Unsorted links for March 2017: Earth has always been round, space rocket geekery, maths, and other stuff
An assorted selection of random links!
Why? Reminder: My original plan for this linkblog was to publicly archive curious links, articles, etc I have found in internet, and do it on a platform that I can control and tweak and hack as I like (unlike Twitter). In particular, the idea was to post each link one-by-one, every one of them nicely tagged and categorized. After a couple of months of half-hearted attempt at this, I’ve come to realize that the original link-blogging idea is more difficult to implement in practice than it sounds. The main problem: it takes too much time.1
So let’s try a slightly different format instead. In the best blogging tradition, straight out from 00’s: a monthly collection of links! This one more or less corresponds to the past March (also including older stuff):
Links
Atomic Rockets [Science Fiction, Rockets, Rayguns]
Atomic Rockets. A wonderful, wonderful resource I wasted far too many hours reading last week. The website looks like it’s from early 00’s, the contents like they are mostly from 1950’s pulp science fiction magazines (…beautiful old illustrations! translations of fusion reactor schematics from obscure Soviet magazines!), except it’s constantly updated with commentery and references.
My favorite thus far is essay about how to model your heinleinian Space Patrol on Coast Guard, or this essay about feasiblity of space warfare taking into account what spotting spaceships in Solar System would be really like, or maybe this review of scientific accuracy of Tintin’s Moon-Rocket2, or possibly yes, all of the whole website.
Also, I thought I was well versed in the old science fiction literature, but I’ve barely heard about ~half of the books and stories referenced.
NERVA [History, More Rockets]
NERVA A pick form the above website that deserves a special mention. I have heard of this project before (I think Esko Valtaoja mentioned it in some of his books 3), but I did not know it got this far.
22 min long NASA film on YouTube
Our current chemical rockets look slightly depressing in comparision. Or comfortably non-nuclear, depending on your viewpoint.
Apollo Mission Control Room [History, Geekery]
Also via Atomic Rockets:
Simply. So. Cool.
The Regrettable Decline of Space Utopias [Science Fiction, Culture]
Related. An article by Brianna Rennix in Current Affairs.
On Star Trek:
tar Trek is one of those TV shows whose basic premise would be horrifying if the show weren’t so utterly committed to its own optimism. […] The characters’ preternatural level of peace with the unknown is probably one of the main reasons why Star Trek is extraordinarily comforting to watch.
It continues with wondering about the curious absence of lawyers in space, and then lamenting the profilitation of dystopias across genre fiction:
Sadly, utopias are presently out of vogue, as the tedious proliferation of dystopian fiction and disaster films seems to indicate. No genre is safe. Game of Thrones is the dystopian reboot of Lord of the Rings; House of Cards is the dystopian reboot of The West Wing; Black Mirror is the dystopian reboot of The Twilight Zone. The slate of previews at every movie theatre has become an indistinguishably sepia-toned effluence of zombies, terrorists, and burnt-out post-apocalyptic hellscapes. Even supposedly light-hearted superhero movies now devote at least 3.5 hours of their running time to the lavishly-rendered destruction of major metropolises. […] Immersing ourselves in narratives where 99% of the characters are totally selfish also engrains a kind of fashionable faux-cynicism that feels worldly, but is in fact simply lazy.
I agree, but luckily there’s some recent major films swim against the current of pessimism. My favorite science fiction film of the past year was surprisingly optimistic Arrival. I expect it to do very well on Hugos.
[Mathematics, Self-Learning, Resources]
K. K. Fowler on AMS Notices. The Mathematics Autodidact’s Aid (2005) (pdf).
The present brief guide doesn’t attempt to identify the “best” books, but rather to give the independent mathematics learner recommendations of reasonable starting points; therefore resources that are particularly suitable for self-study, mostly at the graduate level, have been preferred where possible.
The list looks formidable, and by of course, recommends almost fully different books than I’ve read. Also lots of CS stuff that I think any working mathematician should have is missing. 4 Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology is on my reading list.
Kullback-Leibler Divergence [Statistics]
One thing that I’ve been trying to grok lately: Kullback-Leibler divergence tl;dr. How to compare a change between probability distributions from infomation theoretic viewpoint?
IncrementalPCA [Applied maths, Algorithms, Matrix Decompositions]
I didn’t notice until now that Scikit-Learn comes with a memory efficient PCA implementation
References:
Implements the incremental PCA model from: D. Ross, J. Lim, R. Lin, M. Yang, Incremental Learning for Robust Visual Tracking, International Journal of Computer Vision, Volume 77, Issue 1-3, pp. 125-141, May 2008. See http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~dross/ivt/RossLimLinYang_ijcv.pdf
This model is an extension of the Sequential Karhunen-Loeve Transform from: A. Levy and M. Lindenbaum, Sequential Karhunen-Loeve Basis Extraction and its Application to Images, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 9, Number 8, pp. 1371-1374, August 2000. See http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~mic/doc/skl-ip.pdf
Unicode tutorial [Unicode, Software]
Distill [AI, Machine Learning, Academia, Journals]
Everybody (OpenAI, Deepmind) seemed to be excited about Chris Olah’s new internet-age journal/visualization repository/toolbox/cool thing Distill. We shall observe with great interest?
[Cognition, language, cute]
Some guy tracked his son’s vocabulary since birth. Not exactly a scientific sutdy, but lookit, what a curious exponential trajectory?!
Why Most Published Reserach Finding are False [Statistics]
This one is a bit old, but interesting anyway:
Ioannidis J.P.A. (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
From abstract:
Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.
Via New Scientist, also from 2005
Or Are They? [Statistics]
…but the actual thing I read was this:
Is Most Published Research Really False?. A more recent review of the state of statistics, one decade later.
Abstract:
There has been an increasing concern in both the scientific and lay communities that most published medical findings are false. But what does it mean to be false? Here we describe the range of definitions of false discoveries in the scientific literature. We summarize the philosophical, statistical, and experimental evidence for each type of false discovery. We discuss common underpinning problems with the scientific and data analytic practices and point to tools and behaviors that can be implemented to reduce the problems with published scientific results.
Leek, J. T., & Jager, L. R. (2016). Is most published research really false?. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, (0). DOI: 10.1146/annurev-statistics-060116-054104
The Great Mouse Neuron [CogSci, Biology]
Nature News: A giant neuron found wrapped around entire mouse brain
Nature 543,14–15 (02 March 2017) doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21539
Vaellusretkiä matematiikkaan [Mathematics, Education]
Simo Kivelä published a new book (in Finnish). Read it, liked it. A comprehensive review of mine: forthcoming.
Hey it’s already available on Helmet and look, it’s popular (several reservations)!
Compressed Sensing [TODO, Applied math]
(Originally via HN as usual.)
A question on MathOverflow:
I try to generate a lot of examples in my research to get a better feel for what I am doing. Sometimes, I generate a plot, or a figure, that really surprises me, and makes my research take an unexpected turn, or let me have a moment of enlightenment.
For example, a hidden symmetry is revealed or a connection to another field becomes apparent.
Question: Give an example of a picture from your research, description on how it was generated, and what insight it gave.
Terence Tao’s answer on rightly on the top.
More about: Compressed Sensing and Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem.
It’s a greate shame I don’t know more about this, given where I currently study: I really should read the seminal “compressed sensing” papers5 papers one day.
Daily Reminder That Earth Has Been Round Longer Than We Think [History, Mathematics, Culture]
Convex Geometry of Inverse Problems [Mathematics, Applied maths, Inverse Problems]
Benjamin Recht provides a curious insights Inverse Problems (from quite different perspective than the similarly named course here at Helsinki). Long-ish YouTube lecture.. (1 h 23 m)
Deep Learning Reading List [Deep Learning, AI, CV, NLP, References, TODO]
For future reference: deeplearning.net has the definite list of deep learning and related applications papers.
arXiv Sanity Preserver [arxiv]
I’m not currently using this but willing to give it a try.
Latex Tooling Guide [latex, TODO]
by norwswap aka Nicolas Laurent, via HN. Picks:
- I’ve been using
latexmk. Wasn’t aware of latexryn, which does look cool. - Also a more complicated makefile than mine
- ShareLatex.com. Similar collaborative editing tool I’ve used in the past: Overleaf.
- From HN comments:
- remember to use LuaLatex if you want your utf8 öäå characters without resorting to weird macros
- blkarray
- tufte-markdown/CSS/latex woah
It’s Always Fascinating to Look at Foreigners Arguing About Nordics [Economics, Politics, Society]
Basically, his question is, if you dropped Kela or Vero in the U.S., would they be able to do the same stuff. My answer is no, because of institutions.
“Nordic Democracy Is Not Exportable”, by Lyman Stone, in a dialogue/argument/disagreement/w/e with Matt Bruenig.
More about city-stateness of Nordics by Stone
David Chalmers Did A Reddit AMA While Back [Philosophy, CogSci, Reddit]
What’s So Bad About Scientism? [Philosophy, Science]
Paper by Moti MIzrahi. From abstract:
In their attempt to defend philosophy from accusations of uselessness made by prominent scientists, such as Stephen Hawking, some philosophers respond with the charge of “scientism.” This charge makes endorsing a scientistic stance a mistake by definition. For this reason, it begs the question against these critics of philosophy, or anyone who is inclined to endorse a scientistic stance, and turns the scientism debate into a verbal dispute. In this paper, I propose a different definition of scientism, and thus a new way of looking at the scientism debate. Those philosophers who seek to defend philosophy against accusations of uselessness would do philosophy a much better service, I submit, if they were to engage with the definition of scientism put forth in this paper, rather than simply make it analytic that scientism is a mistake.
Mizrahi’s quantitative evidence for “science is superior” isn’t that convincing, but I like the thesis put forward in the first sections. “Scientism” is often used as a pejorative; any given debate would often be of higher quality if it wasn’t.
From 2015: Mathematics Warn that London Underground May Be Too Fast [Mathematics, Applied Maths, Models, Traffic Jams]
Footnotes
1: Posting just bare links with minimal commentary feels too much like Twitter emoting. So I ask myself: Why I am doing it here instead of Twitter? And if I’m writing a post about a single link here, I simply can’t resist the impetus to write at least a couple of hunderd words long commentary about the link’s contents.
Consequently, I currently have near dozen such unfinished drafts in my _drafts folder and my browser bookmark folder titled Interesting stuff keeps growing and growing. Which defeats the original purpose of archiving the contents of that bookmark folder here…
2: The iconic comic albums by Hergé, Objectif Lune / Destination Moon, On a marché sur la Lune / Explorers on the Moon. More on the official Tintin website by Moulinsart.
3: Most likely: Kotona maailmankaikkeudessa. Ursan julkaisuja 80. Helsinki: Tähtitieteellinen yhdistys Ursa, 2001. ISBN 952-5329-15-1.
4: I’m myself partial towards Rudin’s books instead of Apostle or Holland. Daubechies’s Ten Lectures on Wavelets is notoriously difficult to find, so when I studied wavelets a couple of years back I used some less famous book as a reference. And I’m currently reviewing for real analysis exam with .Richard Silverman’s (heavily edited) translation of Kolmogorov’s Introductory Real Analysis.
5: Candès, Emmanuel J.; Romberg, Justin K.; Tao, Terence (2006). “Stable signal recovery from incomplete and inaccurate measurements” (PDF). Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. 59 (8): 1207–1223. doi:10.1002/cpa.20124.
Candès, Emmanuel J.; Romberg, Justin K.; Tao, Terence (2006). “Robust Uncertainty Principles: Exact Signal Reconstruction From Highly Incomplete Frequency Information” (PDF). IEEE Transactions on information theory, 52(2), 489-509. DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2005.862083