Course Notes on Robotics Theory

http://academicearth.org/courses/introduction-to-robotics

The Reading List

After a few weeks of conscientiously trying to manage my online reading I have cut down my reading list even more.

The only feeds I am not following are:

AAAI's AI topics
Hack a Day
CodeProject

These are manageable with a very high signal to noise ratio.  I wish the AAAI stuff was better formatted but that's a minor bitch.  I have recently killed off ScienceDaily because it was burying me under a landslide of marginally interesting shit.  At last count it was sitting at 1251 unread items. That's insane. No one can keep up with that amount of crap. They have no system to specialize the feed or split it by topic so you get everything or nothing.  I pick nothing.

There are a few other low volume blogs that are interesting, mainly math, stats and some robotics stuff... but I'm being more cautious about committing my time to testing them.  They need to earn my trust first and display the high signal to noise ratio that they need to be worth my time.

Libertarian Sci fi Fiction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_science_fiction

Never realized this existed. Makes sense.  Wonder what the parallels with dystopian and post-apocalyptic genres are?

Sci Fi to catch up on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Awards

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_Awards

To read.

Current Reading List

I am trying to refine my regular reading palate. Both in terms of quality and in terms of topicality.  I figure that all the lists of bookmarks that I never have time to visit in my browsers are dead air, so I have turned to RSS feeds and subscriptions to email newsletters to bring topical curated material to me. I am being ruthless in culling low quality feeds. If I don't read it or the volume is too high or the quality is too low... its toast. It's also fun to play the finite resource game. I only have so much time to read in a day and I want it to all count. This means a feed has to keep the noise down.

I would prefer a better source on robot hacking, but have not found one yet.

CodeProject's daily Newsletter
Usually good. I tend to read about 75% of the articles.

AAAI's AITopics
http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/HomePage
Lots of robot goodness. Keeps the brain ticking over. About 90%

Hack a Day
http://hackaday.com/
This is usually high quality and interesting.  About 80%

Lifehacker
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/
The signal to noise ratio here is not good. Most things are interesting but of fairly low utility. So its distracting but not particularly enriching.  About 30%.  This one is sliding off the end.

Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/
This is a general roundup of science articles. Usually something interesting but a crap RSS feed as it duplicates and repeats stuff all over. Probably needs to get dumped as its too much work.  About 25%. This is too much work and is too hard to manage.


I have recently discarded GeekDad because it has turned to crap. I was reading about 1 in 20 articles and the signal to noise ratio was constantly falling.

100 books that shaped a century of science

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/100-or-so-books-that-shaped-a-century-of-science

Some  interesting reads here. Surprisingly few that I have actually read. Probably a measure of just how few of these books are on topics that I'm interested in. The one's I have read were generally boring, so perhaps I should look up some of the other ones.... when I have a whole pile of time to burn...