- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Google’s Deep Dream shows us that machines can indeed generate trippy dream-like images and videos.
- Word Embeddings An image is easy enough to encode as a vector with all the pixel intensity values. This means that two similar images are likely to have vectors that are similar too.On the other hand, for text, individual words are often encoded using arbitrary reference ids. Thus despite the obvious similarities between “cat” and “dog”, the ids could be vastly different.
- Can Any Noun Be Verbed? Somewhat recently, the erstwhile distinct worlds of computational linguistics and graph theorists collided. Researchers discovered that graphs offered a convenient way to represent text.The nodes could be words, sentences, or entire documents. The edges and their weights could suggest connections and similarities between nodes.
- Alice, Bob, and Annoying Eve Cryptography deals with secrets. How to keep them, and how to choose whom to share them with. If you ever look at an ELI5 (explain like I’m five) article for a cryptography topic, say a particular cipher, you are bound to come across certain people. I guarantee that you will read about Alice and Bob, who always seem to have confidential conversations. And then there’s Eve, a nosy friend who constantly wants to listen in on their classified communications.
- Fooled by Randomness We’re puppets of probability, slaves to statistics. Every last one of us. The gamble of leaving the house without an umbrella on an overcast day. The despair of picking the slowest moving queue in the supermarket. The risk of grabbing a quick smoke where your mom might just walk in on you.
- Can-openers, Cows, and Razors Where would scientists be, if they weren’t allowed to make certain convenient assumptions? Insisting on mathematical rigour would mean the untimely death of scores of bright young economists.
- Teapots, Coffee Mugs, Donuts, Hairy Balls, and Bottles Utah TeapotNot to be confused with Russell’s Teapot, a cosmic analogy cooked up by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who evidently had a great sense of humour. Illustrating that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others, he famously quipped:
