Rewards + Pause + Updates + Interactive Textbook?

(4 min read)

Hi all! Turns out my schedule was too crammed to finish Nutshell this month (here's the beta, if you forgot), so I'm pausing my Patreon for July. You will not be charged on August 1st.

In the meantime, here's this month's rewards!...

• Wall of Thanks ($2+/month) – next month's thanks will be put right into Nutshell's credits, for posterity!
  
• Polygon Avatars ($5+/month)

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Three Other Updates:

🎙 I'm giving a keynote talk next month at a math-exposition conference! I'm coordinating with the organizers to figure out when they'll post the videos online, because last year's still aren't up. 🤷🏻‍♀️ But I'll probably give three mini-talks:

1) My How To Explain Things Real Good talk, updated with more math-communication tricks,

2) showing off Nutshell [an extra incentive for me to finally finish it], and

3) a talk on math and virtue ethics.*

(* I recently read, and I recommend, Mathematics For Human Flourishing. It's co-written by Francis Su, the first non-white president of the Mathematical Association of America ["finally, an Asian who's good at math"], and Christopher Jackson, an inmate who discovered math's beauty while in prison, and now helps other inmates get their GEDs.)

🌞 Want to try explaining math accessibly & beautifully? There's a bit under a month left to join 3Blue1Brown's Summer of Math Exposition 2 "competition"! The prize pool has expanded from 5 "winners", to 15! (that exclamation mark is for emphasis, not a factorial)

p.s: for tips on explaining complex ideas, might I recommend my 18-minute talk I posted last month?

🥔 [content note: dieting] Remember I said I was participating in Slime Mold Time Mold's *Potato Diet* experiment? Their first analysis is out – with 160 participants! (summary tweet-thread) I also analyzed my own data, (tweet-thread) and will explore SMTM's open dataset soon.

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What Interactive Textbook Do You Want?

With Nutshell (and Orbit, maybe Observable, and my good ol' simulations), I can finally make something I've wanted to try for a long time: a free, online, interactive mini-textbook!

But... on what?

Please be the tie-breaker for my indecisive brain. Which of the following mini-textbooks do you personally want –– whether it's for your own learning, or to teach students & peers? (I asked a similar survey last year, but here it is again with some entries added/removed.)

Here's 17 ideas:

1. Game Theory (classic game theory with its flaws, the more-plausible evolutionary game theory, mechanism design a.k.a. "reverse game theory")
2. Economics 101 (supply-demand, monopolies/monosponies, externalities, taxes & subsidies, etc)
3. Georgist Economics (why the rent is too damn high, and what to do about it: shift tax burden to a land speculation tax + maybe a citizen's dividend/basic income)
4. Public Choice Theory ("politics without the romance": policymakers & voters seen with game theory & economics. most public choice texts are pretty doomer-y, so i'll try to be more solution-focused.)
5. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems ("some guy broke the entire foundation of all of mathematics using nothing but basic number theory, but his work indirectly inspired the computer, so i guess it all worked out.")
6. Algebra in Pictures (all that high-school crap you were forced to memorize, but with, like, actual visual intuition and stuff.)
7. Systems Biology (if your eye cells & stomach cells have the same DNA, why don't your eyes make stomach acid? the science of how your cells – and all of biology – modify themselves with biological networks.)
8. How To Not Make Terrible Decisions (classic decision theory, functional/logical decision theory, ergodic economics, robustness/anti-fragility. ok this bulletpoint is more of a grab-bag than a coherent curriculum)
9. Control Theory (how your thermostat works, and what it means for being alive)
10. Statistics Without The Sadistics (statistics rebuilt from the ground up around computer simulation. a.k.a the resampling technique)
11. Bayes (bayes theorem & practical intuition, why correlation is evidence of causation, and a bit of bayesian statistics)
12. Causal Inference (how to get causation from correlation: econometrics, causal network analysis, maaaaaybe SINDy's.)
13. Differential Equations ("things change each other over time". this is the math of that, applicable to everything from physics to ecology to brains to society.)
14. HTML, CSS, JavaScript (so that we can take back power over the web, by really owning the tools to make the web)
15. Virtue Ethics For Queer Atheist Nerds (neo-Aristotlean virtue ethics, from a secular, queer, & nerdy perspective.)
16. Cognitive Educational Psychology (how to learn & teach, according to [our current] science)
17. Cognitive Neuroscience (neural networks, artificial & real)

Help me decide! Which piques your fancy, if any? Leave a comment about what topic(s) you'd like a free interactive mini-textbook on, whether they're in the above list or not!

As usual, I may be too brain-scrambled to actually make any of this. Curb your enthusiasm accordingly.

Potatingly Yours,
~ Nicky Case 🥔