March 2009
13 posts
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I just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye. [spoiler alert?] I was constantly waiting for Holden to snap and go all Alex DeLarge on me. That probably had more to do with the surrounding controversy than the actual narrative, which makes me wish I knew nothing about the book in advance.
If you haven’t read it yet, you must appreciate the irony of me telling you the exact thing I wish I...
Clustering a mixture of Gaussian distributions using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Each frame shows the estimates at the end of an iteration. Plots were generated in Matlab. (Anyone else get spooked seeing learning algorithms in action?)
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on writing
I miss writing. This comes as a big surprise to myself. Last year, every quarter I had at least one course that demanded regular writing. At the time, I despised it. For me, writing is not one of those things that comes naturally. But even then the benefits of the chore were obvious to me. I actually feel a bit dumber now that I haven’t been writing at all.
Instead of writing, I’ve...
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comment on last quote
I’m reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. The third chapter of the book is called Typographic America, and it’s been my favorite chapter so far. It talks about the high literacy rates in Colonial America, the popularity of books in that period, and generally praises the print-based culture of those times.
Towards the end of the chapter, Postman quotes Richard...
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WatchLast night’s show was one of my favorites in recent weeks. Starts off by making us feel good that certain people are not in control anymore (see previous post!), moves on to criticize twitter frenzy in the media, and wraps up with a nobel-winning scientist.
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“Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.”
– Wayne LaPierre, CEO, National Rifle Association
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“We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has...”
– Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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to-do
tumblr app for android.
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