Sitting at JFK reading Scholarpedia’s comprehensive entry on Recurrent Neural Networks, waiting for my flight to Iceland with my kid while the sun drops just to the north of Freedom Tower…priceless.… Read the rest
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Vin versus the Vampires, Chapter 2: Dealing with the Creditors
Unpublished novel chapter about vampires taking over Hollywood, from the perspective of Vin Diesel. Vin arrives in London to work on a new film about vampires but is attacked by a strange creature while jogging in Hyde Park.
The doctor is a woman, brown, Indian or Pakistani, and, as usual when I first arrive in Britain, I am surprised that the accent can accompany any serious discussion at all. Yes, I had a tetanus shot three years ago. Actually, yes, I had the typhus series, too. No, it was definitely not a dog but admittedly, yes, I am not sure exactly what it was. I’m grinning at her as she projects standardized health system concern through the lilts and dips of pure Londoner. She keeps glancing at my grin, either not recognizing me or just concerned that I am drunk or high. It’s just the accent, I think about blurting out; I can’t take it seriously, sorry, an American oddity exaggerated by the pain in my knee and the early morning hours without much sleep. But I clam up and answer her questions only getting a bit peeved at the third round of, “Had you been drinking”
“No, I was jogging. I was jetlagged. I was jogging. Really.”
There were no stitches, just a bandage and a shot of broad-spectrum antibiotics. As I finished up and signed off, I thought about sneaking a peak at the chart to see if she had annotated “likely alcoholic” or something on the page, but it was almost 9 AM British Summer Time and I needed a nap before my meeting in the afternoon, so I scribbled where I needed to scribble and grabbed a cab back to the hotel, hobbling in past the front desk with my tattered sweats sweeping the marble of the lobby.… Read the rest
Curiouser and Curiouser
Jürgen Schmidhuber’s work on algorithmic information theory and curiosity is worth a few takes, if not more, for the researcher has done something that is both flawed and rather brilliant at the same time. The flaws emerge when we start to look deeply into the motivations for ideas like beauty (is symmetry and noncomplex encoding enough to explain sexual attraction? Well-understood evolutionary psychology is probably a better bet), but the core of his argument is worth considering.
If induction is an essential component of learning (and we might suppose it is for argument’s sake), then why continue to examine different parameterizations of possible models for induction? Why be creative about how to explain things, like we expect and even idolize of scientists?
So let us assume that induction is explained by the compression of patterns into better and better models using an information theoretic-style approach. Given this, Schmidhuber makes the startling leap that better compression and better models are best achieved by information harvesting behavior that involves finding novelty in the environment. Thus curiosity. Thus the implementation of action in support of ideas.
I proposed a similar model to explain aesthetic preferences for mid-ordered complex systems of notes, brush-strokes, etc. around 1994, but Schmidhuber’s approach has the benefit of not just characterizing the limitations and properties of aesthetic systems, but also justifying them. We find interest because we are programmed to find novelty, and we are programmed to find novelty because we want to optimize our predictive apparatus. The best optimization is actively seeking along the contours of the perceivable (and quantifiable) universe, and isolating the unknown patterns to improve our current model.… Read the rest
Minimizing Existential Toaster Threats
Philosophy in the modern world has strived for a sense of relevance as the sciences (“natural philosophy”) have become dominant. But philosophy may have found a footing in the complicated space between technological advances and defining human virtues with efforts to address and understand change and its impact on human existence. These efforts have included the ethics of biological manipulation and, critically, existential threats to humanity, including climate change, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering.
I mention all this because I’m really writing about cars but need to fit the discussion somehow into the theme of this blog. So the existential threat of climate change means we need to pollute less and burn less fossil fuels. More tactically, however, my wife and I also needed to buy a new toaster because our five-year-old Oster four-burner unit was failing. There was therefore only one solution to this dilemma: take the brand new Tesla S 70 miles away to the foothills of the Sierra on a test drive and, yes, to buy a new toaster.
I had taken delivery of our Tesla S Performance 85 with Tech Package a week before but didn’t really have any opportunity to drive it because of work obligations that kept me firmly planted in front of a computer monitor. I had driven it briefly but it mostly sat charging in the garage (at the slowish pace of a 120V circuit; Tesla did not deliver my dual charger station in time and I haven’t had the 100A circuit installed to support it either), so when Saturday came, I realized that it was an opportunity to justify a longish trek to test the drivability of the car and to seek out and use the Tesla “supercharger” stations that promise rapid charging in 30 minutes to an hour.… Read the rest
Ye Olde Leaden New Year
Fascinating discovery by Emily Chertoff at The Atlantic from the archives of The New York Times dating to 1856 about European traditions concerning New Year’s celebrations. Could all that molybdomancy have led to stupidity?
Update: New York Times changed the reference links to Emily Chertoff’s article. Here is the original:
Signals and Noise: Chapter 15 (Synaesthesia)
The drift from daylight into twilight held an anxiety for Zach. There was a liquescent feeling to the air that was a result of the luminous ocean, the cars, and the windows of the coastal homes. The morning was much bolder in its transition—less lackadaisical—because the coastal range blocked the light into a striated glow until finally rolling over town in full heat, bearing down on the fogbank that stretched out to the south like twirling cotton candy. He woke up scared in a way that he rarely ever did. There had been days when he awoke in a full flush, bounding out to the living room to peer out through the blinds, marveling that the FBI had not yet arrived, but there had always been a mischievous edge to his fears. If he had been arrested, taken in, interrogated, it was all part of the stripes associated with his own actions. This time was different for Zach. He was scared that there was something else going on that he did not understand, and he was not at all used to not understanding or, at least, thinking he understood.
The online universe had not changed and PoorGore was not back in The Spinner’s miniverse. He checked in on the Idaho papers, narrowing to the southwest corner of the state, watching for anomalies. Pollution, grazing rights, indigenous casinos and their impacts, car dealerships going under, property taxes—it was all normal for the time being except that PoorGore had vanished and nothing significant had happened. Zach’s mental math suggested he could be anywhere in the United States given the elapsed time since PoorGore’s last post. He peered at FC’s house from space again, but the satellite imagery had not changed.… Read the rest
