Category: Thought
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Christopher Olah’s blog
Christopher Olah’s blog The math behind computational learning is hard, but Christopher Olah makes understanding it really easy. Every article of his is worth reading.
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Mycroft
Forty-four percent of the way through the complete Sherlock Holmes works on Kindle and Mycroft is finally introduced: “My dear Watson,” said he, “I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a […]
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Leonardo
From the chapter on Leonardo da Vinci in Visari’s Lives: Da Vinci would buy and the immediately release birds… He was so pleasing in conversation, that he attracted to himself the hearts of men. And although he possessed, one might say, nothing, and worked little, he always kept servants and horses, in which latter he […]
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Learning from History
What can history teach us? From Chapter 1 of Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History: Rulers, statesmen, and nations are told that they ought to learn from the experience of history. Yet what experience and history teach us is this, that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted in accordance […]
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The case for computer algebra
The case for using computer algebra Many academics and researchers get annoyed when students use computer algebra programs such as Mathematica to evaluate simple integrals that they maintain should be done by hand. The question I ask is “At what point do you expect your students to switch over to using a computer?”. Most mathematical […]
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Learning from doing
We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do.’ Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than to propose gestures for us to reproduce. In other words, there is no ideo-motivity, only sensory-motivity. Gilles Deleuze, Difference […]
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I know that I am mortal by nature…
“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia” Ptolemy, Ptolemy’s Almagest
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From the little…
From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State… The […]
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Foucault
It is the connection of desire to reality (and not it’s retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force. Michel Foucault, in the preface to Anti-Oedipus
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Seneca Quotes
Flipping through my copy of Carnegie by Peter Krass, which I read a few years ago, I found a torn paper of scribbled quotes from Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic: Only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his social position, which after all is only something that we […]