Learning Deep Learning

Author: wombat

  • It’s a boy thing

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    wombat
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    I like boy things. When I hear about explosives and magnets and highly nauseating g-forces I am drawn like a moth to flame. I once spent a week in Mumbai hanging out with an engineer who designed ship propellers. You only like me for my propeller talk, he’d say. Not true, but I did like…

  • One and a half lingual

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    wombat
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    When your mother tongue is not your mother’s, you grow up with an echo. In our house, English was the official language, the language of information transfer. Cantonese, my parents’ first language, was the language of emotion and of secrets. It was the language of outbursts. Here’s a typical example, an exchange between my mother…

  • My favorite feminist film

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    wombat
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    Is also my favorite film. And believe me, coming up with a fave is not easy for me. I don’t think I could come up with a favorite book. This film, When A Woman Ascends The Stairs, stands out because I think it’s flawless. I wouldn’t change a frame of it. The movie came out…

  • Viva le vélo

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    wombat
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    I wrote a novel for twelve year olds that features bicycles. The novel is set in China in 1902, when the bicycle was a fairly new technology. Many key features of the modern bicycle were present in the 1902 bicycle. So, why bicycles? When I was in Africa for six months in 1991-1992, Chinese bicycles…

  • Math Problem: from 2007 Colorado Math Olympiad

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    wombat
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    The problem: Each cell of an 8×8 chessboard is filled with either a 0 or a 1. Prove that if we compute the sums of the numbers in each row, each column, and each of the two diagonals, at least three of the sums must be equal. I worked on this recently with some middle…

  • Chekhov’s Rabbits

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    wombat
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    The first time I fell in love with Anton Chekhov was when I read “The Darling” and other short stories. The second time was when I saw Wallace Shawn play Uncle Vanya in a movie. And the third time was when, on a whim, I read some biographical notes about him. When he was young,…

  • To 80s Hong Kong Pop With Love

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    wombat
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    In the 80s, in June, when I was in graduate school, a friend called me up and asked if I wanted to make an impromptu trip from Berkeley, California to Vancouver, BC. He wanted to drive up and see his father, who was ill, and could use help driving. I had family in Vancouver too.…

  • Cumin and Hammers

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    wombat
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    Once, I had a difficult plane flight from Frankfurt to Nairobi. I’d purchased my ticket from Bulgarian Airlines about 30 hours before departure, at the height of the summer travel season. The plane stopped in Sofia, where I was told that I did not have a seat on the flight to Nairobi because I did…

  • Boost profits, analyze metrics

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    wombat
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    Once upon a time in math, I studied metric spaces, spaces for which there exists a way to measure distances between points. At first glance the non-mathematician might say: yuck, this is the genesis and justification of corporate bean counting and turning people into numbers, stay the heck away from me. But this is not…

  • says René Magritte

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    wombat
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    I despise the past, my own and everyone else’s. I despise resignation, patience, heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. This is a favorite quote from the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. As the author of a novel set in the past, it puts me on my toes. The quote is a little outré, and I…