Culture
Blessed Are Those Drowsy Ones
It's rare to laugh out loud when reading philosophy, but Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra is one of those books. The book is a philosophical treatise written in the form of a novel.
Matthew Clapp
Life
Optimizing Genes with a Genetic Algorithm
In the simplest terms, genetic algorithms simulate a population where each individual is a possible “solution” and let survival of the fittest do its thing.
Matthew
All-New Super Friends Hour
When I was four or five years old, I loved the Super Friends cartoon. I remember the All-New Super Friends Hour, which ran from 1977 to 1978.
Tech
Will AI turn against us?
"I think a lot of people dismiss this kind of talk of superintelligence as science fiction because we’re stuck in this sort of carbon chauvinism idea that intelligence can only exist in biological organisms made of cells and carbon atoms." - Max Tegmark, Physicist
Motion
Which Computational Universe Do We Live In?
Cryptographers want to know which of five possible worlds we inhabit, which will reveal whether truly secure cryptography is even possible. The post Which Computational Universe Do We Live In? first appeared in Quanta Magazine
Tech
Lessons from the COVID data wizards
Data dashboards have been an important part of pandemic response and planning. What have their developers learnt about communicating science in a crisis?
Motion
An explosive result in particle physics could change everything
A tiny discrepancy in the weight of a fundamental particle called the W boson could blow open one of our major theories for understanding everything – if the measurement stands up to scrutiny
Thinking
Problem Solving 101
"In analytics, the term fishing expedition refers to a project that was never framed correctly to begin with and involves trolling the data for unexpected correlations." There is an excellent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Framing Data Science Problems the Right Way From the Start. This
Matthew
Does Information Want to Be Free?
It's been a long time since I checked in on #opensource publishing software. I learned perl and then PHP by using tools like WordPress, Drupal, and others I'm sure I've forgotten about. Like going back to a place you saw as a child, the
Culture
Above the Stars He Surely Dwells
The Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, is a choral symphony, the final complete symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, composed between 1822 and 1824. It was first performed in Vienna on 7 May 1824.
Matthew
Wanting to Die in Space
I didn't sleep well last night, but I always seem to dream somehow. I only write down the weirdest, and last night's dream was pretty odd, and I remember the dream starting in the middle of a total adventure.
Film
From Gertie to Dylan
Drew Barrymore was born in 1975, so we were about the same age when I saw E.T. at the theatre. She grew up in West Hollywood until she moved to Sherman Oaks at seven. In her 2015 memoir, Wildflower, Drew says she talks "like a valley girl" because she grew up in Sherman Oaks.