*Found particularly interesting.
Links and readings
- Podcasts
- *Sexistential (Strangers) – An eye-opening documentary, and probably not what you are expecting – Main idea: with society’s contradictory attitudes on sexuality, there is no safe space for people to learn about sex. This is where Kendra Holliday, sex surrogate, steps in.
- *Darkode (RadioLab) – Large-scale organized Internet crime.
- Enjoy the Suffering (The Truth) – A story about Hell
- This American Life
- The Land of Make Believe – A father constructs an elaborate fantasy ship in to occupy his 12 children.
- What’s Going On In There? – An abusive relationship; a son and father who can’t understand each other’s languages.
- Too Soon? – On the making of a reality show featuring OJ Simpson.
- The Source of Creativity (TED Radio Hour) – Drawing creativity from empathy with others, studying the brain during creative activity (jazz improvisation). Interesting: Creativity comes from turning off the part of your brain that self-reflects.
- 99% Invisible
- 180 Reefer Madness – Someone had to invent shipping containers! When you add refrigeration, things become more complicated.
- *179 Bathysphere – People only found out there was life in the deep sea when they found transatlantic cables covered with critter remains. On the wondrous journey of the first attempt to explore the deep sea, in a “bathysphere.”
- 177 Lawn Order – On the responsibility to maintain (or not maintain?) your lawn.
- *IndieFeed – Performance poetry podcast. Too many wonderful poems to list individually, go check them out!
- Media
- Neurotic Neurons, Nicky Case – an animation on Hebbian learning and its relation to behavioral psychology
- Slam poetry
- Books
- *The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss – a beautiful and unconventional book, featuring one character and her relationship to the objects she finds and makes alive.And while her eyes were all softness and want, her mouth grew firm and furious. No. That was not the way of things. She knew better. She knew perfectly well where this sheet belonged… She was a greedy thing sometimes. Wanting for herself. Twisting the world all out of proper shape. Pushing everything about with the weight of her desire.
- currently reading The Master and Margarita, Mikhai Bulgakov
- A few random posts/articles
- Write, Arxiv, Repeat – how we can simplify researchers’ workflows
- Why someone left academia
- Water on Mars
- Ignoring your passion is slow suicide
- Programming (I’m collecting Haskell links here.)
- Learn You an Agda!
- Type-level programming in Haskell
- State of the Haskell ecosystem – What Haskell is good at, and where it needs work.
- Write You a Haskell – A 100-page tutorial on writing a proto-Haskell compiler in Haskell. Some beautiful code here; it goes fast and teaches tons of stuff. Especially helpful for me were the nice examples on monad transformer stacks.
- TypeFunc – Lots of links for resources on functional programming.
- *Julia’s links for September including a proposal to replace London’s Tube with moving sidewalks and a fully automated restaurant.
- Games I learned about
- VVVVVV
- I Wanna Be the Guy – The ultimate troll computer game. Look up “rage quit I wanna be the guy” on YouTube.
Activities
- I have a paper Quadratic polynomials of small modulus cannot represent OR on the arXiv.
- Simons meeting on Intractability in Machine Learning. Some (messy) scribed notes are here (source).
- For COS513 (Probabilistic Modeling) (links to projects) I’m working with Maxim Zavslavsky and Kevin Miller on modeling rats’ strategies for the “two-armed bandit problem.” See our blog.
- I auditioned for Ellipses (Princeton’s slam poetry team). I didn’t get in, but got exposed to some wonderful poetry, and found out about some literary/performance events that I’ll be going to: the monthly Butler Open Mic Night (next one: Nov. 13), and the open mic night at the Princeton Cemetery (next one: Oct. 30).
- I wrote a Sudoku solver and various search algorithms in Haskell. In both I aimed to write code that’s very general (ex. constraint propagation using the AC3 algorithm) rather than tailored to the specific problem at hand.
Mental Wilderness 
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