Activity

[...] On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the look-out for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully on the alert lest his erratic surroundings (unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of preposterous oversight. It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin wh…

[...] How Pnin came to the Soedinyonnie Shtati (the United States). 'Examination on ship before landing. Very well! "Nothing to declare?" "Nothing." Very well! Then political questions. He asks: "Are you anarchist?" I answer'--time out on the part of the narrator for a spell of cosy mute mirth--'"F…

Although critics may refer to Lévi-Strauss when talking about raw and cooked data, they are rarely pursuing this kind of analysis. Instead, they are usually working in the Lakoffian mode, making and evaluating mappings between domains in terms of their adequacy. The anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (…

[...] Richard, an engineer at Whisper, once asked me: "We have to recommend Filipino music to people in the Philippines, but we have no Filipino staff -- what should we do?" Neither he nor I were in positions to actually influence such decisions at the corporate level, and my suggestion, that perha…

A grad student told me a joke that captured the impossibility of developing an intuition for machine learning's highly dimensional spaces, attributed to one of the field's most senior figures, Geoffrey Hinton: "How do you deal with a fourteen-dimensional space? To deal with a fourteen-dimensional s…