Words

• A collection of letters of note.
• Zinsser on Friday.
• A list of cliches you might want to avoid
• Few books on writing and reading
• Words worth replacing

Rambling Mumbling

I am awake for twenty hours now, without any pressing reason. For the last couple of days, I had been studying at night and sleeping by day. I discovered that night is quieter than day, so much so that the daybreak makes it very hard for me to concentrate. I am studying research articles on usable authentication. In the beginning it took between two and four hours to read one research paper and I could not finish reading more than two papers between sleeps and the sleeps were lengthy. I thought this would continue and I would not be able to read more than a small fraction of the important papers in the field. Couple of days later I found out that the related works section of the papers were mostly known to me and that there was a pattern in which they organized the papers. Even the experiments, user study, hypothesis test, and security analysis seemed to reveal some patterns. I found majority of the words in the papers do not bring any news to me. I could glean a lot of information only by looking at the pictures, graphs, and tables and just by musing about them by myself. As a result, I can read most papers rather quickly now.

Jargons

• Magnetic card skimming: Here.
• Credit card fraud
• Stuck in London scam

Effective Advices

• While solving a problem, concentrate and work vigorously on it. If stuck, leave it for now. Start working on some other problem. Hopefully the subconscious will succeed in finding a crucial connection or two in the already existing data on your brain and you will experience a eureka  moment. [Poincare]
• The best idea is to have lots of them. [Pauling]
• Never write out all the ideas before going to sleep. Save one or two, so that you have something handy to start with, tomorrow. [Hemingway]
• One moral of this story is that you should always collect more materials than you will use. Every article is strong in proportion to the surplus of details from which you can choose the few that will serve you best - if you don't go on gathering facts forever. At some point you must stop researching and start writing. [Zinsser]
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Mediocre People by Altucher

Ernest Hemingway on Writing

• When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the spring that fed it. [A Moveable Feast, pp. 25-26]
• It was in that room that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to dot it. Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris. [A Moveable Feast, p. 13]
• Let me know how long I have to stay away from it before I can get it to you. Longer I can stay away before I have to get it to you the better it will be as gives me a whole new chance to see it cold and plug any gaps and amplify where there is any need. [to Charles Scribner, 1949, Selected Letters, p. 684]
• P.P.S. Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whiskey? [to Ivan Kashkin, 1935, Selected Letters, p. 420]
• Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs. [Green Hills of Africa, pp. 21-22]
• All art is only done by the individual. The individual is all you ever have and all schools only serve to classify their members as failures. [Death by the Afternoon, pp. 99-100]
• I do not wish to squawk about being hit financially any more than I would squawk about being hit physically. I need money, badly, but not badly enough to do one dishonorable, shady, borderline, or "fast" thing to get it. I hope this is quite clear. [to Alfred Rice, 1948, Selected Letters, p. 655] 
• I get letters from Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan etc. asking me for stories, articles, and serials, but am publishing nothing for six months or a year ... because I know that now is a very crucial time and that it is much more important for me to write in tranquility, trying to write as well as I can, with no eye on any market, nor any thought of what the stuff will bring, or even if it can ever be published - than to fall into the money making trap which handles American writers like the corn-husking machine handles my noted relative's thumb... [to Grace Hall Hemingway, 1927, Selected Letters, p. 244]
• I still need some more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently. [to Wallace Meyer, 1952, Selected Letters, p. 752]

Writings, I devoured

There are only a few books which seemed to resonate with me and I read with great appetite.

1. Sherlock Holmes by Doyle: LOVE it
2. The Double Helix by Watson: Thanks to my brother, from whom like many other beautiful things, I got this one. 
3. Metamorphosis by Kafka: Read it in notepad format from gutenberg.org and with feverish speed
4. Einstein's Cosmos by Kaku (Einstein is my hero since ummm... Kaku's account made me feel like I am walking side-by-side with him, sitting by the next chair, watching him, listening to him)
5. Writings of Russell in general: I just love the way he writes.

Algorithm Sources

• Here is a set of three short video lectures from Coursera covering the analysis of quicksort.
• Linear-time Sorting: Here is a video lecture from ocw mit on Counting sort and Radix sort. 
• This, this, this, and this: sources for Morris traversal, an inorder traversal of a binary search tree without using recursion or stack.
• Red-black tree: Here is an applet to play with red-black trees. Here is a video lecture on red-black trees from mit opencourseware.
• Here is a video lecture on Dynamic Order Statistics from ocw mit.
• Dynamic Programming: Longest common subsequence, Rod-cutting
• List of algorithms: Depth-first search, Breadth-first search, Topological sort, Kosaraju-Sharir, Kruskal, Prim, Dijkistra, Bellman-Ford, Ford-Fulkerson, LSD radix sort, MSD radix sort, 3-way radix quicksort, Multiway tries, Ternary search tries, Knuth-Morris-Pratt, Boyer-Moore, Rabin-Karp, Regular expression matching, Run-length coding, Huffman coding, LZW compression, and the Burrows-Wheeler transform