Through the Geek's Lens
Author: Marc Magrans de Abril
Available on Amazon.
Free sample.
NoteBookLM podcast (English and a shorter version in Spanish.)
📖 Overview
What do a crowded airport in Beijing, parenting, the risk-return frontier, and micromanaging bosses have in common? Everything—if you look at the world through the right lens.
In Through the Geek’s Lens, you’ll embark on a personal, humorous, and yet thought-provoking journey through some fundamental trade-offs and models from mathematics, psychology, economics, and engineering. Through the eyes of a textbook lover, Through the Geek’s Lens opens unexplored mental horizons and connects the dots between accumulated scientific knowledge and our private and professional lives.
The book introduces and explains complex subjects, their factual basis, and their limitations by contextualizing them within a specific time and place—a moment in the author's personal life. Each section offers a small dose of actionable insight. Among the many topics explored are the trade-off between freedom and security, the diminishing returns faced by particle accelerators and large machine-learning models, and the No Free Lunch Theorem, which explains why a self-confident explorer like the author can get lost in an unknown forest. It applies paraconsistent logic to interpret Eastern philosophies and uses unbiased statistical sampling to show how to see your loved ones. It discusses the Law of Small Numbers and why it’s just as important as the Law of Large Numbers, the determination of Service Level Agreements using basic probability inequalities, and the Shannon-Hartley Theorem to decide when to shout (or not) at your kids. And that’s just the beginning—there’s much more to discover when you look your day to day through a geek’s lens.
📚 Table of Contents
- Prologue
- Why Mathematics is so Effective?
- Freedom and Security
- USA Patriot Act and Spanish Corcuera’s Law
- All Models are Wrong
- Team Size and Communication Complexity
- It’s a Nonlinear World
- Law of Diminishing Returns
- The Power Wall
- Livingston Plot
- Optimizing Their Life is Always Simpler
- Pareto Efficiency
- Risk-Return Frontier
- Empirical Evidence of the Risk-Return Frontier
- Risk in Fat-tailed Distributions
- Invert, Always Invert
- A Compromise is not a Trade-off
- Optimization versus Heuristics
- Is There a Best Way?
- Lost in the Swedish Forest
- What I didn’t Know During my Master Thesis
- Robust Yet Fragile
- Observer Effect
- True or False
- I Do Not Know
- I Guess
- Yes and No
- Dialetheism in East Asian Philosophy
- Either A or B
- Sampling
- Human Hearing Range and Compact Disks
- The Wagon-wheel Effect, Aliasing, and Noise
- What is Worst than a Micromanager?
- Whack-a-Mole Friendship and Sampling Jitter
- Hallway Usability Tests and Statistical Sampling
- Sampling Knowledge
- Bombers and How to Look at Your Beloved
- Why Engineers are Bad Communicators and My Hot Couple is Crazy
- Normality
- Computation Accuracy or Why Don’t We Arrive Later
- I’m Not Normal, Nobody is Normal
- The Law of Small Numbers
- Diminishing Returns in Physics Experiments abd Machine Learning
- Log-normal Distribution
- Pili Knows Better
- Markov and Chebychev
- Income Inequality
- Service Level Agreement
- This is not Rocket Science
- Information, Signal, and Noise
- Head or Tails
- Optimal Testing
- Minimum Description Length and the Ockham’s Razor
- Immigration Subsidies and Don’t Shout at Me
- Signal and Noise
- Strong and Weak Noise
- Group Discussion
- Feedback
- Fireflies and Conductors
- Positive and Negative Thinking
- Multiple-loop Dynamics
- John Boyd and the OODA loop
- Decentralized Control
- Everything is Connected
- Perfection is the Enemy of Good
- The Boy Who Cried Wolf and 50 Hz Rejection
- Feedback versus Feedforward
- Robust Yet Fragile
- Catch-22
- Antifragile is not Robust
- Haste Makes Waste
- Overshoot or Overreaction
- Undershoot and Why Things Get Worse Before Getting Better
- Statistical Decision-Making
- Explore or Exploit
- Sniper Rifles or Machine Guns
- Lindy’s Law
- Re-writing Software From Scratch
- Waste
- Toys, Wine, Water, and Oil
- Solar Panels and Carbon Footprint
- Recycling
- Fix the Chair
- Quality is Free
- Reliability and Redundancy
- Chain-Link Logic and Trash Bins
- Reliability and Downtime
- Nuclear Families and Fault Tolerance
- Durability of Cloud Storage
- Failure of the Weakest Link
- Linus’s Law
- N-Version Software and Common Faults
- The Problem of Redundancy Problem and the Dangers of Child Care
- How much Reliability?
- Consistency versus Availability
- Does Bitcoin Sacrifices Consistency or Availability?
- Consistent Design versus Development Speed
- Consensus’ Tyranny
- Boeing 777 Design Rules and Authority Limits
- Consistency and Non-monotonicity
- Idempotency and Commutativity
- Non-monotonic Logic
- Time and Space
- History, Chaos, and NP Problems
- Compressed Data Storage
- Nada
- Protocol Expressiveness and Security
- Contact
- Don’t Repeat Yourself
- Tidying Up
- Communication versus Computation
- Computation, Communication, and Storage Trends
- Parental and Radiation Tolerant Control
- Are you Spanish or Catalan?
- Perfection is the Enemy of Good, Again
- Latency versus Throughput
- Haste Makes Waste, Again
- Faster! Faster!
- The Bottleneck
- Efficiency Versus Thoroughness
- In Praise of Idleness
- Too Much and Too Little
- Rate-determining Chemical Reaction
- The Theory of Constraints
- Free Riding
- Messi, Jordan, Brad Pitt, and Steve Jobs
- Winner-take-all Markets
- The Dawn of Everything
- Opportunity Cost
- Opportunity Cost is not a Sunk Cost
- Cost of Delay
- Are you an expert?
- Priorities
- Work-Life Balance
- What Makes Us Happy?
- Opportunity Cost, Inversion, and Framing
- Breadth or Depth
- Defense in Depth
- Russia
- Depth or Breadth First Search
- Starting a Campfire
- Ants Swarming and the Battle of Cannae
- Further Reading
- References
✨ About the Book
Genre: Popular Science / Science Communication, Memoir / Narrative Nonfiction, Essay Collection / Thought Pieces
Length: 238 pages
For fans of: Richard Hamming's The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Peter Bevelin's All I Want To Know Is Where I'm Going To Die So I'll Never Go There, Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam's Gesstimation.
👤 Author
Marc Magrans de Arbil is an engineer and economist with 20 years of experience in developing software systems and leading software teams. He has worked at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization), specializing in software development and management. Happily married for nearly 15 years, he is a proud father of three, and a dog, Patxi.
Marc is a lifelong learning wtth an insatiable curiosity for mathematics, science, and engineering, often immersing himself in textbooks as a favorite pastime.
📬 Contact and Feedback
- 📧 marcmagransdeabril@gmail.com (feedback is welcomed)
🙏 Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the help of Bego, my intelligent friend and loving wife, as well as my mother and sister, whose unconditional support has been invaluable. Special thanks go to my brother, who invited me to CERN for a month—a month that ultimately turned into a lifelong stay in Switzerland—and to Edu, Carlos, Oriol, and Dave for their patient proofreading and feedback. Ignacio Regaida designed a fantastic and professionally looking cover, replacing my initial choice from Amazon's default options. I am also deeply grateful to all the anonymous contributors who, as colleagues, supervisors, friends, and neighbours, have shaped the wholeness of my life reflected in this book.
However, the list above does not cover all the contributors. It is, in fact, a diminutive list of the people required for such an endeavour. Through this book, I am also drawing on the accumulated scientific knowledge of millennia, and through the referenced work, I have tried to give fair credit to a small proportion of such giant thinkers. Most likely, I have missed several crucial references and underappreciated their works. I apologize for that; it is entirely my fault.
📝 License
This work is © 2025 by Marc Magrans de Abril. All rights reserved.
Please do not reproduce without permission.
☁️ Keywords
Engineering, mathematics, probability, queueing theory, control theory, physics, biology, psychology, economy, parenthood, family, autism, children, marriage, friendship, Theory of Constraints, Law of the Minimum, redundancy, degeneracy, consistency, logic, paraconsistent logic, Zen, optimization, nonlinear, chaos, complexity, decentralization, centralization, Catalonia, Spain, Switzerland, mental models, trade-offs, Markov, Chebyshev, Gaussian, fat-tailed, Pareto, computation, particle physics, CERN, LHC, opportunity cost, cost of delay, chain-link logic, work-life balance, humor, Russia, breadth and depth search, free lunch.