Links

A dumping ground for links with no particular organization.

Machine learning

• Interpretable Machine Learning - A Guide for Making Black Box Models Explainable
• Mathematics for Machine Learning
• An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks
• How to trick a neural network into thinking a panda is a vulture
• Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Execution - Presentation at NeurIPS 2018 on reinforcement learning in game contents by "dreaming" game worlds
• Adversarial Reprogramming of Neural Networks
• Knowledge Graph Alignment Network with Gated Multi-hop Neighborhood Aggregation

Academic(ish)

• Compensatory conspicuous communication: Low status increases jargon use
• The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
• Academic family tree
• What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists
• "So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!"
• "You and Your Research" - Richard Hamming
• NVidia conference talk about using 18,000 GPUs for astrophysical plasma
• Dudley Herschbach's Nobel Autobiography
• "Faraday's notebook"
• "24/192 Music Downloads...and why they make no sense" - see also the Digital Show-and-Tell video
• Lord Rayleigh's biography of J.J. Thomson
• Richard Fitzpatrick's book on Celestial Mechanics
• Science magazine article on g-2 result (including a photo of an old labmate!)
• Torus Earth
• Breakfast cereal contains (non-bioavailable) elemental iron
• The Supercollider That Never Was - A short history of the SSC
• Three short stories on Fermilab colors - in which the color of magnets is quite important.
• Fullerene diffraction - diffraction of buckyballs!
• "Thermal and Statistical Mechanics I." - Artem Abanov's Creative Commons notes on the subject
• "Science of Opportunity" - Don Pettit's colloquium-level talk about his personal experiments aboard the International Space Station
• Résonaances - particle physics blog
• iPhones are allergic to helium
• Veritasium - "How Special Relativity Makes Magnets Work"
• Interstellar DNGR black hole renderer details
• Upcycled instrument tied to auspicious accelerator - on the conversion of a lock-in amplifier used in Ernest Lawrence's 184" cyclotron into a musical instrument
• How do bicycles balance themselves? New research picks up momentum
• Random Walks - a summary of random walks, particularly the difference between 2D and 3D random walks, re: Shizuo Kakutani's excellent quote: _"A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever."_
• How to Become a Pure Mathematician (or Statistician) - a stunning list of references sorted by topic.
• How to become a GOOD Theoretical Physicist - gross name, nice reading list
• Electronic references - "a loosely-categorized collection of links to CS textbooks in a variety of areas that are freely available online"
• Han Solo and Bayesian Priors
• Same Stats, Different Graphs - simulated annealing of wildly different datasets with the same five-number summary, starting from Alberto Cairo's "Datasaurus"
• Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers - exactly what it sounds like: an encylopaedic database of more than 30,000 ways to define the center of a triangle.
• Why Momentum Really Works - great post about momentum methods in optimization
• Introduction to Differential Geometry - a free differential geometry text that I haven't read at all

Papers

• Why aren’t regular expressions a lingua franca? an empirical study on the re-use and portability of regular expressions
• CaloGAN: Simulating 3D High Energy Particle Showers in Multi-Layer Electromagnetic Calorimeters with Generative Adversarial Networks
• Accelerating access to an elusive medical isotope - treatment of extremely advanced systemic cancer with Ac-225 bound to PSMA-617 (prostate membrane specific antigen
• Foucault pendulum on a chip: Rate integrating silicon MEMS gyroscope - a nice paper explaining how MEMS gyroscopes work
• Eyesight and the solar Wien peak
• Some Historic Papers - Many historically important papers, including Einstein's annus mirabilis papers
• "An Examination of "The Martian" Trajectory" - On performing the Rich Purnell maneuver featured in The Martian
• The network of global corporate control
• A typology of street patterns - Publication showing distinct topological categories of human cities
• Moderate sleep deprivation produces impairments in cognitive and motor performance equivalent to legally prescribed levels of alcohol intoxication - on an equivalence between lost sleep and BAC
• Evaluation of Artery Visualizations for Heart Disease Diagnosis - in which "jet" being a terrible colormap could cause very real harm

Misc.

• THE EDSAC SIMULATOR (archived)
• Puzzling Out the Perytons - Discussion of the intersection between radio astronomy and microwave burritos
• How to be a Star Engineer - tl;dr the lone wolf is a myth
• "A Problem in Dynamics" by James Clerk Maxwell
• Galileo being sassy
• Julia Evans's guide to core dumps - With some good good summary of the core_pattern kernel feature
• How To Ask Questions The Smart Way - Gross name, great advice
• Doom as an Interface for Process Management
• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design - What it says on the tin, a rant on interfaces. I usually remember this essay for its "smashing fingers on glass" perspective
• Making Wrong Code Look Wrong - Joel on code smells
• Git for computer scientists - "Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph ."
• How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good
• Learn CMake's Scripting Language in 15 minutes
• The 500 mile email
• Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know
• RFC 2616: HTTP 1.1 - See in particular Section 10 which describes status codes.
• In Depth: Principal Component Analysis - By the always-excellent Jake VanderPlas
• The science on C/C++'s security - A summary of the empirical evidence for the challenge of writing secure code in C/C++
• A Gallery of Processor Cache Effects
• A deep dive on end-to-end encryption - EFF writeup of E2EE
• gravislizard's UI rant
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel Spolsky saying Joel Spolsky things about Unicode
• Falsehoods programmers believe about time
• Falsehoods programmers believe about names
• Encoding Problems in Boolean Satisfiability - See also: CppCon 2019: Solve Hard Problems Quickly Using SAT Solvers
• Rich Programmer Food - "Gentle, yet insistent executive summary: If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work. If you're not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don't know how they work."
• They Write the Right Stuff - overview of space shuttle software and real-time constraints
• The missile memory overflow story

 From: k...@rational.com (Kent Mitchell)
 Subject: Re: Does memory leak?
 Date: 1995/03/31
 Message-ID: <3lhdjd$l6h@rational.rational.com>#1/1
 X-Deja-AN: 100649473
 distribution: world
 references: <3kopao$ekg@nef.ens.fr> <EACHUS.95Mar22193719@spectre.mitre.org> <3kvccb$18ru@watnews1.watson.ibm.com>
 organization: Rational Software Corporation
 newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
 
 Norman H. Cohen (nco...@watson.ibm.com) wrote:
 : The only programs I know of with deliberate memory leaks are those whose
 : executions are short enough, and whose target machines have enough
 : virtual memory space, that running out of memory is not a concern.
 : (This class of programs includes many student programming exercises and
 : some simple applets and utilities; it includes few if any embedded or
 : safety-critical programs.)
 
 This sparked and interesting memory for me.  I was once working with a
 customer who was producing on-board software for a missile.  In my analysis
 of the code, I pointed out that they had a number of problems with storage
 leaks.  Imagine my surprise when the customers chief software engineer said
 "Of course it leaks".  He went on to point out that they had calculated the
 amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time
 for the missile and then doubled that number.  They added this much
 additional memory to the hardware to "support" the leaks.  Since the missile
 will explode when it hits it's target or at the end of it's flight, the
 ultimate in garbage collection is performed without programmer intervention.
 
 --
 Kent Mitchell                   | One possible reason that things aren't
 Technical Consultant            | going according to plan is .....
 Rational Software Corporation   | that there never *was* a plan!

• Masterjun's Super Mario World "Total Control" TAS - arbitrary code execution on the SNES
• How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 - Ages like fine wine
• Matplotlib FAQ: What is a backend?
• Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple and Fast - Nice explanation of regex as finite automata
• The manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra
• nedbat's kindling list - A list of projects (and other lists of projects)
• How to Write a Git Commit Message
• Introduction to A* - Red Blob's guide to pathfinding with A*
• TinyKeep's dungeon generator algorithm
• What's a Linked List, Anyway? - One of the more notable entries in Vaidehi Joshi's BaseCS series
• Trying to Understand Tries
• "The controller pattern is awful (and other OO heresy)" - article by @eevee on what makes a good object ("Object-oriented programming is about objects: bundles of state and behavior.")
• - A small zine by Julia Evans on invaluable meta-skills in computing (and elsewhere "So you want to be a wizard"
• Dave Baggett explains how Crash Bandicoot's packing system worked, and how the game ended up with only 4 bytes to spare on the CD. See also the Ars Technica interview interview with Andy Gavin (scrub to 1:07:00, chapter 10 for data chunking content)
• Playing battleships over BGP
• Main is usually a function. So when is it not?
• The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer - the story of the greatest card game program ever written
• "Resumes suck. Here's the data"
• Contempt Culture - an excellent summary of a cultural

practice of defining tech through derision and scorn. "We excluded people. Directly. All of us. Even if we didn’t intend to, it does not matter. We make fun of the things others care about, make them feel small, make them feel like their achievements didn’t matter. Make them feel like they’re not welcome."

• Don't use Hadoop - your data isn't that big
• Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster
• Floating point numbers are a leaky abstraction
• Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
• Tales from the Lunar Module Guidance Computer - how Apollo 11 almost didn't land on the Moon
• Andrew Appel's "Studies of Voting Technology" page - in particular, his excellent talk on voting
• Congressional polarization, 1949 - 2011 - A brief article summarizing The Rise of Partisanship and Super-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives
• *Außerordentlichehochgeschwindigkeitselektronenentwickelndesschwerarbeitsbeigollitron*, the alternative name for the betatron that almost was
• matplotlib colormaps - on perceptually-uniform colormaps, why jet is objectively bad, and more
• DIA Conspiracies Take Off - On the crazy things people believe about Denver International Airport
• Evaluating Apologies
• Excerpt from "Because Internet" focused on emoji
• The Noel Smith-Wenkle Salary Negotiation Method - tl;dr get the employer to offer first
• A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage
• "Adrift" - Eric Berger's excellent series in the Chronicle about the Space Launch System (SLS) and other elements of the US space program.
• Investigation: I Think I Know Which Justice Flushed - a detailed analysis of who flushed a toilet during a oral arguments before the Supreme Court in 2020. (spoiler alert: it was almost certainly Justice Stephen Breyer)
• "El martirio de San Esteban"
• A near-disaster at a federal nuclear weapons laboratory takes a hidden toll on America’s arsenal - LANL doing their thing and almost having a criticality incident for a photo opportunity
• On Unread Books - In which Umberto Eco constructs elaborate excuses not to read James Joyce
• 1972 Interview with C. Milton Wright
• The Zelda Dungeon Generator: Adopting Generative Grammars to... - Becky Lavender's BSc thesis on using generative grammars to make dungeons for a Zelda game. See also her excellent PROCJAM talk
• Pixar president Ed Catmull on WYPR - In which Ed Catmull tells us that Pixar doesn't hire people who haven't worked on failed projects before, because failing is a necessary skill
• Scientist: The story of a word - a thorough history of the history of the word "scientist," coined in 1834 in a review of the work of Mary Somerville
• Doom (2016) Graphics Study
• GDC talk: Meaningful Choice in Level Design - the talk I always think about with respect to the psychology of game design, nice examples using Doom
• Falstad's 555 square wave generator applet
• article about ratradio.nyc and rat ultrasonic vocalizations
• Hackers (An Oral History)
• The boilermaker story
• Ur-Fascism - Umberto Eco's essay on fascism, including his list of intrinsic traits
• How to do hard things
• NIST SRM 2387 - NIST's standard reference peanut butter
• "How capicola became gabagool: the Italian new jersey accent, explained
• "Lying to the ghost in the machine" - Charlie Stross offers his thoughts on the multimodal neurons paper and shows off the impressively stupid typographic (yes, really) attacks on a resulting classifier