Lotte Time Lapse Age 0 to 12

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April 23, 2012
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This man filmed his daughter in short video segments from her birth until the current time, age 12. While this is not necessarily a new idea, I think it is worth checking out because it (a) spans more than a decade, (b) starts with a newborn and ends with an adolescent, and (c) comprises video clips, rather than stills.

Social Media Plateau

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April 19, 2012
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In The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has posted a wonderful article on the plateau that social media and technology have hit during the past couple years. The subtitle for the article is “After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups,” and Madrigal does a nice job of convincing the reader that the need is actually there.

I particularly liked the quotation from Jeff Hammerbacher about developers these days: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

However, while I understand Madrigal’s frustration, I think that it may be a little too early to shut the coffin on new and revolutionary technologies emerging from the “social-local-mobile” arena. But we’ll see.

World earthquakes 2011 Visualization map

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April 15, 2012
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Normally, I like to comment on these kinds of things, but I’ll just post this instead. You need a bit of sounds for this. Watch through 2:30 at a minimum.

How to give an excellent research talk

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April 13, 2012
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There are a few points of view on how to give an interesting and effective research talk. However, after attending practically any conference, it seems (appallingly) clear that many presenters do not represent any point of view on the subject. It sometimes appears that they do not give much thought to the delivery and style of their talks, but focus instead on getting all the “content” in. Don’t be that person! Here is some nice reading on the issue: On Academic Talks: Memory and Fear.

As an excellent example of how to gloss over all of the “divine details” please check out Donald Sadoway’s explanation of liquid metal batteries, below. It also happens that this is a very interesting idea. I wonder what happens if you don’t draw on (or recharge) the battery enough. Does it cool off and need to be re-liquified?

Ph.D., Rebirth, and Tyler Cowen

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April 7, 2012
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Summary: I finished a PhD, and then slept a lot. Afterward, while organizing my life, I watched Tyler Cowen’s TED talk (below) on problems with representing complex issues via simple st

ories, which relates to my previous discussion of Nassim Taleb’s ideas in Black Swan, as well as Jeff Hawkins’s ideas in On Intelligence.

On Thursday 5 April, 2012, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation on Critical Dynamics in Complex Excitable Networks. After teaching Friday morning, I slept for a few hours in the afternoon, went to a Passover seder at my mother’s, and then slept for another 12 hours. Apparently I was a little short on sleep?

Anyway, I woke up feeling great and have been cleaning and restoring order to my life all day. It feels like a very literary kind of rebirth, or epilogue to a story or something. It also feels strange to spend time outside during daylight hours. Anyway, one thing on my checklist today is to go through emails that I flagged as interesting, but didn’t have the time to really read. One such email was from DP and re
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoEEDKwzNBwcommended that I watch this TED talk by Tyler Cowen, which fits in nicely with my previous post about humans’ apparent need to fit events to the patters of stories in order to make sense of those events, as discussed in Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan.

It is, therefore, with a grin on my face that I write about feelings of rebirth, which Cowen discussed right away. If you have 15 minutes, I recommend watching the video above. If you prefer, you can just listen to the audio while you fold laundry or something (my preference, in this case).

But I think Cowen’s ideas are supported well by some ideas in neuroscience. Earlier this year, I read the book On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, which was an extremely coherent tour of the state-of-the-art theories on the mechanisms of human intelligence. The way in which humans remember things via invariant hierarchical representations in the cortex links very nicely with Cowen’s cautionary words about our predilections for representing complex concepts with simple stories.

Notes on Foundation and Empire, Black Swan

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January 12, 2012
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I recently finished Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire. It’s purely coincidence, but these two books are inadvertently related to each other in a fundamental way.

First, let me say that I enjoyed both. Black Swan‘s most attractive point was highlighting the human need for a unifying and “low-dimensional” narrative with which to explain inherently complex and “high_dimensional” data. Taleb’s point in my office-mate‘s terms is that if you squint hard enough, you can always find a low-dimensional manifold in a high-dimensional data set . . .  especially if it helps you sleep better at night. Foundation and Empire is just plain good. Asimov’s ability to make the reader care about characters quickly and forget about them just as quickly is amazing. I really like how each subsequent storyline makes reference to the previous storyline without being obnoxious. I also like how he was able to envision a future of space travel six years before Sputnik 1 which still remains driven by characters and plot and not by in-your-face hard scifi.

It is very interesting to me that Hari Seldon’s psycho-history is essentially a statistical physics approach to history. Essentially, when there are enough people acting collectively, individuals don’t matter because Society acts in aggregate as a much lower dimensional and more easily described creature. However, given what we now know about chaotic determinism, it’s hard to imagine a field such as Seldon’s emerging. In a sense, that’s what Taleb is highlighting in his own writing: the trajectory of history is hard to describe precisely because of unexpected individuals.

Summary: I highly recommend reading both Black Swan and Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (in order: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation).

Books for 2012

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December 30, 2011
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Here are the books that I ordered for 2012:

  1. Moneyball and The Big Short, by Michael Lewis
  2. Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, by Robert Reich
  3. The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick ,and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, by Tyler Cowen
  4. Judas Unchained and Pandora’s Star, by Peter F. Hamilton
  5. What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly
  6. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann
  7. On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins
  8. The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
  9. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, by Nicholas Wade
  10. Robopocalypse, by Daniel Wilson
  11. Halting State, by Charles Stross
  12. Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
Should be some good reading… Thanks to N.O. in Lawrence for some good recommendations!
In Defense of Food

In Defense of Food and Forks over Knives

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November 28, 2011
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I finished reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and really enjoyed it. If you are interested in a healthy diet, I highly recommend that you read this book. Its perspective may not be what you are expecting, however. Pollan’s argument is best summed up by his own seven words:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. 

Pollan isn’t advocating for low carbs. He’s not advocating for low fat. He’s not advocating for vegetarianism or veganism. He’s arguing that people should eat food. Once you start to think about the different between, say, bread, and the stuff that you can buy in the bread section at a supermarket, Pollan argues that the differences between industrial food products and actual food become pretty clear. Try baking bread yourself and pay attention to the list of ingredients. Now check out the ingredients list of a loaf of bread at the store. See a difference?

In Defense of Food

Check out In Defense of Food on its website, here: http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/.

Next, I watched a movie called Forks over Knives. It was like a Michael Moore version of In Defense of Food with a much more one-sided and extreme message, without the nuance of Pollan’s reasoning, documentation, and thoroughness. This is not to say that the movie doesn’t have just as must strong research behind it, but it is to say that you should not expect the two to be the same “flavor.” I liked Forks over Knives, but felt like it was trying to convert me in some sort of pseudo-religious way, rather than in an intellectual and well-reasoned way. However, converted I was, by the end, nonetheless. It was a really nice movie, and goes well with Pollan’s book.

Forks over Knives

Check out more here: http://www.forksoverknives.com/.

Synched

Synched – Sebastian Skardal

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November 17, 2011
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Sebastian Skardal, one of the other students in my research group at CU Boulder Applied Math, just released a really nice piece of software, called Synched. Synched is a nice visualization program for the Kuramoto oscillator system, in which a collection of many coupled oscillators interact and, depending on the strength of their coupling, synchronize or partially synchronize.

Download Synched for Mac OSX from the Synched web page

 

10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn In College

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November 13, 2011
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My cousin, Jonathan Nagel (Bagel with an “N”) posted this on Google+. I think it’s great. You should read it.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/12/10-things-entrepreneurs-dont-learn-in-college/

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