One benefit of keeping a long term note garden is that you can have conversations with your past self. You wake up a slightly different person every morning. Aggregated over years and decades, you slowly become a very different person. …

Tools for Thought are all the rage these days. Unfortunately, most of these tools assume one corpus per tool, and the interoperability story is very poor. At the same time, it’s pretty clear to me that no single app can serve as my second brain. …

The ancient Sumerians invented writing sometime around 3500 BCE. But how did writing get refined? How did it spread outside of Sumer? In general, tracking diffusion of ancient technology is hard. For tracking the spread of literacy, however, here’s an interesting idea. Innumerate people may fudge their self-reported age to…

As Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. But whose giant shoulders did Newton stand on? And did those giants stand on the shoulders of other giants? And how about Newton’s successors, or people working in other fields? …

The book Radical Markets is centered on one central premise: Competitive, free markets are awesome, but most in reality are either not perfectly competitive, or insufficiently free. Overall, the book covers a lot of ground, proposing solutions to many of modernity’s major questions, from immigration to monopolies to property rights…

I built an audio player to easily compare multiple interpretations of the same piece. Here’s an interactive demo, and a video to give you a sense of how it works: What does it mean to interpret classical music? At first glance, sheet music is prescriptive: the composer has provided all of the notes, the dynamics (forte, piano)…

Last time we converted audio buffers into images. This time we’ll take these images and train a neural network using deeplearn.js. The result is a browser-based demo that lets you speak a command (“yes” or “no”), and see the output of the classifier in real-time, like this:

One of the first problems presented to students of deep learning is to classify handwritten digits in the MNIST dataset. This was recently ported to the web thanks to deeplearn.js. The web version has distinct educational advantages over the relatively dry TensorFlow tutorial. You can immediately get a feeling for…