Saturday, December 31, 2022

More correspondence about religion

After 6 years of suspense (see my first comment on this post: http://breathmintsforpenguins.blogspot.com/2016/06/musings-on-meaning-of-meaning-and.html), my thoughtful Christian friend got back to me and we continued for a while brought it to a thrilling conclusion.

I thought it was a fun conversation, so I'm posting (a somewhat edited for brevity and clarity) my part of it here. I haven't asked for permission to post my friend's comments, so I'll summarize those. I guess if they come across this and want their part included verbatim, I'll replace with the full, unedited correspondence. Also skipping a big chunk towards the end because it gets complicated, and probably boring to read for people other than the participants.

Monday, January 4, 2021

Backpropagation through graphical models for new year's resolutions and planning out priorities for the next year

Around New Year's every year, I take some time to reflect on the successes and failures of the past year and decide what I should prioritize for the next year. Usually I do this using a combination of paragraphs and bullet point lists.

I recently took a deep learning class where I learned about a technique called backpropagation, which is used to find optimal parameters for a predictive model. It occurred to me that an analogous thought process could be used to help guide New Year's planning.

This is the first time I have gone through this exercise, so I'm making it up as I go along. If you decide to try this (or if you have already tried something similar), I would be really delighted to hear any feedback (good or bad) or suggestions you might have for improving the method. 

Friday, January 1, 2021

Dreaming of Grandpa


memorial for grandma

Productivity through cycles of exploration and focus


I'm not a very good swimmer. I don't usually wear goggles, but I don't like getting water in my eyes. When I swim I start by looking around, noticing where obstacles points of interest are, and picking a destination. Then I close my eyes and swim towards that target for a while before stopping and repeating the cycle.

Isolating (peppermint) glandular trichomes by the bead-beater method

Sean Johnson

April 26, 2017

Simplified from: Gershenzon et al., ANALYTICAL BIOCHEMISTRY 200,130-138 (1992)


Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Zamenhof 1907 speech at the London guildhall

Zamenhof gave a lot of beautiful speeches. This one makes me cry every time I read it. It's a lot more eloquent in the original Esperanto, but here is a translation into English that I've made.

The speech was made during a period of intense nationalist violence in Zamenhof's home region. Also at the time of the speech, some members of the Esperanto community thought that Zamenhof's idealism was scaring people away from Esperanto. They wanted to advertise and use Esperanto solely as an instrument for international business and communication and to drop any discussion of world peace. A few years earlier Zamenhof had reluctantly endorsed some of their ideas.

In this speech Zamenhof clarifies that he still sees the pursuit of world peace as the primary goal of Esperanto and he makes a plea for people in the Esperanto community (and beyond) to not lose their idealism. For more about Zamenhof and his political ideas, see here, and here.