Suppose it is an ordinary Sunday. A late-evening drink downtown. 8:47. The bartender says, “There’s a man with a machete!” You look up from the bar, and there he is, silhouetted in the doorway 20 short steps away. What do … Read More
A man is using reinforcement learning to train an AI to play a video game. A virtual boat has to navigate a virtual coast from A to B without crashing. (Reinforcement = dopamine -> when you earn a reward, reinforce … Read More
A place for me to keep track of my ‘idea blitz’ during the last year of going through papers. Cost/Fitness Landscape. Bayesian ensemble solution to flexibility in face of change. Biological population/machine population parallel. Problem: high dimensional volume difficult to … Read More
What is life, according to science? An open thermodynamic system that is capable of reproduction. Accurate, but misleading. In this perspective man is a purely material beast, born to suffer and die in the void with no purpose. I propose … Read More
Let’s take a break here to discuss one element of Kauffman’s work with Boolean networks. Essentially, he found that complex networks can behave in one of 3 ways, stable, critical, and chaotic, depending on how the nodes of the network … Read More
In this part, let us take on the evangelical strain of veganism that is also anti-hunting. There are individuals who would like you to believe that veganism is the only defensible moral way of eating. They depict an industrial meatpacking … Read More
Philosophically, the hunter believes in objective truths, the power of archetypes, and an essential view of the world. I include “objective truth” above because it is very easy in modern life to agree with the sentiment that truth is almost … Read More
A series of posts have been cooking, in part, because of NPR’s Barbara King who occasionally writes on animal rights & hunting. I recommend her columns for those interested in an animal rights perspective. First, I’d like to address a … Read More
I’ve been a week in the wilderness. I’ve not seen another human in that time, or let a sound escape my lips. I am deep in the Yolla Bolly Wilderness, a 150,000 acre tract between the 6 Rivers and Mendocino … Read More
Designers can be placed on a single axis described by two extremes, best represented I think by 20th century designers Henry Dreyfuss and Raymond Loewy. Dreyfuss exemplifies the school of design that considers human factors first, and categorically denies the … Read More