The Living Thing

Here are my public notebooks.

This means: these notebooks concern topics about which I wish to inform myself about. All conclusions are provisional, all ideas are half-baked and nothing, at all, has been reviewed. Typos, spelling errors and bad edits abound. You’re welcome.

Much of this information is digested from the blogs on my blogroll, or the papers on my reading list.

These are rated on the 3 point scale of Usefulness (🔧), Novelty (💡), Uncertainty (🤪) and Incompleteness (🚧).

Particulate masks For a new century in which inhaling gets only more dangerous 2019-01-18 – 2020-08-06
Hygienic masks Medical/anti-infectious masks 2020-08-01 – 2020-08-06
Publication bias Replication crises, P-values, bitching about journals, other debilities of contemporary science at large 2016-08-30 – 2020-08-06
Secure chat systems Optimising back channel interjections into other people’s meetings 2015-02-15 – 2020-08-01
Remote Desktop Business model: Uber for pixels 2019-11-18 – 2020-07-31
Time management Akrasia, gamification, hyperbolic discounting, quantified self and voluntary blackmail 2017-06-18 – 2020-07-25
Innovation On the invention of self-moving goalposts 2014-07-27 – 2020-07-24
Taking notes Notes on notes on notes 2020-02-17 – 2020-07-23
Psychometrics Dimensionality reduction for souls 2017-10-31 – 2020-07-23
Packaged apps for Linux On having 3 extra suggestions for installing that app on top of the existing 12 2019-08-09 – 2020-07-16
Pornography Morsels of oddity from the depiction of human sexual behaviour 2020-04-22 – 2020-07-10
Hardened mobile Trusting the computer that follows you around all day 2015-02-15 – 2020-07-06
LaΤeΧ …and ΤeΧ, and ConTeXt and XeTeX and TeXleMeElmo 2014-09-08 – 2020-07-06
Python A programming language whose remarkable feature is working how you imagine, if not how it should 2011-04-18 – 2020-07-03
Website cheat codes CSS, SCSS, SASS, HTML, UX, Web 2.0, RFC, Yeah you know me 2014-12-23 – 2020-07-02
DJing On causing people to listen to your living room playlist by demanding that they pay for it 2015-02-02 – 2020-06-26
Research discovery Has someone answered that question you have not worked out how to ask yet? 2019-01-22 – 2020-06-26
Status The original karma system 2019-10-25 – 2020-06-25
Comfy GNOME shell Sparing thoughts for the desktop whatsit favoured by the thoughtless 2019-08-13 – 2020-06-24
Scientific writing In which style tips are given for the projection of status through nominal phrases and passive voice 2014-12-31 – 2020-06-24
Metis and .*-rationality The cash value of belief, high modernism and cargo culting, spontaneous order, legibility, the Great Society and local knowledge 2017-07-24 – 2020-06-23
Rhetoric Argumentation, descriptive and prescriptive 2017-06-07 – 2020-06-23
Nootropics The struggle to find a drug that makes you so fast that you save more time taking it than you lose reading about it 2017-08-07 – 2020-06-23
Zotero The adequate citation tool 2019-12-01 – 2020-06-23
Learning of manifolds Also topological data analysis; other hip names to follow 2014-08-19 – 2020-06-23
Dimensionality reduction Wherein I teach myself, amongst other things, feature selection, how a sparse PCA works, and decide where to file multidimensional scaling 2015-03-22 – 2020-06-23
Sex and sexology Incorporating smut, lewdness, and prurience 2020-06-07 – 2020-06-18
Memetics Taste and opinion dynamics 2020-01-30 – 2020-06-16
Code editors The best thing since punchcards 2014-11-11 – 2020-06-14
Terminals More realistically, terminal emulators, because anyone who is owns an actual working VT102 these days is not using it to do work 2018-10-11 – 2020-06-11
Weaponised social media Trolls, bots, lulz, infowars and other moods of the modern networked ape 2019-10-21 – 2020-06-10
Jupyter The least excruciating compromise between 1) irreproducible science, and 2) spooking your luddite colleagues 2017-02-09 – 2020-06-08
Natural language processing Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move. 2018-01-11 – 2020-06-07
Free content Raiding history for clip art 2014-08-31 – 2020-06-05
Academic reading workflow The continuing ascendancy of using piles of dead tree products for understanding cutting edge digital informatics 2016-04-11 – 2020-06-05
Productivity schemes If you can tell me why this placeholder post from 2014 is still consistently in my top 10 most popular posts I would be grateful 2014-10-09 – 2020-06-05
Browse the internet for me Introducing modern automation to the ancient crafts of serfing the web and tilling the clickfarm 2016-06-17 – 2020-06-04
Digital nostalgia Pixel art, geocities chic, cyberpunk retrofuturism 2020-05-15 – 2020-06-03
The simplest thing Minimum viable whatever, worse is better, PC-losering, Burkean engineering 2020-02-03 – 2020-06-03
Data dashboards On assuring the client that you are doing something data-sciency via clickable widgets 2020-03-12 – 2020-06-02
Covariance functions Mercer kernels, positive definite operators, spare reproducing kernels for that Hilbert space I bought on eBay real cheap 2019-09-16 – 2020-05-28
Audiobooks Long form podcasts 2014-11-11 – 2020-05-27
Getting along Tolerance, ghettoisation, xenophobic panic; Causes, pathologies and consequences of and suggestions for 2017-02-19 – 2020-05-25
PDF Portable Document Format – how we may use a thousand dollar computer to simulate a one cent piece of paper with zero day exploits 2018-06-03 – 2020-05-22
Academic blogging workflow Minimising the friction of advertising my thoughts in order to maximise the chance each thought gets advertised. Not covered: maximising quality of thoughts 2020-05-22
Naming things Hashes, UUIDs, deep and inscrutable singular Names 2016-06-07 – 2020-05-21
But what can I do? The stuff to do to make a better society is so easy that it is embarrassing if you are not doing it 2020-02-06 – 2020-05-19
MAPLE An OK computer algebra system 2020-05-19
Semantics Compressed representations of reality for syntactic agents; which might be what meaning means 2014-12-29 – 2020-05-16
Tensorflow The framework to use for deep learning if you groupthink like Google 2016-07-11 – 2020-05-15
Fonts Typefaces as I need them, which is for web pages and scientific papers 2016-01-11 – 2020-05-13
Presentations Slide decks and other stylised academic dominance displays 2015-06-01 – 2020-05-12
Oh, Sydney The rum corps in New South Boomerstan 2019-03-05 – 2020-05-12
ssh “secure shell”, which is not a shell but is a useful way that we log in to the back-end of things 2014-12-27 – 2020-05-11
Contact tracing Reverse engineering social graphs for the control of contagions of pathogens, subversive ideology and other substances of interest to control 2020-03-21 – 2020-05-10
R The statistical programming language, not the letter 2011-08-07 – 2020-05-07
Linux audio Making sound by banging rocks together 44 thousand times per second 2018-04-23 – 2020-05-01
Containerized apps Doing things that previously took 1 computer using 0.75 computers 2015-11-05 – 2020-04-28
C++ 2011-04-06 – 2020-04-27
Gym togs On getting fancy activewear of low impact to my pocket and the urban ecology 2018-06-03 – 2020-04-23
Colour 2015-04-07 – 2020-04-22
Email Doing email better, or better, not doing email at all 2015-01-13 – 2020-04-21
Survey modelling Adjusting for the Lizardman constant 2019-08-29 – 2020-04-21
Indyweb 2020-03-05 – 2020-04-17
Particle filters incorporating Interacting Particle Systems, Sequential Monte Carlo and a profusion of other simultaneous-discovery names 2014-07-25 – 2020-04-08
Queueing The mathematical field whose major result is enraging you about call centres 2015-06-03 – 2020-04-06
Editing images Chinks in my armour of learned Photoshop helplessness 2018-10-16 – 2020-04-05
Neural nets designing the fanciest usable differentiable loss surface 2016-10-14 – 2020-04-05
Free will A matter about which I voluntarily admit I don’t care, but am compelled to have something to link to when eliding 2012-03-16 – 2020-04-02
Model averaging On keeping many incorrect hypotheses and using them all as one goodish one 2017-06-20 – 2020-03-22
Bounded rationality and miscellaneous non-von Neumann-Morgenstern rationality postulates 2012-01-13 – 2020-03-19
Bootstrap Shuffling reality to produce your data 2014-11-26 – 2020-03-18
Tool discovery Settling upon an adequate gizmo to identify other adequate gizmos 2020-02-19 – 2020-03-12
Cloud machine learning Cloudimificating my artificial data learning intelligence brain clever science analyticserisation 2016-08-23 – 2020-03-11
Restricted isometry properties Plus incoherence, irrepresentability, and other uncertainty bounds for a sparse world, and maybe frame theory, what’s that now? 2017-06-12 – 2020-03-09
Gender Political and/or empirical engagement therewith 2017-08-13 – 2020-03-06
Music gear Digital amps and mics for the prissy yet broke 2014-08-26 – 2020-03-04
Stickers Printouts that you do not lose 2020-01-31 – 2020-03-03
Recipes Especially meta-recipes 2015-06-23 – 2020-03-03
Bias reduction Estimating the bias of an estimator so as to subtract it off again 2020-02-26
Asynchronous Python It can’t be premature optimisation if it took 20 years to start 2018-03-24 – 2020-02-17
Sunda 2015-11-07 – 2020-02-16
Teaching How-to 2020-02-11 – 2020-02-12
PDF viewers On turning texts into font rendering errors 2020-02-11
R Shiny Statistics through the internet 2020-02-11
Random change of time Stochastic processes derived by varying the rate of time’s passage, which is more convenient than I imagined 2015-08-05 – 2020-02-10
Cascade models a.k.a. cluster distributions, Galton-Watson models 2019-10-11 – 2020-02-10
Games 2020-01-22 – 2020-02-06
pytorch #torched 2018-05-04 – 2020-02-06
Subordinators Non-decreasing Lévy processes with weird branding 2019-10-14 – 2020-02-05
Infinitesimal generators Generators of the transition semi-group, connection to Kolmogorov forward equations 2017-05-29 – 2020-02-05
Community Engineering, maintaining, organizing 2020-02-02
Bandit problems Also reinforcement learning and stochastic control 2014-11-27 – 2020-01-28
*-omics 2016-08-12 – 2020-01-22
Economic inequality Return to capital versus return to labour versus return to state of nature 2014-10-29 – 2020-01-22
Comfy Ubuntu Various bits of setup for a research machine 2014-10-14 – 2020-01-14
Wikis plus also CMSs 2020-01-03 – 2020-01-02
Shells That alternative to GUIs by which you replace clicking-on-the-wrong-thing errors with typing-the-wrong-thing errors 2014-10-03 – 2020-01-01
Trains #Gunzellyf 2019-12-30
Tip me 2016-09-06 – 2019-12-24
FFMPEG 2019-11-11 – 2019-12-23
Backups Breaking things safely 2015-01-02 – 2019-12-21
Free energy Fancy analogy for understanding cognition 2011-11-27 – 2019-12-11
Controllerism Making thing happen by waving your arms about on stage 2014-11-17 – 2019-12-10
Markdown An itemised list of the esoteric difficulties of bullet points 2019-07-17 – 2019-12-07
Clojure 2015-01-05 – 2019-11-30
Bitwig The DAW I hate least 2016-11-26 – 2019-11-22
MIDI The near-adequate compromise for digital music that we are stuck with 2015-10-03 – 2019-11-20
Sleep Pathologies and hacks 2017-04-19 – 2019-11-19
Fish shell A command line shell that does not think that the problem is you 2019-03-30 – 2019-11-19
Tunings 2015-10-29 – 2019-11-18
Classification Labelling losses, fitting classifiers etc 2017-02-20 – 2019-11-13
Probability divergences Metrics, contrasts and divergences and other ways of quantifying how similar are two randomnesses 2014-11-25 – 2019-11-12
Javascript audio Every program will expand until the point that it can generate cheezy techno 2011-11-25 – 2019-11-08
Phase retrieval I’ve got the power. / Like the crack of the whip/ I snap attack/ Front to back 2017-01-16 – 2019-11-07
Sparse coding How to make big things out of lists of small things. 2014-11-17 – 2019-11-05
Wasserstein GANs Fancy regularisation for tricky fakes 2019-05-21 – 2019-11-04
Conference posters Comes the time when a student must spell the eldritch symbols for this occult rite of great but inscrutable importance 2018-07-19 – 2019-11-01
Gamification “Belated Blogging of a Buzzword” achievement unlocked 2019-10-27 – 2019-10-31
Fit 2015-01-17 – 2019-10-31
Oh, Newcastle Newcastle, Australia, not that weird copy in England 2019-10-31
Aksara Sunda ᮃᮊ᮪ᮞᮛ ᮞᮥᮔ᮪ᮓ 2015-10-08 – 2019-10-30
Nowhere to hide A catalogue of terrifying surveillance methods I encounter 2019-07-13 – 2019-10-27
Ableton Live The de facto standard for techno 2015-01-06 – 2019-10-24
Printing Offline backups that do not need batteries 2018-10-03 – 2019-10-21
QR codes Subtitles for robots 2019-10-30 – 2019-10-21
Solarpunk A tomorrow worth retiring to 2019-10-29 – 2019-10-20
Bayesians vs frequentists Just because we both get the same answer doesn’t mean neither of us is wrong 2014-11-25 – 2019-10-19
Diagrams Of the kind I need, a practical guide to the creation thereof 2015-03-02 – 2019-10-17
Climate crisis The conspiracy of those malign incumbent powers, the laws of physics, against the plucky underdog, coal megacorporations 2011-12-13 – 2019-10-14
Voting Systems Mathematics and economics of ballots 2014-09-22 – 2019-10-05
Social psychology Which of those NPR-friendly studies actually replicated? 2017-02-20 – 2019-10-03
Data sets Questions for answers looking for questions 2015-06-26 – 2019-09-25
Informations Entropies and other measures of surprise 2011-11-25 – 2019-09-10
Sneakernets Intermittent connectivity, mesh networks and the Honda protocol 2015-10-03 – 2019-09-09
DNS On asking strangers for directions 2017-10-13 – 2019-08-26
Hierarchical models DAGs, multilevel models, random coefficient models, mixed effect models… 2015-06-07 – 2019-08-19
Sandboxing apps Upon letting strangers into your house, just so long as they don’t open the door to that one forbidden room 2019-08-09 – 2019-08-18
Causal inference Confounding! This scientist performed miracle graph surgery during an intervention and you won’t believe what happened next 2016-10-26 – 2019-08-07
Neural nets designing the fanciest usable differentiable loss surface 2016-10-14 – 2019-05-27
Making and its discontents Also repairers, innovators, maintainers, disruptors and sustainers, but not passive consumers 2018-09-24 – 2019-05-24
Artisanal poverty On the decreasingly relevant business model of cool 2018-03-26 – 2019-03-14
Hollow states Skim government when fat cats drank the cream 2019-03-13
Signal sampling Discrete representation of continuous signals and converse 2017-05-30 – 2019-03-08
Csound a less irritating audio programming language 2017-03-06 – 2019-03-07
3d data A grab bag of point clouds, volumetric data and photogrammetry 2019-02-15
First aid If you are checking this webpage while your colleague bleeds out, you are doing it wrong 2019-02-12
Inner product spaces The most highly developed theory of squaring things 2019-01-01 – 2019-02-11
Bikes Especially bikes where I live, which means Sydney at the moment 2014-11-10 – 2019-01-29
Meditation Socially-mandated zoning out 2016-01-05 – 2019-01-22
Learning on manifolds Finding the lowest bit of a krazy straw, from the inside 2011-10-21 – 2018-11-16
The right words That which I substitute with the long words 2017-06-15 – 2018-11-07
Atom A text editor I seemed to be using 2017-06-19 – 2018-11-06
Sauna sweating, deliberately 2017-04-06 – 2018-10-25
Newcomb-type decision problems I know that you know what I think you know about what we all know about people who write about strong AI online. 2018-10-24
Ergodic theory / mixing For things that probably happen eventually instead of just probably 2011-10-17 – 2018-10-23
German 2014-10-17 – 2018-10-23
Anomaly detection I don’t define what is normal, but I know it when I see it 2015-10-06 – 2018-10-22
Surviving bash The flagship product of modern unix is certainly better than any other 80s shell 2018-08-10 – 2018-10-19
UIs in Python interacting with an app, a python app, without too much dicking about 2017-06-03 – 2018-08-10
Linear algebra If the thing is twice as big, the transformed version of the thing is also twice as big. {End} 2011-04-06 – 2018-08-07
Sundanese music Karawitan, Ketuk Tilu, Jaipongan, Gamelan Degung, Death Metal and similar 2014-11-11 – 2018-07-13
Python caches The fastest code is the code you don’t run 2018-07-02
Signal processing That which you study for 4 years in order to design trippy music visualisers 2015-03-18 – 2018-01-05
Matlab A method of charging you licensing fees to use the CPU you already bought 2016-06-13 – 2017-12-13
Embodiment It’s easier to teach a robot to walk if it has legs. 2015-01-02 – 2017-10-14
Quantum probability and quantum information, noncommutative probability 2016-10-16 – 2017-09-18
AutoML hyperparameter selection with the use of yet more hyperparameters 2017-07-17 – 2017-08-30
Brains Neural networks made of real neurons, in functioning brains 2014-11-03 – 2017-08-15
Institutions Stable orbits in human systems 2014-10-29 – 2017-06-20
Models of computation Turing machines, λ-calculus, term-rewriting and other models of what may be computed. 2017-06-18 – 2017-06-18
Flashcards Spaced repetition systems 2015-01-02 – 2017-04-01
Scala 2017-02-11 – 2017-02-28
Statistical learning theory Eventually including structural risk minimisation, risk bounds, hopefully-uniform convergence rates, VC-dimension, generalisation-and-stability framings etc 2016-07-06 – 2016-08-16
Lua 2014-07-25 – 2016-08-12
Syntax 2015-01-18 – 2016-06-22
Visuals 2015-03-24 – 2015-11-26