Sam Ritchie

Emmy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Computer algebra system and physics toolkit for Clojure/ClojureScript

N720AK — RV-10

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Van's RV-10 four-seat airplane, completed and flying

PaddleGuru / RaceHub

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Race registration and results platform for endurance sports

Road to Reality

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Newsletter on math, physics, and functional programming

Cascalog

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Data processing library for Clojure on Hadoop

Ryca CS-1 Cafe Racer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Custom motorcycle build from a Ryca kit

SICM Textbook (Typeset)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Beautiful typeset edition of Sussman & Wisdom's classical mechanics textbook

ThinkFun iOS Games

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

iOS puzzle games: Rush Hour, Solitaire Chess, Chocolate Fix

OnSpeed Gen3

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Open-source angle-of-attack indicator for general aviation

Personal PhD

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Self-directed study in mathematics, physics, and computer science

Summingbird

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Streaming MapReduce with Scalding and Storm

Algebird

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract algebra for Scala, powering aggregation at scale

Dyson Baidarka

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Traditional Aleut kayak build based on George Dyson's designs

Functional Differential Geometry (Executable)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Executable version of Sussman & Wisdom's Functional Differential Geometry

Caliban

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Docker-based job runner for reproducible AI research

Scalding

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Scala MapReduce library built on Cascading

FORMA

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Forest monitoring with satellite imagery at global scale

Bijection

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Invertible type-safe conversions between Scala types

Chill

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kryo serialization extensions for Scala and beyond

Storehaus

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Asynchronous key-value store abstractions for Scala

Tormenta

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Scala API for Apache Storm spouts

ElephantDB

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Distributed read-only database for Hadoop-generated data

Om-Bootstrap

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Bootstrap 3 components for ClojureScript's Om framework

core.logic Koans

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Learn Clojure's core.logic through interactive exercises

ScalaRL

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reinforcement learning framework in Scala

GenJAX

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Probabilistic programming with programmable inference for JAX

Pallet-Hadoop

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Automated Hadoop cluster deployment with Pallet

The Road to the Hardrock 100

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 16:19:28 +0000

I’ve been working to get into the Hardrock 100 since 2013, and finally made it through the lottery this past December. The race starts on July 14th, this coming Friday! In three days, at 6am, I’ll jog out of Silverton, CO and begin a potentially 48 hour-long meditation on the phrase, “be careful what you wish for”.

For anyone interested in following along, here are the relevant links:

The course starts in Silverton and travels counter-clockwise through Lake City, Ouray and Telluride before aiming us back at Silverton, accumulating just over 33,000 feet of vertical gain along the way, all through terrain like this:

Years of Backlog, Quitting X, Twins!

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 21:36:44 +0000

Wait long enough to write and the updates are bound to be interesting! I’ve gone through many lives since I last wrote, back in July of 2020, mid-pandemic.

Leaving Google for… Computer Algebra?

I quit my job at Google at the end of 2021. I’m not sure I ever wrote about starting this job back in 2019. Yes, for about 15 months I was a *Staff Research Engineer *at *Google X, *a dream job on paper! In reality, fairly pedestrian and factory-like.

Dual Numbers and Automatic Differentiation

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 22:20:41 +0000

This literate essay develops an implementation of a type called `Differential`. A `Differential` is a generalization of a type called a ["dual number"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number), and the glowing, pulsing core of the SICMUtils implementation of forward-mode automatic differentiation.

Functional Numerical Methods

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 19:41:02 +0000

This page contains a literate-programming exported version a definite-integral package I built into SICMUtils, a Clojure(script) based computer algebra system based on Gerald Sussman’s scmutils. (Beware the buzzwords…)

I expect that this post will fission into a full series, with a bit of explanation about how each piece fits into the whole. Until then, know that you’ve found the source of what might be the most hardcore definite integration library out there, certainly the only one written like this, in functional style with unashamed explanation of how everything works.

Power Series, Power Serious

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 20:05:45 +0000

This post spawned from work I’ve been doing on the SICMUtils library; I’ve just released 0.13.0 and I hope you’ll give it a try.

SICMUtils is the engine behind the wonderful “Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics”, an advanced physics textbook by Gerald Sussman of SICP fame. I’m trying to get the textbook running in the browser as a Clojurescript library, and as part of that effort I’ve had to re-implement quite a bit of numerical code in Clojure.

How to Publish CLJSJS Jars to Clojars

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 12:23:18 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of work in Clojurescript lately, and the time finally came to pull in my first vanilla Javascript dependency. The default way to do this seems to be the CLJSJS project.

CLJSJS publishes many Javascript packages in a form that you can consume from a Clojure project. For projects like React, you’ll find the latest versions of the JS libraries, packaged up and ready to go. For less active libraries like bignumber.js you might have to go bump a version and open up a pull request against CLJSJS’s packages repository… or maybe package and add the library from scratch, as I did recently with Complex.js.

Spot Check: Boulder to Long's Peak

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 14:02:41 +0000

I’m a big believer in off-the-couch adventures, and the idea of the “spot check”. If you invite me on an adventure for which I’m mildly unprepared, I’ll use my brain and say no. But if you ask me to do something that is obviously stupid given my lack of regular training, I can’t help but take it as a little test, a spot check from the universe, and say… yes. Please, please yes.

Optics and the Principle of Least Time

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 18:40:57 +0000

(This is a writeup of Exercise 1.3 from Sussman and Wisdom’s "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics". See the solutions repository for more.)

Law of Reflection
- Geometry
- Calculus
Law of Refraction
- Calculus
- Geometry

The problem explores some consequences for optics of the principle of least time. The exercise states:

Fermat observed that the laws of reflection and refraction could be accounted for by the following facts: Light travels in a straight line in any particular medium with a velocity that depends upon the medium. The path taken by a ray from a source to a destination through any sequence of media is a path of least total time, compared to neighboring paths. Show that these facts imply the laws of reflection and refraction.

Half Angles from Euler's Formula

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 15:59:10 +0000

I’ve been reading the lovely Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham, and the visual-style proofs he’s been throwing down have been wonderful and refreshing. I’ll write more about this book and its goals later, but I was inspired this AM to write up a proof of the half angle identities from trigonometry using some of the tools from the book.

Here’s the half angle identity for cosine:

\begin{equation} \label{eq:half-angle} \cos {\theta \over 2} = \sqrt{{\cos \theta + 1} \over 2} \end{equation}

This is an equation that lets you express the cosine for half of some angle $\theta$ in terms of the cosine of the angle itself. As you can imagine, there are double-angle, triple angle, all sorts of identities that you can sweat out next time you find yourself in a 9th grade classroom.

Computing the Universe

Tue, 26 May 2020 16:13:31 +0000

Humans have a strange relationship with reality. We’ve developed a large body of mathematical tools that sometimes seem to let us beat time. We can send spaceships out to take photos of distant planets, and be almost totally sure that they’ll make it. It takes minutes (seconds?) to simulate voyages of thousands of years. We can examine light from stars millions of light years away, and make good guesses about the stars’ ingredients.

Memento Mori for the Hardcore

Thu, 21 May 2020 16:00:39 +0000

Memento Mori. In English, this Latin phrase means something like “remember that you must die”, or “Remember Death”.

The Stoic philosophers were big pushers of this idea as the core insight of a daily meditation practice. Are you worried that there are things you’re going to regret about your life when you die? What if you died today? It is absolutely certain that you are going to die; you might as well sit down each morning and imagine it. Do any regrets flare up about your day, or your life?

Maps, Paths and Fairy Circles

Thu, 14 May 2020 16:00:51 +0000

I’ve had an odd, intellectual fever dream going for years now; I’d like to learn enough advanced math and physics to make my way through Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, and not just understand it, but feel in my bones what it’s like to intuitively get our current best guess about how reality works.

(If you haven’t heard of this book, or Roger Penrose, go check out the Amazon reviews, then listen to Penrose’s appearance on “The Portal“ podcast. He allegedly wrote this tour of all modern physics as a popular science book, but Penrose is so mis-calibrated, or optimistic, about non-Penrosian math ability that physics and math professors routinely flame out.)

Practice, Knitting, and The Two Selves

Thu, 07 May 2020 16:00:56 +0000

Barry Green’s The Inner Game of Music is a lovely book about music, and practice, and the strange psychological battle that doing anything difficult and creative seems to require.

Early in the book he lays out a very simple framework for how to think about why it’s so hard to learn new things and make progress on seemingly clear goals.

Imagine two small people living in your head. One is named “Self Two”. Self Two is a cherub, an almost helplessly creative little kid, the source of every “what if” and impulse you’ve had to build and share anything.

Music in the Time of Coronavirus

Sun, 03 May 2020 12:52:32 +0000

I hope you’re all doing well during these strange times of quarantine and uncertainty. I’ve been passing the time by playing my guitar, and the experience has generated a few insights that I think are worth sharing. First, some background, then the nuggets.

I played as a teenager for a few years, and had a fairly cramped relationship with music. I was good, technically, but I didn’t have much feel for music, and compensated for this by learning really difficult solo jazz arrangements of songs I didn’t listen to, like Autumn Leaves or Lullaby of Birdland. I can still feel the prickling shame and performance anxiety I’d feel at big family gatherings when my uncle or mom would ask me to play something. A test! And I had no repertoire that was fun for anyone else, no chords, no ability to lift myself or anyone else up with music.

Niwot's Challenge 2018 Race Report

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 20:43:06 +0000

I feel like I’m never going to publish this damned thing… so here it is, in bullet point form. Maybe I’ll tidy it up some day.

Niwot’s Challenge, a very fun race out in South Platte. Jason invited me to this damned thing last week…

Text from Jason: “Free Sat?”

All I could find was this one race report from Erik Sanders: https://gearjunkie.com/colorado-ultra-mountain-race-niwots-challenge

Prep for the Infinity Loop later this summer. Race details, what does it entail… I’m totally detached from how hard it might be. “It’s only 45 miles”, says Jenna.

Niwot's Challenge 2019 Race Report

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 20:39:53 +0000

Well, I can honestly say, now, close to a year after the event, that I don’t remember this event in the furious detail that characterizes my usual race reports. How lucky! We’re not supposed to talk about the Niwot’s Challenge at all.

I ran this race in 2019 for the second time, finishing in 27 hours and 17 minutes with Matt Fackrell and Jason Antin, my long-time collaborator on such beauties as “The Rainier Infinity Loop!” and the quite absurd “Tahoe 200, 2018 edition”. We ran a good portion of the race with Todd Salzer; Todd guided us through the first two loops, but unfortunately didn’t finish the 2019 edition. I know he’ll be back in 2020, this year.

Basis Changes for Linear Transformations

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 03:10:09 +0000

A 1-act sketch via Apple Pencil, for your viewing pleasure. Happy to link to further references or sketch this out in more detail — let me know in the comments if this is illuminating.

Check it out below, or click here for a direct image link to stare at a big version in the browser.

Book: The Second Mountain

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 16:50:29 +0000

I had a hard time with this book; it showed up in the TED book club mailing months ago, and I went into my reading primed to love the message, which is concise and persuasive… but maybe so persuasive on its own that the book feels like 300 pages of filler.

David Brooks’s “The Second Mountain” is about the sense he’s developed, later in his life, that our lives play out on a landscape populated by peaks whose summits, we’re told, offer peace, happiness, alleviation from the anxiety of modern life. If you get to the top, earn the PhD, become CEO, you can stop.

Taylor Series and Imaginary Numbers

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 14:56:03 +0000

I wanted to share some of the intuition I’ve been developing around complex numbers; some of the resources that have been helpful, for understanding why anyone would come up with an idea like $i$ , the square root of -1, and then build an entire number system on top of it.

History

My knowledge of the history here is probably at the level of a Just-So Story; still, I’ve been finding it helpful to have some vague idea of why folks started developing some area of mathematics before digging into the details, so I’ll pass on what I’ve got to you.

Entropy: Combinations and Permutations

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 13:39:36 +0000

In my ongoing quest to lay a more solid foundation for this new, strange life as a machine learning “researcher”, I’ve been going through various foundational concepts and ideas and trying to build up rock solid intuitions that I can lean on for years. (Why the hell didn’t I do this back in school??)

Entropy is my latest obsession - thermodynamic entropy, and information entropy, and the ways in which these two things are similar.

Book: On Having No Head

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 13:37:46 +0000

What a strange, fantastic little book! I recently read Douglas Harding’s “On Having No Head” after hearing Sam Harris mention the book in one of “Waking Up” meditations, and then many times on subsequent podcasts.

The book is a long look at an insight that blew Harding’s mind — from the first-person person, as a matter of subjective experience, there was no evidence around that he had a head. Put another way — if you try not to read into what you’re seeing, and just describe exactly what’s in front of you, not only is there no head on display… but the whole picture of who you are, of the person doing the looking, looks quite strange indeed.

Windshield and Windows Attached

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 21:00:06 +0000

The RV10 has windows! And a windshield! I’ve got everything attached and mostly cleaned up.

Here’s what it looks like now:

I used three tubes of Lord 7545 A/E adhesive from Aerosport Products, one for each pair of side windows and a full tube for the windshield. The process was stressful; I’ve been mildly dreading this for a couple of years now. Compared to much of the metal work, this step is one-shot with permanent results.

Spring Clips and Stage Time

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 13:24:18 +0000

I’m out here working on the plane today - I haven’t made it out much, lately, but I’m in the garage spending the time. This project will end up taking roughly five years, three years longer than I thought it might when I started.

I’ve gone through so many oscillations of excitement and frustration out here. Some days I feel like I’m flying through tasks, and I think about how close I am to the end. Some days it is just such a grind and I feel exhausted, sanding away yet another coat of epoxy, trying to get the curve of the cabin top just right, knowing that I’m probably aiming for a level of craftsmanship that I’ll never notice once the plane is up in the air.

Newsletter Warmup; Building the Airplane, still, endlessly.

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Well, here we are, close to 18 months after I left my job at Stripe and put out the call for subscribers to this newsletter. In the future, expect notes on

my new, strange identity as an “AI research engineer”, working on machine learning and evolution;
notes on information theory, set theory, linear algebra and friends, squeezed through my mind and decorated with as much non-symbolic intuition as I can manage;
how to take a run at difficult things outside the usual set of difficult things everyone thinks they want.

Today, a note I wrote after a day out working on the RV10 4-seater airplane I’m building in the garage.

Book: The Second Kind of Impossible

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 12:41:34 +0000

I spent a while this summer reading math books and popular science, trying to figure out what a life in “research” might look like; in late Spring I began to sense that it was time to wake up my brain and start thinking again, and the best way forward seemed to be to find examples of lives-well-lived in science and study the cases.

I’m so glad I found “The Second Kind of Impossible: the Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter” by Paul Steinhardt. The book is a trip report of Paul’s decades-long relationship with a peculiar type of matter called a “quasicrystal”. I’ll give a short summary, then discuss what struck me as so wonderful about the book, and finish out by including my more detailed notes in case you want to dig deeper.

Adding Mathjax to your (SBT-)Microsite

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 15:38:02 +0000

I’m obsessed with sbt-microsites. Sbt-microsites is a fantastic plugin for SBT (the Scala Build Tool) that makes it easy to generate a beautiful sidecar site for your software project, full of code checked by your CI!

I recently built a microsite for ScalaRL, my in-progress functional Reinforcement Learning library, and found that adding support for Mathjax (a javascript math equation renderer) to the microsite was not obvious. It’s not hard… just not clear from the Mathjax docs how to get past some limitations with sbt-microsites.

Moving to Spacemacs for Scala and Python

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:53:39 +0000

I’ve just finished retooling my development environment, and the process was annoying enough that I thought I’d write it up here, for myself in the future, and for you in the present.

tl;dr; I ended up porting my old Emacs config, based on the literate emacs24-starter-kit, over to Spacemacs, and ended up with a great Scala and Python setup.

Read on for the details.

Goals

I’ve been an Emacs user since my first days with Clojure, and I’m hooked, fully in love. Those Clojure days were a long time ago; as I’ve spent more time developing in Scala and Python, I’ve made do with basically just code formatting and syntax highlighting, delegating to an external build tool like SBT in a terminal window to give me compilation feedback every so often. My Emacs config is crusty and old, and way out of date.

Tahoe 200 2018 Race Report, Part 2

Fri, 23 Aug 2019 05:32:23 +0000

Welcome back to my report of the 2018 Tahoe 200. If you haven’t read Part 1 and care about background and context, go check it out and come on back. Otherwise enjoy the tale!

Heavenly Aid Station (102)
Heavenly (102) to Armstrong (117)
Armstrong (117) to Housewife Hill (135)
Housewife Hill (135) to Sierra at Tahoe (142)
Sierra at Tahoe (142) to Wright’s Lake (161)
Wright’s Lake (161) to Tell Creek (175)
Tell Creek (175) to Loon Lake (182)
Loon Lake (182) to Barker Pass (199)
Barker Pass (199) to Finish (205)
Conclusion

Heavenly Aid Station (102)

We slept for about two hours at Heavenly. I woke up drenched in sweat; Jason claims that I spoke to him in the night, but I remember nothing. Jason couldn’t fall asleep at all, and finally woke me up at the two hour mark to get our stuff together and head out.

Tahoe 200 2018 Race Report

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 04:03:00 +0000

I never suspected that 100 mile races would be a gateway drug for… 200 mile races, but here I am, polishing off my race report for the Tahoe 200. What went wrong in my past? Neglectful parents? A broken home? The answers lie buried somewhere in the following account.

First, the glorious Strava art I spent over 90 hours painting across the California landscape:

And then my detailed account.

Why?

I’m going to describe why I ran the Tahoe 200, and the reasoning is going to sound unhinged. Ready?

The Dreadful Secret of Platypus Boarding School

Sun, 18 Aug 2019 21:50:58 +0000

I’ll present this here with little comment for those who track it down. This is a story I wrote in 7th grade for Henry Edwards’s english class. I’m most proud of the cover art, designed by yours truly. Enjoy!

Introduction

“… And today for lunch, we will be having apple Juice, macaroni and cheese, and SLOPPY JOES, bwa ha ha ha!” A maniacal cackle could be heard throughout the school grounds of Platypus Boarding School as the intercom clicked off.

Why I Climb - Plodding toward Creativity

Sun, 18 Aug 2019 21:04:23 +0000

I started rock climbing because it freed me from the monotony of training for sprint kayak. Climbing on rock is athletic and inspiring, and takes you to beautiful places. It can also be dangerous. Your decisions matter when you’re hanging from tired fingers far off the ground. The danger and the ticking clock of your tired muscles forces you to make each next move quickly and intuitively. Think too hard and you’ll start to get tired. Get too tired and you’ll fall. These consequences force me to fight my tendency to reduce sport to a plodding checklist.

Book: The Measure of a Mountain

Wed, 17 Jul 2019 20:07:53 +0000

Last Spring, while preparing for my attempt on the Rainier Infinity Loop, I bought two books on Mt Rainier… and failed to read either of them. My invite to that adventure had come out of nowhere; I knew nothing about the park, the area, the mountain or its history, and it felt important to develop some sense of the mountain I planned on running over and around.

So I bought The Challenge of Rainier, a collection of trip reports by Dee Molenaar, and The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, by Bruce Barcott, an environmental journalist from Washington. They lived on my desk for months, untouched. I contemplated bailing on the trip - I wasn’t prepared! I was only running a few times a week! Actually reading the books represented a commitment I wasn’t sure I wanted to make.

Trip Report from the Other World

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 04:10:26 +0000

I recently ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time in my life, a decision that would have shocked and disappointed the straight-edged sprint kayaker I used to be. And I’m alive! I’m sane!

My goal was to have some sort of spiritual experience; or, more accurately, to figure out how consuming a molecule produced by a mushroom, or any drug, really, could possibly be a spiritually significant act.

I’d done enough research to realize that my skepticism was probably unfair. Michael Pollan’s “How to Change your Mind” had made me aware of the modern wave of research into psychedelics as miracle cure for all sorts of conditions, from anxiety, to PTSD in soldiers, to fear of death in late-stage cancer patients. In one Johns Hopkins study, a single high dose of psilocybin reliably triggered, in the majority of patients, a “mystical-type experience” ranked “as among the most meaningful in their lives, comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.” (from “The Trip Treatment”, by Michael Pollan.)

Vapor Trail 125 2017 Race Report

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 04:00:59 +0000

In September of 2017 I raced my first ever mountain bike race - the Vapor Trail 125, the hardest race I could find up in the mountains of Colorado. After four years of 100 mile running races I was well and truly burned out on the idea of spending my summer training for yet another huge odyssey-on-foot… but I still wanted to get up into the high country, and I know by now that my best source of motivation is the fear of a big race on the calendar.

Texas Water Safari 2019 Race Report

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 02:36:33 +0000

On June 8th I completed the Texas Water Safari, a 260 mile canoe race down in Texas that runs rivers from San Marcos to the Gulf of Mexico. My 4-man boat (filled by Jason Antin, Andrew Soles and Andrew Stephens) finished early Monday morning after 44 hours and 14 minutes of nonstop paddling.

It was a glorious junkshow, vivid in all the ways a Safari can be; a wonderful reunion with Soles and Stephens; a smashing introduction to paddling for Jason Antin, who’d trained for less than two hours over two sessions.

IMTUF 100 2016 Race Report

Wed, 08 Aug 2018 14:22:31 +0000

In 2016, as part of my years-long quest to make it into the Hardrock 100, I signed up to race the IMTUF 100. IMTUF stands for “Idaho Mountain Trail Ultra Festival”, and I’ll admit that before the event, I found it difficult to tell people about the “I’m Tough” without apologizing for how lame it sounded and expanding the acronym.

I’ve got no such issue now! This was the most beautiful trail race I’ve ever completed, absolutely world class in the scenery, the trails, and the overall quality of the event.

Rainier Infinity Loop 2018 Attempt

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 22:25:30 +0000

Earlier this month I attempted to complete the biggest endurance adventure of my life: the Rainier Infinity Loop, a project dreamed up by the late Chad Kellogg. The line physically traces out a rather sloppy infinity sign by traveling over Mount Rainier, the most glaciated peak in the lower 48, 28 miles clockwise around its base on the Wonderland trail back to the start, over the mountain again and then counter-clockwise on the remaining 65 miles of the Wonderland trail. Knock all that out and you’ll have traveled over 130 miles and climbed around 47,000 vertical feet.

Creative Fear at Red Rocks

Fri, 05 May 2017 03:42:59 +0000

I write software for fun and profit, and writing great software - like all creative work - requires long stretches of deep thought. I don’t know where creative insights come from, but two things are clear to me about how to find them:

You can study and obsess over a problem as much as you want, but eventually you have to learn to sit and wait for your subconscious to bake all that work into something coherent.
Sitting and waiting for those insights is excruciating.

I started meditating a couple of years ago as a way to train myself to wait. Sit on a pillow, close your eyes, focus on your breath. If you haven’t ever done this, you should download Headspace, take 15 minutes and try it right now. You might think that it’s going to be relaxing. Instead you’ll discover that you, like me, have been living your entire life with a jabbering little monkey that’s terrified of boredom and specializes in drowning out those creative whispers from down deep.

Goals for the Truly Insane

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 01:52:02 +0000

I want to expand on the last piece I wrote on courage and goals, and talk about some of the traps that endurance racing can set for athletes looking to push their limits. That piece makes the case that aggressive goals are important because they force your ego to adapt, and that maintaining a flexible identity requires you to get good at setting goals. Goal-setting is hard, and an endurance race’s finish line is as good a goal as any to start with.

On Courage and Goals

Fri, 20 May 2016 17:42:01 +0000

This post is about courage and failure, and how to think about success or failure when the objective is difficult.

Aaron Steele’s 2014 Leadville 100 race report is one of the more honest and inspiring race reports I’ve read. Leadville is a brutal, high altitude 100 mile running race in Colorado. The race was Aaron’s first ultra-marathon DNF, or "Did Not Finish", out of dozens of ultras. You can tell from the post that the experience scared him:

Seth Godin and Clear Thinking

Fri, 19 Feb 2016 16:09:00 +0000

Tim Ferriss’s interview of Seth Godin was stunning. It made me feel the way I did at my first TED conference, at 16 in Monterey - "Why didn’t anyone tell me that it was okay to think this way?" Seth thinks about the world, his mission and his choices with a clarity that was startling.

I fired up this podcast during a long walk to the Alpine Modern cafe in Boulder, expecting Tim’s usual mildly interesting breakdown of his guest’s habits. The interview starts a little mechanically, but Seth takes over after about twenty minutes and those wide-eyed, holy-fuck "where is my PEN" moments start flowing.

2015 Miwok 100k Race Report

Tue, 05 May 2015 16:49:00 +0000

It’s over! My first 100k is in the bag. I finished the 2015 Miwok 100k in 10 hrs and 12 minutes, good enough for 9th overall and 2nd place in my age group to a 23 year old crusher who took the overall win. The pace was much faster than the previous ultras I’ve done, all hundred milers. I spent this winter doing a bunch of ski mountaineering races, trudging up ski resorts and whipping my skinny skis down double black diamonds I had no business skiing on what’s basically my first season. All of those winter miles paid off with a huge boost in pace. Here’s the story. (And here’s the Strava if you want to skip the narrative.)

Cascalog + Hadoop Counters, Finally!

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:08:06 +0000

I’ve just merged a Cascalog pull request of mine that gives Cascalog operations access to the statistics that Cascading generates at the end of each job. I’ve also added global inc! and inc-by! functions that let you increment custom Hadoop counters from within your functions and operations without having to deal with all that prepfn nastiness we introduced in Cascalog 2.0. Here’s a link to the code. If you want to follow along, or just want to get the hell away from this blog and start playing with the code now, get yourself a copy of the new snapshot:

Wyoming Rando Roundup, Pt 2

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 23:46:00 +0000

This is my race report from the 2015 Jackson Hole skimo race, the second of two ski mountaineering races I completed this weekend. (Here’s my report from yesterday’s race at Grand Targhee.)

Jackson was going to be bigger and badder than Targhee, no question. I knew that I’d be hucking double black diamond chutes on Wade’s skinny race skis, but with no concept of how hard or dangerous that would be, I chose to shut down the usual mental preparation. I’d deal with the steeps soon enough.

Wyoming Rando Roundup, Pt 1

Sat, 10 Jan 2015 17:40:00 +0000

Wow, I haven’t gotten crushed that hard in a race in a long time. Just fully WHIPPED!

Jenna and I drove out to Jackson yesterday for the "Wyoming Rando Roundup", my first real weekend of racing since I signed up for all of these races a few weeks ago. I don’t have my own race setup yet, so Wade lent me his crazy carbon Alien 1.0 boots and SkiTrab skis, and some extremely short kicker skins (for flat stretches) that had showed up in the mail the day before I grabbed them.

5 Books for Endurance Addicts

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 00:21:13 +0000

This post is about some of the books related to endurance training and sports that have inspired me over the last couple of years.

Training for endurance events changes you. At the beginning of a season, on my first long run, ten minutes in I feel anxiety creep in. How long have I been running? How many miles? How long until I get to turn around?

Eventually these thoughts quiet down. The engagement of the activity is enough to keep me occupied for hours and hours. Dan Hammer thinks of engagement as cathexis - in the mountains, your thoughts focus in on the present and all distraction burns away cleanly.

Cascalog 2.0 In Depth

Sat, 03 Jan 2015 20:46:56 +0000

Cascalog 2.0 has been out for over a year now, and outside of a post to the mailing list and a talk at Clojure/Conj 2013 (slides here), I’ve never written up the

startingly long list of new features brought by that release. So shameful.

This post fixes that. 2.0 was a big deal. Anonymous functions make it easy to reuse your existing, non Cascalog code. The interop story with vanilla Clojure is much better, which is huge for testing. Finally, users can access the JobConf, Cascading’s counters and other Cascading guts during operations.

Hardcore Cascalog: Dynamic Queries

Thu, 01 Jan 2015 03:09:32 +0000

A little side note before I get started - pivoting from my last post on ski mountaineering racing to this post on advanced Cascalog patterns has made me realize that I’m a full-fledged connoisseur of the esoteric. I’m embracing it! This is the first in a series of posts on hardcore Cascalog. If you’re stoked, leave me a comment telling me what you want to learn more about and we’ll go from there.

Wasatch Front 100, 2014

Sat, 20 Dec 2014 19:56:00 +0000

Oh my god, I can’t believe that this race is over! I’m sitting in my desk chair with a little blanket over me, knees wrecked, feeling like FDR. 26 hours and 15 minutes of mountain running, and a Strava page to prove it! Here are some pictures and tweets from the crazy day.

Pre-Race

Unlike Leadville, Wasatch requires an application. It’s one of the big, bad, fucked up hard races, with 25k feet of elevation gain to Leadville’s measly 15k. It’s got a reputation of being second to Hardrock in difficulty.

SkiMo Season is Here!

Sat, 20 Dec 2014 19:30:04 +0000

(Jason Antin cranking up A Basin in our second Skimo race of the year. Photo by Camera Photography.)

My running season ended in September with the Wasatch Front 100, and I resigned myself to a winter of weight lifting and sporadic winter trail running. It takes a LOT of motivation to run around in the cold in deep snow, so I tend to hibernate athletically until March. After a week implementing this, our herding dog Pretzel’s bottled up energy was red-lining - watching him yip, vibrate, whimper and drag his leash around in that sad and hopeful way, Jenna and I gave in and committed to a winter outdoors.

Leadville Trail 100, 2014 Edition

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 22:24:00 +0000

Last weekend, I raced the Leadville Trail 100 for the second time. Last year’s race was physically brutal; I sat curled up at the 50 mile point, 11 pounds light and unable to keep down fluids, for almost two hours before rallying and banging out a strong second half for a finish of 26:15 (strava report). That race earned me the silver belt buckle awarded to all finishers under 30 hours:

API Authentication with Liberator and Friend

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 00:24:00 +0000

I’ve just finished rewriting a number of PaddleGuru’s internal APIs using two great open-source libraries; Liberator and Friend. Liberator is a library for writing RESTful resources in Clojure. Friend is an authorization and authentication library written by the prolific Chas Emerick, Dominator, Esquire. You’ve certainly seen his stuff around if you’ve played with Clojure(Script) in any level of detail.

Authentication and authorization are both really important in RESTful APIs. These libraries are made for each other, I thought to myself. I’ll just use them together and life will be wonderful. Right?

Upcoming Talks in 2013

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 22:24:00 +0000

This is the year I teach myself to become a better public speaker. I’ve spent the past year coding up a number of powerful Scala and Clojure projects, all the while avoiding the important and difficult work of teaching and writing about the import and use of those projects. Well, no longer.

To mind that gap I’ll be giving a number of talks in 2013 on my recent work on Summingbird and Cascalog. If you’re in the Bay Area, Boston, or Northern VA (my home town!), I’d love to meet you.

Leadville Trail 100

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 19:18:00 +0000

This past weekend I ticked off one of my athletic life goals; the Leadville Trail 100, a brutal 100 mile running race in Colorado. I signed up for Leadville this May after a team injury forced our boat out of the 2013 Texas Water Safari, a 262 mile canoe race down in Texas that is my usual ultra-length torture for the year. Less than three months is less training than recommended for a hundred miler, but what the hell. Rational thinking never led anyone to a successful hundred mile finish.

Cascalog Testing 2.0

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:24:00 +0000

A few months ago I announced Midje-Cascalog, my layer of Midje testing macros over the Cascalog MapReduce DSL. These allow you to write tests for your Cascalog jobs in a style that mimics Cascalog’s own query execution syntax. In this post I discuss midje-cascalog’s 0.4.0 release, which brings tighter Midje integration and a number of new ways to write tests. I’ll start with a refresher on the old syntax before debuting the new. If you’re eager, add the following to your project.clj:

Introducing Cascalog-Contrib

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:24:00 +0000

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Cascalog for about ten months now, and have seen the community produce some fantastic work. A number of businesses are using Cascalog in production; I use Cascalog at Twitter every day to write MapReduce queries for the new Twitter Web Analytics product.

One thing Cascalog doesn’t yet have is a community repository for generic queries and operations. To fill this gap we’ve created cascalog-contrib.

Cascalog-contrib will be home to any higher-level abstractions over Cascalog that the community is willing to submit. If you have an idea for a module, file a pull request on GitHub or bring it up on the mailing list for discussion.

Testing Cascalog with Midje

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 22:24:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a Cascalog testing suite these past few weeks, an extension to Brian Marick’s Midje, that eases much of the pain of testing MapReduce workflows. I think a lot of the dull work we see in the Hadoop community is a direct result of fear. Without proper tests, Hadoop developers can’t help but be scared of making changes to production code. When creativity might bring down a workflow, it’s easiest to get it working once and leave it alone.

Getting Creative with MapReduce

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:24:00 +0000

One problem with many existing MapReduce abstraction layers is the utter difficulty of testing queries and workflows. End-to-end tests are maddening to craft in vanilla Hadoop and frustrating at best in Pig and Hive. The difficulty of testing MapReduce workflows makes it scary to change code, and destroys your desire to be creative. A proper testing suite is an absolute prerequisite to doing creative work in big data.

In this blog post, I aim to show how most of the difficulty of writing and testing MapReduce queries stems from the fact that Hadoop confounds application logic with decisions about data storage. These problems are the result of poorly implemented abstractions over the primitives of MapReduce, not problems with the core MapReduce algorithms.

Cascalog 1.8.1 Released

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:24:00 +0000

Nathan Marz and I are releasing Cascalog 1.8.1 today! We’ve added a few interesting features, and I thought I’d provide a bit more detail here for anyone interested.

Cross Join

cascalog.api now includes support for cross-joins; just add (cross-join) to your query as its own predicate.

Think of a cross-join as a “tuple comprehension”, or cartesian product, with similar results to clojure.core/for; it’s not very efficient, as it forces all tuples through a single reducer (and causes a massive blowup in the number of tuples!). Here’s an example:

Haskell in Emacs

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 22:24:00 +0000

I spent some time today getting my emacs config set up to learn Haskell, and ran into a few issues; I figured I’d go ahead and document the process here for everyone’s enjoyment. We’re going to install and configure Haskell mode, then add a few extensions that’ll make learning Haskell fun and easy!

I’m currently running haskell-mode for emacs, with the hs-lint plugin, Haskell support for FlyMake (which provides on-the-fly syntax checking from the Haskell compiler), and code autocompletion. The steps covered by this tutorial are:

Simple Hadoop Clusters

Tue, 31 May 2011 22:24:00 +0000

I’m excited to announce Pallet-Hadoop, a configuration library written in Clojure for Apache’s Hadoop.

In the tutorial, we’re going to see how to create a three node Hadoop cluster on EC2, and run a word count on MapReduce. We’ll be following along with Pallet-Hadoop example project for the introduction; for a more in-depth discussion of the design of pallet-hadoop, see the project wiki.

Background

Hadoop is an Apache java framework that allows for distributed processing of enormous datasets across large clusters. It combines a computation engine based on MapReduce with HDFS, a distributed filesystem based on the Google File System.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Sam Ritchie. I’m Co-Founder and CTO at Perceptual, living in Boulder, Colorado. Before Perceptual I was a research engineering lead at CHI-FRO, working on tooling and interactive experiences for rational AI and probabilistic programming. Before that I worked at Google X, Stripe, and Twitter.

I co-founded PaddleGuru and RaceHub, and have written a number of prominent open source projects in Scala and Clojure, including Emmy, a computer algebra system for computational mathematics and physics.

Adventure Resume

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

2023

Running

7/14 - Hardrock 100, Silverton, CO - 33:32, 16th overall (results, strava)

2021

Running

7/30 - High Lonesome 100, Buena Vista, CO - 23:50, 4th overall (results, strava)

2020

Running

7/2 - Boulder to Long’s Peak 50, Boulder, CO - 23:50 (report, strava)

2019

Marathon Canoe

6/8 - Texas Water Safari, 262 miles, San Marcos, TX - 44:14, 16th overall (results, report, strava)

Running

4/20 - Niwot’s Challenge, South Platte, CO - 27:17, 7th overall, Chief Many Coves (results, report)

Ski

3/2 - Power of 4 Skimo Race, 25m, Aspen, CO - DNF (results, strava)

2018

Running

9/7 - Tahoe 200, Lake Tahoe, CA - 90:21:26, 83rd Overall (results, report, report part 2, strava)
4/28 - Niwot’s Challenge, South Platte, CO - DNF after 17.5 Hours (report)

Mountaineering

7/10 - Rainier Infinity Loop, 135m, Mt Rainier, WA - 1x Rainier + Wonderland (report, strava 1, strava 2)

Ski

12/1 - Indian Peaks Rally, 24m, Eldora, CO - 1:35:52, 27th Open Division (results, strava)
4/7 - Father Dyer Postal Route, 24m, Leadville, CO - 6:41:09, 12th Overall (results, strava)
3/3 - Power of 4 Skimo Race, 25m, Aspen, CO - 6:55:35, 20th Men’s (results, strava)

2017

Mountain Bike

9/8 - Vapor Trail 125, Salida, CO - 18:34:00, 21st overall (results, report, strava)

Running

4/15 - Grand Canyon Rim 2 Rim 2 Rim, 46m, Grand Canyon, AZ - 13:55 (strava)

Ski

2/25 - Power of 4 Skimo Race, 25m, Aspen, CO - 6:43:01, 10th Men’s (results, strava)

2016

Running

9/17 - IMTUF 100, 106m, McCall, ID - 20:36:35, 2nd overall (results, report, strava)

Ski

2/27 - Power of 4 Skimo Race, 25m, Aspen, CO - 7:41:28, 33rd Men’s (results, strava)

2015

Adventure Racing

10/10 - AXS Moab 24hr Finale, Moab, UT - 13:00:00, 1st overall

Running

7/18 - Vermont 100m, West Windsor, VT - 18:08:59, 8th overall, 1st 20-29 (results, strava)
5/2 - Miwok 100k, Stinson Beach, CA - 10:12:52, 9th overall, 2nd 20 - 29 (results, report, strava)

Ski

3/27 - Grand Traverse, Crested Butte, CO - 12:13:41, 101st overall (results, strava)
2/28 - Power of 4 Skimo Race, 25m, Aspen, CO - 7:56:35, 26th overall (results, strava)
2/7 - Alley Loop Nordic 42k Skate, Crested Butte, CO - 2:37:41, 41st Male (results, strava)
1/11 - Jackson Hole Rando Roundup, Jackson, WY - 3:44:32, 53rd overall (results, report, strava)
1/10 - Grand Targhee Skimo Classic, Alta, WY - 2:26:14, 49th overall (results, report, strava)
1/6 - Rise & Shine Rando #3, A Basin, CO - 50:51, 15th overall (results, strava)

2014

Ski

12/16 - Rise & Shine Rando #2, A Basin, CO - 49:21, 17th overall (results, strava)
12/2 - Rise & Shine Rando #1, A Basin, CO - 58:38, 37th overall (results, strava)

Running

9/5 - Wasatch Front 100, SLC, UT - 26:41, 40th overall, 3rd 20-29 (results, report, strava)
8/16 - Leadville 100, Leadville, CO - 22:38, 34th overall, 3rd 20-29 (results, report, strava)
7/12 - Hardrock 100, Silverton, CO - paced Betsy Kalmeyer for 30 miles (strava)
6/14 - Leadville Trail Marathon, Leadville, CO - 6:24, 230th overall (results, strava)
4/10 - Grand Canyon Rim 2 Rim 2 Rim, 46 miles, Grand Canyon National Park (strava)

2013

Running

8/17 - Leadville 100, Leadville, CO - 26:15, 159th overall (results, report, strava)

Marathon Canoe

5/4 - Texas River Marathon, 39 miles, Cuero, TX - 4:10, 2nd overall (results)

2012

CrossFit

5/18 - CrossFit NorCal Regionals, San Jose, CA - Team LaLanne, 21st overall (results)

Marathon Canoe

6/9 - Texas Water Safari, 262 miles, San Marcos, TX - 38:30, 1st overall (results)
5/5 - Texas River Marathon, 39 miles, Cuero, TX - 4:44, 1st overall (results)

2011

Marathon Canoe

6/11 - Texas Water Safari, 262 miles, San Marcos, TX - 39:51, 1st overall (results)

2010

Kayak

9/22 - Philadelphia Fall Classic, 7.1 miles, Philly, PA - 52:53, K1, 1st overall

Marathon Canoe

9/17 - Tour du Teche, 135 miles, Leonville, LA - 18:29, 1st overall (results)
7/10 - Texas Water Safari, 262 miles, San Marcos, TX - 34:40, 1st overall (results)

Triathlon

5/7 - Ironman St George, St George, UT - 12:37, 473rd overall, 3rd 18-24 (results)

2009

Kayak

8/14 - ICF Sprint World Championships, Dartmouth, CA - K4 1000m, 19th place (results)

2008

Triathlon

8/31 - Ironman Louisville, Louisville, KY - 11:27, 195th overall, 8th 18-24 (results)
3/30 - Lonestar Half Ironman, Galveston, TX - 4:48, 28th overall, 1st 20-24 (results)
5/17 - Endurasport Olympic Triathlon, Harriman, NY - 2:35, 7th overall, 1st 18-24 (results)

2007

Kayak

7/27 - Pan American Games, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - k2 1000m, 7th place A Final

2005

Kayak

8/5 - ICF Junior World Championships, Szeged, Hungary - K2 500m, K2 1000m
6/24 - USACK Sprint Team Trials, Lake Placid, NY - K2 500m Gold; K2 1000m Gold

2004

Running

11/13 - Cross Country 5k MAC Championships, Bethesda, MD - 18:31, 8th overall (results)

Kayak

7/28 - USACK Sprint National Championships, Gainesville, GA -
- K1 200m, 500m, 1000m Jr Silver, 5000m Jr Gold
- K2 1000m Jr Silver
- K4 500m Gold

2003

Kayak

8/31 - ICF Junior World Championships, Komatsu, Japan - K1 1000m, Semis; K4 500m, 15th place (results)
8/5 - USACK Sprint National Championships, Oakland, CA -
- K1 500m Juvi Silver, 1000m, 5000m Juvi Gold
- K2 500m, 1000m Juvi Gold
- K4 500m, 1000m Jr Silver
6/26 - USACK Sprint Team Trials, Lake Placid, NY - K1 1000m Silver; K1 500m Silver

2002

Kayak

7/23 - USACK Sprint National Championships, Gainesville, GA -
- K1 1000m Juvi Gold, 500m Juvi Silver
- K2 500m, 1000m, K4 500m, 1000m Juvi Silver

2001

Kayak

USACK Sprint National Championships, Oakland, CA -
- K1 500m, K1 1000m Bantam Gold
- K1 5000m Juvenile Gold

Bookshelf

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Some of the best books I’ve read, sorted according to topic, with reviews linked where I’ve completed them.

Sometimes I write longer form book reviews! I’ll link to these as I generate them.

Math & Physics

A Mind for Numbers, Barbara Oakley
Naive Set Theory, Paul Halmos
Concepts of Modern Mathematics, Ian Stewart
A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics, Jeremy Kun
A History of Vector Analysis, Michael J. Crowe
Adventures of a Mathematician, Stanislaw M. Ulam
Linear Algebra Done Right, by Sheldon Axler
Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire: The Biggest Ideas in Science from Quanta, Thomas Lin
Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions, Frederick Mosteller
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin A. Abbott
Godel’s Proof, Ernest Nagel
Introduction to Mathematical Thinking, Keith J. Devlin
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos K. Doxiadis
Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning (Dover Books on Mathematics), A.D. Aleksandrov
Men of Mathematics (Touchstone Books), Eric Temple Bell
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, David Deutsch
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth, Paul Hoffman
The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
The Prime Number Conspiracy: The Biggest Ideas in Math from Quanta, Thomas Lin
The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter, Paul J. Steinhardt
Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, Gerald Jay Sussman

Computer Science & Programming

Code, Charles Petzold
Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming, Peter Seibel
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy
In the Beginning…Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson
Programming Clojure, Stuart Halloway
Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Glyn Moody
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Harold Abelson
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, Richard Hamming
The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin, Peter H. Salus, Jeremy C. Reed, Jon Hall
The Design of Design, Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, M. Mitchell Waldrop
The Joy of Clojure, Michael Fogus, Chris Houser
The Little Prover, Daniel P. Friedman, Carl Eastlund
The Little Schemer, Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen, Duane Bibby, Gerald J. Sussman
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
The Reasoned Schemer, Daniel P. Friedman, William E. Byrd, Oleg Kiselyov
The Seasoned Schemer, Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen
The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Michael A. Hiltzik
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, David Kushner
Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Cryptocurrencies, Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, Nathaniel Popper

Machine Learning & AI

Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, Richard S. Sutton
An Introduction to Statistical Learning: With Applications in R, Gareth James
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Max Tegmark
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Nick Bostrom

Science Fiction

2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1), Arthur C. Clarke
Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1), Richard K. Morgan
Anathem, Neal Stephenson
Axiomatic, Greg Egan
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
Diaspora, Greg Egan
Dichronauts, Greg Egan
Distress (Subjective Cosmology #3), Greg Egan
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1), Frank Herbert
Ender’s Game (Ender’s Saga, #1), Orson Scott Card
Foundation (Foundation #1), Isaac Asimov
Heavy Weather, Bruce Sterling
Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1), Dan Simmons
Ilium (Ilium, #1), Dan Simmons
Leviathan Wakes (Expanse, #1), James S.A. Corey
Caliban’s War (Expanse, #2), James S.A. Corey
Abaddon’s Gate (The Expanse, #3), James S.A. Corey
Cibola Burn (The Expanse, #4), James S.A. Corey
Nemesis Games (The Expanse, #5), James S.A. Corey
Babylon’s Ashes (The Expanse, #6), James S.A. Corey
Persepolis Rising (The Expanse, #7), James S.A. Corey
Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse, #8), James S.A. Corey
Oceanic, Greg Egan
Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1), Octavia E. Butler
Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology #2), Greg Egan
Quarantine (Subjective Cosmology #1), Greg Egan
Schild’s Ladder, Greg Egan
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Speaker for the Dead (Ender’s Saga, #2), Orson Scott Card
Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
The Black Cloud, Fred Hoyle
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, Neal Stephenson
The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1), Stephen King
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #1), Douglas Adams
The Stand, Stephen King, Bernie Wrightson
The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1), Liu Cixin, Ken Liu
The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2), Liu Cixin, Joel Martinsen
Death’s End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3), Liu Cixin
Wool (Wool, #1), Hugh Howey
Wool Omnibus (Silo, #1), Hugh Howey

Fiction

A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1), George R.R. Martin
American Gods (American Gods, #1), Neil Gaiman
Catch-22 (Catch-22, #1), Joseph Heller
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Ghost World, Daniel Clowes
Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian
Musashi, Eiji Yoshikawa
Neverwhere (London Below, #1), Neil Gaiman
Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
Shogun (Asian Saga, #1), James Clavell
Summer of Night (Seasons of Horror, #1), Dan Simmons
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Hobbit or There and Back Again, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King #1-4), T.H. White
The Princess Bride, William Goldman
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien, Martin Shaw
The Talisman (The Talisman, #1), Stephen King, Peter Straub
The Terror, Dan Simmons
The World According to Garp, John Irving
Ulysses, James Joyce
Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Phases of Gravity, Dan Simmons
Bag of Bones, Stephen King
Black House (The Talisman, #2), Stephen King
Different Seasons, Stephen King
Hearts in Atlantis, Stephen King
It, Stephen King
The Body, Stephen King
The Shining (The Shining, #1), Stephen King
The Tommyknockers, Stephen King
Stop-Time, Frank Conroy

Shakespeare

Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, William Shakespeare

Running & Endurance

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall
Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, Alex Hutchinson
North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, Scott Jurek
Once a Runner, John L. Parker Jr.
Running with the Buffaloes: A Season Inside with Mark Wetmore, Adam Goucher, and the University of Colorado Men’s Cross-Country Team, Chris Lear
The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It, Neal Bascomb
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel
Why We Run: A Natural History, Bernd Heinrich

Adventure & Outdoors

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, Bill Bryson
Beyond the Mountain, Steve House
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, by Bruce Barcott (my review)
On Trails: An Exploration, Robert Moor
The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks, Susan Casey
The High Lonesome: Epic Solo Climbing Stories, John Long, Hai-Van K. Sponholz

Rowing

Assault on Lake Casitas, Brad Alan Lewis
Lido for Time, Brad Alan Lewis
Lido for Time 14: 39: My Training Journal from October 1983 Through the Olympics in August ‘84, Brad Alan Lewis
The Amateurs, David Halberstam
The Last Car in the Parking Lot, Brad Alan Lewis
The Shell Game: Reflections on Rowing and the Pursuit of Excellence, Stephen Kiesling

Science & Nature

The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee
A Genetic Switch, Phage Lambda Revisited, Mark Ptashne
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
Chaos: Making a New Science, James Gleick
Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology, Johnjoe McFadden
Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, Paul Stamets
Radical Mycology: A Treatise On Seeing & Working With Fungi, Peter McCoy
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan
The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – And Us, Richard O. Prum
The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus, Richard Preston
The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America, Langdon Cook
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan
The One-Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins

History & Biography

All the President’s Men, Carl Bernstein
Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, Jim Ottaviani
Feynman, Jim Ottaviani
Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character, Richard P. Feynman
Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, Leonard Mlodinow
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: Letters of Richard P. Feynman, Richard P. Feynman
John Adams, David McCullough
Lincoln, David Herbert Donald
Master of the Senate, Robert A. Caro
Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2), Robert A. Caro
On Power, Robert A. Caro
The Passage of Power, Robert A. Caro
The Path to Power, Robert A. Caro
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert A. Caro
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X
The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville, Shelby Foote
The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939-1945, R.V. Jones
The Wright Brothers, David McCullough
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Laura Hillenbrand

Philosophy & Mind

On Having No Head, by Douglas Harding (my review)
Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, James P. Carse
Free Will, Sam Harris
I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter
Lying, Sam Harris
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca
On the Shortness of Life, Seneca
On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt
Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, Sam Harris
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
Zen in the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, Terence McKenna
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Michael Pollan
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys, James Fadiman
True Hallucinations, Terence McKenna
A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, Ayelet Waldman

Writing & Craft

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott
Confessions of a Public Speaker, Scott Berkun
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, Mortimer J. Adler
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, John Gardner
The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm, Ian Jack
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles, Steven Pressfield, Robert McKee

Business & Startups

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, Michael Lewis
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, Jessica Livingston
Intel Trinity, The: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World’s Most Important Company, Michael S. Malone
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Michael Lewis
ReWork, Jason Fried
The 4 Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Michael Lewis
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, Michael Lewis
A Truck Full of Money: One Man’s Quest to Recover from Great Success, Tracy Kidder
Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, Ryan Holiday
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
Your Money or Your Life, Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez

Self-Improvement & Productivity

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Cal Newport
So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Cal Newport
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence, Josh Waitzkin
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, Marie Kondo, Cathy Hirano
The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life, Robert Fritz
Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It, Gabriel Wyner

Fitness & Training

Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger
Mean Ol’ Mr Gravity, Mark Rippetoe
Practical Programming for Strength Training, Mark Rippetoe
Never Let Go: A Philosophy of Lifting, Living and Learning, Dan John
Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, Rory Miller
The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch, Jonathan Gottschall

Military & War

About Face: Odyssey Of An American Warrior, David H. Hackworth
Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield
Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War, Evan Wright
In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, Tobias Wolff
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, Nathaniel Fick
The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228, Dick Couch, Cliff Hollenbeck

Big Ideas & Culture

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Steven Pinker
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Judith Rich Harris
Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, John McWhorter
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

John McPhee

Basin and Range, John McPhee
Coming Into the Country, John McPhee
Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee
Looking for a Ship, John McPhee
Oranges, John McPhee
The Crofter and the Laird: Life on an Hebridean Island, John McPhee
The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor, John McPhee
The Patch, John McPhee
The Pine Barrens, John McPhee, James Graves
Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee

Animals

Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog, Ted Kerasote
Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals, Karen Pryor
The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs, Patricia B. McConnell

Aviation

Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying, Wolfgang Langewiesche

Memoir & Narrative Nonfiction

A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder, Michael Pollan
Kafka, David Zane Mairowitz
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, George Horace Lorimer
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1746-47, Philip Dormer Stanhope
Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived, Laurence Shames
Old School, Tobias Wolff
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Christopher W. Alexander
The Craftsman, Richard Sennett
The Homeowner’s Handbook to Energy Efficiency: A Guide to Big and Small Improvements, John Krigger
The American Religion, Harold Bloom
Jesus and Yahweh, Harold Bloom

Sam Ritchie

Emmy

N720AK — RV-10

PaddleGuru / RaceHub

Road to Reality

Cascalog

Ryca CS-1 Cafe Racer

SICM Textbook (Typeset)

ThinkFun iOS Games

OnSpeed Gen3

Personal PhD

Summingbird

Algebird

Dyson Baidarka

Functional Differential Geometry (Executable)

Caliban

Scalding

FORMA

Bijection

Chill

Storehaus

Tormenta

ElephantDB

Om-Bootstrap

core.logic Koans

ScalaRL

GenJAX

Pallet-Hadoop

The Road to the Hardrock 100

Years of Backlog, Quitting X, Twins!

Leaving Google for… Computer Algebra?

Dual Numbers and Automatic Differentiation

Functional Numerical Methods

Power Series, Power Serious

How to Publish CLJSJS Jars to Clojars

Spot Check: Boulder to Long's Peak

Optics and the Principle of Least Time

Half Angles from Euler's Formula

Computing the Universe

Memento Mori for the Hardcore

Maps, Paths and Fairy Circles

Practice, Knitting, and The Two Selves

Music in the Time of Coronavirus

Niwot's Challenge 2018 Race Report

Niwot's Challenge 2019 Race Report

Basis Changes for Linear Transformations

Book: The Second Mountain

Taylor Series and Imaginary Numbers

History

Entropy: Combinations and Permutations

Book: On Having No Head

Windshield and Windows Attached

Spring Clips and Stage Time

Newsletter Warmup; Building the Airplane, still, endlessly.

Book: The Second Kind of Impossible

Adding Mathjax to your (SBT-)Microsite

Moving to Spacemacs for Scala and Python

Goals

Tahoe 200 2018 Race Report, Part 2

Table of Contents

Heavenly Aid Station (102)

Tahoe 200 2018 Race Report

Table of Contents

Why?

The Dreadful Secret of Platypus Boarding School

Introduction

Why I Climb - Plodding toward Creativity

Book: The Measure of a Mountain

Trip Report from the Other World

Vapor Trail 125 2017 Race Report

Texas Water Safari 2019 Race Report

IMTUF 100 2016 Race Report

Rainier Infinity Loop 2018 Attempt

Creative Fear at Red Rocks

Goals for the Truly Insane

On Courage and Goals

Seth Godin and Clear Thinking

2015 Miwok 100k Race Report

Cascalog + Hadoop Counters, Finally!

Wyoming Rando Roundup, Pt 2