretty niche but I've found it to be useful when I'm doing something more exploratory, like testing out a new editor config, where I don't want to commit to anything.

Great idea to expose the host docker instance to the container btw (if I'm understanding this correctly). I didn't think to do that but it seems like it could be really useful.

Did you end up incorporating dew into your workflow? Sorry for the jumbled response btw, this is mostly stream-of-consciousness as I read through the repo.


A couple weeks ago someone posted a link to a real time re-creation of the apollo 11 mission. It's amazing watching videos of everyone in that room, listening to the chatter on all the radio channels, and seeing pictures scroll by from the moon, all in real-time. It does an amazing job bringing you behind the curtains, almost like you're a part of the actual mission.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20193118


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