Upstart and Algorithms of ExclusionOn July 27th, the New York Times published an article about algorithms that “determine character” titled, you guessed it, Determining Character With Algorith...
On Leaving Facebook: Jessica Kasmer-JacobsToday I received an email from a very dear friend of mine with the subject line “New Year’s Resolutions”. With her permission, I’m adding it to what I guess ...
Everyone’s a Little Bit RacistI reviewed Christian Rudder’s book “Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking)” for the Wall Street Journal. A huge thank you to the unwielding f...
The Ban and the Bit: Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and the Entropy Measure “I didn’t realize [Turing] was as important as he was.” — Claude Shannon1 Shannon, personal communication, 25 September 1980. See van den...
Non-Anti-Pattern-Less-NessIn drafting my proposal to present in the TEDxGallatin Senior Symposium, I found myself agonizing over the fact that there isn’t a single satisfactory antony...
Neural Networks & Artificial Neural NetworksYour visual system does not work like a camera. If you don’t believe me, think about what happens to an image if, while taking it, you shake the camera from ...
Going on a Date With Panpsychism, Tononi, and EdelmanI agreed to go on a date with panpsychism. Not that panpsychism came up to me after class and asked if I wanted to grab a coffee, or slipped me its phone num...
A Central Point in ‘Physics & Philosophy’On Thursday, a friend and I watched the first half of Copenhagen, a film adaptation of Michael Frayn’s play of the same name about the mysterious meeting bet...
Chaos and the Atomic SwerveIn 1952, a paper appeared in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology titled The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. The paper’s aim was to provide an analysis of h...
Creature of HabitI am a creature of habit. Armed with this single bit of information, I can say with about 80% certainty that the conversation had something to do with Jeffre...
DNA: Database of the New AgeThe other day, my uncle asked me if my other uncle was “inventing yottabytes.” I took the question more literally than I should have and replied with some sn...
A Cup Full of ConsciousnessFor my birthday this year I have asked a dear friend of mine (and excellent baker) to make not a cake, but a series of nested crusts. I am generally delighte...
The Great Word Laundering, or: Is Language Like a Cast Iron Skillet?Today I had a thought: what if, for a day, every word spoken, written, and thought was value-neutral? Well, I thought it was a very cool thought. One friend ...
The Little ThingsIn spite of an emotional hangover from which I can’t reasonably expect relief anytime soon, complicated by the utter agony of being in an impossible situatio...