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Never toured the inside of the Houses of Parliament before, seeing all the red and green colour coded areas (lords and commons – look at the benches next time you see debates in either place) and busts and statues of some of the shapers, for better or worse, of much … Click to continue reading this post → The post Westminster Wonders appeared first on Asymptotia.

A search engine is a vast mechanical Turk - a reinforcement learning engine that uses human activity to understand the web. PageRank used signal from links created by people, but once people started using Google at scale, that usage itself created far more signal: which results you clicked on, how you changed your searches to get better results, and what else you searched for before and after. That then applies …

After all my heart issues in May of 2023 I’ve been working hard to regain what I lost because of all of that. As the old saying goes “Dying really takes it out of you!” Having coded twice on Mother’s Day of last year it really has been a slog to get back! I’m happily back to where I can use my preferred and heavier system for my serous work …

In yesterday's post, we looked at a vintage photoshoot from the mid-'50s that featured some rather peculiar bikinis. Today, let's travel further back in time while staying on the same topic, as we explore a feature published in Life magazine in its July 9, 1945, issue. The cover model, 20-year-old Paddy Ellerton, sported a striped panung bathing suit with trunks that buttoned up the sides and the magazine included an …

A few stunners from a yearly delight – the Flower Exhibition at the Carbon County, Penna Fair. All shot with a fully manual TTArtisan 50mm f/1.2 on a Canon digital back (the TT is a $100 corker of a Chinese copy of a ZEISS Sonnar 50mm, amazing build quality & response. More here) Shooting fully manual was a joy that late afternoon – gold, creamy light soaked everything. Beyond exposure …

Another element often found in the wildcorners of South London are traces of 'Skippers'. This slang term was used by homeless communities of old London, meaning a temporary site used for rough sleeping. The word is derived from Skepper or Skypper; another name for a Barn. The term seems to appear often when referring to the barn as somewhere to sleep the night. It gradually widened to include all general …

A dataset of 187 thousand high resolution face images from movie trailers! Download it from huggingface. # Before the advent of giant web scale image datasets FFHQ used to be considered a big dataset full of images of faces on which many, many GANs were trained. One of the many issues with FFHQ (side note: don’t get me wrong there are lots of others, but I was focused on this …

This will be a talk at the Generalized Computability Theory workshop in Castro Urdiales, Spain, a beautiful setting on the sea near Bilbao, 19-23 August 2024. Abstract. I shall present infinite-time computable analogues of the universal algorithm, which can in … Continue reading →

For the past few weeks I've been thinking about how hard it is to develop software.

I realize I don’t need ruler to draw little house this since every line is organic and natural. Same for its construction. Just nearby resources, simplicity, easy and can be made in a few days with help of family and friends. The result is something in harmony with the place. I guess this is real wisdom.I saw that giant lizard around my hut most of the days there. Quite scary …

Been on a Venn diagram kick lately, since being primed to think in Venns by Harris campaign. This one summarizes an idea I’ve long been noodling on: The healthiest way to relate to a truth-seeking impulse is as an infinite game, where the goal is to continue playing, not arrive at a dispositive “winning” right […]

Goethe's Clavigo Clavigo and Marie meet after a long absenceLots of things have been going on since my last blogpost that have kept me from posting regularly, even though what has kept me occupied has concerned Goethe. In fact I have been immersed in Goethe, trying to get my “Goethe book” off the ground. But I also had to bring to completion an article on Goethe’s early (1774) play Clavigo. …

I like riding bicycles. The Tanglefoot Moonshiner is a very, very weird bike. It's also an excellent bike. It might just be the perfect bicycle for Northern New England in 2024. moonSHINin' When we lived in Colorado, I thought mountain biking was ridiculous. A bunch of Lycra-clad crazies riding lifts to the top of giant mountains to try to zoom down as fast as possible on bermy trails that might …

Steve Wasserman and I go back. In 1971 he was a student in the American Studies honors seminar I was teaching, or faking, at Berkeley. In 1979, when he was an Op Ed editor at the Los Angeles Times, he asked me to write a premature obituary for John Wayne, which, as it happens, was the right time for me and for the story. I was lucky to write for …

Over at Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander digs into the science behind anti-obesity drug Ozempic, and the subsequent array of secondary effects that have emerged in the scientific literature. “GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. “There’s a pattern in fake …