Upstart and Algorithms of Exclusion
On July 27th, the New York Times published an article about algorithms that “determine character” titled, you guessed it, Determining Character With Algorith...
Things I've Written Down
2015
2014
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-Ness
In 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 Networks
Your 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 Edelman
I 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 Swerve
In 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...
A Cup Full of Consciousness
For 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 ...