A while ago, someone in a Discord server I’m in asked how much of the math behind a system you need to know to implement it. I thought it was an interesting question, and I felt qualified to answer it, so I ended up writing quite a lengthy response. It just occurred to me that it might also be useful to other people, so I thought I would clean it up a little bit and archive it here.

I write across multiple genres, but my main genre is Creative Nonfiction, which writers typically refer to as “CNF” for short. Unfortunately, I always end up having to explain what CNF is to people, because the common view of nonfiction seems to be that it’s entirely comprised of informative texts and academic essays (with maybe the occasional memoir slipped in).

Earlier today I was thinking about this, and I thought it would be really funny to place various types of “nonfiction writing” on a graph with labelled axes to prove my point. I present to you the “Nonfiction Spectrum”. On one axis, we have how “accessible” or easy to understand the text is; on the other, we have how “artistic” the presentation of the text is.

Here’s another roundup of some interesting things I’ve come across lately and would like to talk about! As always, I’m sure there’s some great stuff I read but cannot for the life of me remember.

This one is extremely late, since I’ve been incredibly busy and finding time to write has been hard. I think I looked at some of this stuff back in… November? October? Oops. I’ve decided I want to keep these to only 4–5 items per post, so more posts should be coming shortly! There are definitely other things I’ve looked at that I want to talk about.

I just finished a blog post where I discuss things I’ve recently learned about how to read research papers. I almost included this as a point in that post, but I think it’s important enough to warrant its own article.

Here’s the idea: you absolutely should not be reading the sections of a research paper in order.

It took me a while to learn this one – I can’t remember if I first read this advice somewhere, if someone told it to me, or if I reverse-engineered it from advice I got about how to write papers. It doesn’t matter which one came first, really – my point is that I only found this out in a roundabout way through googling and trial and error and harassing people with questions.

I’ve long said that university education starts to make a lot more sense if you look at it as a precursor to academic training. Historically, there have really been two major types of undergraduate university training, in my opinion: there was the liberal arts type of education, which was meant to turn rich people into cultured members of society (several of whom then went on to pursue academic training and scholarly activities, because they were rich and could afford to do so), and the more specialized type, which is meant to make the student literate enough in the major foundational ideas of the field to pursue additional training at the graduate level. If I remember correctly, universities functioning more like businesses is relatively new, the idea of university being a place for vocational training is relatively new, and the idea that most adults should get a university degree to be employable is also relatively new. (Also of interest: see “credential inflation.”)