Dedicated probabilistic modeling environments are also gaining ground and may become standard in the near future.
The holy grail is something like: feed in some data, or parameters and have an algorithm generate the corresponding correct Bayesian inference and posterior distribution. It's very easy for scientists, even with years of knowledge and experience, to implement things incorrectly ;)
Can also recommend The Crown on Netflix, with American actor John Lithgow masterfully interpreting the Old British Bulldog. There's even an entire episode devoted to the affair of Sutherland's portrait commemorating Churchill's 80th birthday, considered one of the art world's great lost masterpieces:
Secret of Winston Churchill's unpopular Sutherland portrait revealed
Training data? After all, AlphaGo trained on a database of over 30M expert human moves. I suspect one championship round from Team EnVy is worth billions of iterations of random exploration ;)
Kudos to both Blizzard and DeepMind. Anticipating a lot of fun with this. StarCraft 2 could indeed become the AI pedagogy standard.
The Responsive Eye (1965). Exploration into "retinal" art. Amazing how it presaged cognitive and vision sciences current obsessions with optical illusions.
Perhaps a teaching-focused site that explicates all the tips and tricks you've gleaned about atomic microscopy. Maybe featuring a WebGL microscope simulator. And extensive Youtube tutorials for beginners.
Or a data bank. Resources that would appeal to researchers rather than students. Modelled after something like the Electron Microscopy Data Bank:
Your goal is simply to convey that when it comes to this particular characterization technique, you're the world's #1 expert. Not so different than the inbound-style, content-rich influencer marketing all of us are seeking to master here ;)
Had he come of political consciousness during the Digital Age, rather than the Cold War, his message would be exactly the same.
Any technological advancements that take us further away from the Mysterious Unity, the Mother of All, will necessarily bind us in webs of illusion and ultimately lead to disunity and strife.
Totally 100% well deserved. Just imagine the 13 year old out there discovering "Masters of War" or "Idiot Wind" for the first time today. Their entire point of view is about to change. Mind upon to hitherto unknowable vistas. Ergo, the absolute benchmark of what Great Literature strives to embody.
Also worth checking out is Dylan's controversial speech upon receiving the the MusiCares Person of the Year 2015 award. I wonder what he'll have to say to the World when he gets to Stockholm ;)
Read Bob Dylan's Complete, Riveting MusiCares Speech
And of course some essential viewing. D.A. Pennebaker's seminal documentary classic Don't Look Back which follows Dylan on his concert tour of the U.K. in 1965.
Inside Criterion's Incredible Restoration of Dylan Doc 'Don't Look Back'
Ermanno Borra, who first speculated that periodic Extra-terrestrial signals could be detected using Fourier transform analysis on all those old piles of astronomical spectra data we have lying around, also states that "technology now available on Earth could be used to send signals having the required energy to be detected at a target located 1000 light years away"! I vote we try running that experiment for a more conclusive answer to age old conundrum: are we truly alone in the universe?
William Gibson stated his famous maxim about the future already being here way back in 1990. Just last week, Lagos, Nigeria celebrated its own "Startup Week". Currently there are over 2000 technology accelerators spanning the globe. But the "future" you and I are living in barely appears in the halcyon dreams of the vast majority of Earth's citizens!
Stanford economist Paul Romer once theorized that breakthrough technologies don't really become productive for a generation. That lag time has shrunk to about a decade.
So instead of obsessing over the "vertical" invention, think about what it means to solve the "horizontal" problem. That in less than ten years time, something you take for granted today could be at the fingertips of 4B+ people ;)
SolveSpace looks exactly like the sort of "user-unfriendly" tools I build for myself and am absolutely personally productive on but would never release to the general public. Maybe I need to re-think this ;)
That said I'm getting back into GUI editors. Anaconda for research computing. And Atom for text and code. Including Markdown.
The advantage is Atom's module system. 5000+ third-party creations. Including really edge cases. That, I believe, is due to the reach of JS/HTML/CSS.
It's a good question. Perhaps the best question anyone can ask of themselves in relation to "why are you doing what you are doing?"
And the way to prove if it is true or not is by "reverse induction." Remove one-by-one all the supposed "fruits" (wealth, glory, honor, respect, celebrity, etc) of your labors. And determine if it is still really important to you. Or to Us.
Well. There's enough quality content in this thread to start a dedicated cable television channel, a la Viceland ;)
Not sure if it's my favorite. And the subject is more technology than "tech". But the talk that keeps haunting me is Michael Dearing's lecture from the Reid Hoffman "Blitzscaling" class at Stanford:
Dearing draws upon an obscure letter by Daniel McCallum, superintendant of the New York and Erie Railroad, written to his bosses in the 1850s. In the report, McCallum bemoans the stress and frustration of operating a railroad system spanning thousands of miles. All of the joy and magic he used to revel in whilst running a fifty mile stretch back in his home town has long since dissipated. Furthermore, the unit cost per mile seems to be exploding rather counter-intuitively!
Dearing goes on to elucidate the absolute necessity of the railroads ("the thing to know about the railroads is: they were startups once") themselves. As guarantors of civilization and progress. Beacons bringing light and reason to the dark swamps of ignorance and inhumanity. And not just in the physical transport of goods, people and ideas across the continent. But as the wealth created from that creative destruction remains the best cure for all of our other inimical maladies: poverty, injustice, disease and stagnation.
So, no pressure. But civilization depends upon you!
Links to References in the Talk:
Estimates of World GDP: From One Million BC to the Present
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBtk6xWDrwY