Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not. – Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach In the first week of 9.13 The Human Brain, I was introduced to the now-ubiquitous concept of Marr’s three-levels approach to understanding the human mind. The top level is computational, expressing what outputs are to be inferred or computed from what inputs, e.g. recognizing the edges of an object; the intermediate level is algorithmic, describing conceptual routines that can be carried out to produce the desired results,...
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A few years ago I read “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” and while that book instantly made Feynman one of my top role models, it also got me thinking about many things, including how dreams work. I’m not a lucid dreamer and I haven’t had much success in my short-lived attempts, so it’s not so much thinking about dreams as just observing what happens as I’m falling asleep and immediately after I wake up and remember a dream. The most interesting observation so far? As I’m on the brink of sleep, my internal narrative begins to ramble. By default, it...
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Hello! I write this post after a long period of inactivity on the blog. This is a post with my thoughts on my first year in college: partly because freshman year had a lot of things to talk about; partly because I couldn’t think of much else. I am currently on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, on my way to the Google Code-In winners’ trip as a mentor for the Terasology Foundation. I figured this would be a great time to write this up: better now than later (which, probably, might have meant never)! So here goes: Orientation...
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It’s been a long time since I’ve done any serious biking (cycling). The last few reasonable times I remember are probably somewhere in 9th through 11th grades. At one point, before the 10th grade fever hitting my school year, I and my dad biked along with a large group along the Western coastline of Maharashtra, on a stretch of about 200 km. The route was scenic and at times unbelievably beautiful. Visiting Konkan on any pretext always turns out to be a pleasant trip anyway, but additionally biking on the narrow village streets and stopping in a bunch of places...
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My uncle and aunt currently have three cows and two calves. Two of the cows are mothers of the two calves, and one calf is of the “Gir” breed, but all the other cattle are “Jersey” cattle. How did a Jersey cow give birth to a Gir calf? My uncle says there was no bull involved; instead a vet from the local agricultural college made the hour-long journey to my uncle’s village to administer an artificial insemination injection. Such are the miracles of modern science. Another of the cows is pregnant with a Gir calf and my aunt hopes it...
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