David R. MacIver's Blog

Weekly Reading Post #6 (Bi-Weekly Edition)

There was very little to report last week so I ended up skipping posting this for a week.

Random Links

• Derivatives of Parsing Expression Grammars - This takes the work on parsing with derivatives and applies it to parsing expression grammars as an alternative to packrat parsing. I can’t tell if this is a good idea or not. I was interested in it for generating values given a parsing expression grammar, but PEGs have certain properties that make that hard.
• Disgust made us human - about the history of civilization and the role of purity based morality in it. I’m not totally convinced by its thesis but it’s an interesting read.
• Singular Value Decomposition Part 1: Perspectives on Linear Algebra - An interesting two part piece for understanding singular value decomposition.
• Shuffleboard At McMurdo - a fun piece about how the US Antarctic base is terrible. Idlewords in relatively non-infuriating mode.
• When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job - some of the sociological aspects of being a climate scientist and how we’re all fucked.
• Handling sub-process hierarchies in Python on Linux, OS X and Windows
• Wikipedia article on Titanium Biocompatibility - honestly I was just randomly wikisurfing until I got a nonfiction point.
• Long Names are Long - a reasonably decent piece on identifier names and preferring shorter ones.
• Quotes From Feminists That Will Make You Rethink Trusting Men’s Rights Activists - it didn’t make me rethink trusting MRAs, but that’s mostly because I already don’t. It provides some interesting context.
• Wikipedia on the Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno algorithm - an optimization algorithm. I was reading about this because of the adversarial examples link below.

Selected Links

• Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples - a neat paper about the fragility of neural network models when given things that are just slightly off the typical distribution.
• E-Prime language - a linguistic style in which one avoids statements of the form “X is Y” in preference for “X does Z”. This was sent to me in response to my pointing out that arguments about the former tend to be very frustrating and largely go away if you focus on the latter.
• How to Grow a Weetabix - an interesting breakdown of the effect of a possible exit from the EU on the British farming industry and landscape, along with a lot of interesting related information about British farming subsidies and their ecological focus.

Books

I’ve been reading Thinking, Fast and Slow this week. It’s come very highly recommended, but to be honest I’m not very convinced by it. Part of the problem is that I distrust a lot of the underlying research.

Elements of Information Theory arrived as a gift from Zack M. Davis. Thanks, Zack!