47 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2021
    1. The Garden of Forking Paths

      El Jardín de los Senderos que se Bifurcan.

      After reading the short story once more, I can't see how it relates to this context beyond the title. Sure, it's a garden and has paths, but the ideas behind it have nothing to do with how we build knowledge, it is all about how we perceive time and potentially how we interpret the many-worlds theory.

    2. recapitulate instead of iterate.

      Does this mean there is growth? What does recapitulate mean in this context?

    3. Bakhtin

      Who?

    4. Stream presents us with a single, time ordered path with our experience (and only our experience) at the center.

      And even if we are physically next to another person, our experience will be individualized. We don't know what other people see, nor we can be sure we are looking at each other.

    5. In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by. It’s not that you are passive in the Stream. You can be active. But your actions in there — your blog posts, @ mentions, forum comments — exist in a context that is collapsed down to a simple timeline of events that together form a narrative.

      This describes exactly what frustrates me the most about online discussions. Especially on Twitter, it is so hard to build coherence on previous (and future) insight.

    6. lifestream

      What is this?

    7. You’re asked “So basically a book is just words someone said written down?” And you say no, it’s more than that. But how is it more than that?

      I think this is exactly what Hegel meant by Aufhebung, just that technologically speaking there was no concrete way of showing it.

    1. Several instruments, based on the same 3D-printed housing, were utilised for the acquisition of the data presented in this paper.

      Overall, without a focusing mechanism, nor correction for the misalignment between the excitation and detection path, I don't see how this device works if not out of sheer luck.

    2. infill density 20%

      Is this robust enough for a microscope?

    3. faster than the detection frequency of the APD

      Would have been great to have a number here.

    4. commonly run at 1 kHz for longer periods to perform single-molecule brightness analysis

      In the text they use binning of 100us, and autocorrelations down to 10us, I don't get where this 1kHz comes from.

    5. This scanning mirror in a feedback arrangement is used to direct emitted light onto the active area of the detector in the x-y dimensions.

      In my understanding, there is no way of correcting for misalignment between excitation and detection paths. I think the authors do not measure the PSF of this system as to actually be able to conclude anything about the quality (nor the focal volume they are observing).

    6. an achromatic doublet lens is used immediately prior to the objective meaning a single focusing element is used in the excitation and detection pathways

      The idea is to collimate the beam that was made divergent and then use this same lens as tube lens before the filters.

    7. converging lens with a pinhole

      But it removes the pinhole as well, which has a function beyond extending the optical path.

    8. automated alignment algorithm

      A pity that this is provided as a labview file and there's no description of how it works. I couldn't check what the algorithm does

    9. The low-cost device

      What figure is 'low cost'? Few thousands on the objective, another couple on the detector. Without counting licensing for the software (Matlab and LabView). Is it worth the trouble compared to a normal epi-fluorescence microscope? Does this perform better than an Amscope?

    10. operates on a standard bench or desk

      I don't see this device has any dampening mechanism. Can it be used on a desk without showing the vibrations on the signal?

    1. Since it's all contained within a single-author site, our Spammish-Troll-risk factor is at a comfortable zero.

      What if it would be groups of trusted authors instead of a single one? For example, within a company, research community, etc. Perhaps public, but invite-only editing/publishing.

    2. You'd be able to trace information back to its origin the way current web links do. But you'd also be able to see who had referenced, remixed, and expanded off that original. The full Pattern Language of Project Xanadu expands far beyond just bi-directional links to include features like Transclusions, but we won't dive into it all here.

      It must be pointed out that Bush was talking about the work of scientists, and in publications the citing mechanism works bidirectionally now a days. You know who cited a given article and build the tree.

    3. What we're after is a low-friction way for website owners to let other people link to their ideas and creations, offering a rich contextual reading experience for audiences, without letting bad actors monopolise the system.

      It is crucial to have an open standard, and I think the people from indieweb already did a lot of the work. Webmentions are just the communication layer, but. microformats may be a great tool to keep in mind.

    4. The transclusion doesn't automatically change along with it. If transclusions were direct embeds of the original content, we'd end up with link rot on a whole new scale. Every document would be a sad compilation of 404's.

      Thinking about Git repositories, this is how submodules work. you 'freeze' the 'transclusion' to one exact commit and can update if and when needed. Moreover, the contents are stored within the local repository, so they are future-proof.

    1. Genius or Hypothes.is.

      Nice that you have this added by default ;-)

    2. The Webmention spec allows for resending notifications and thus subsequent re-parsing and updating of content. This could be a signal sent to any links to the content that it had been updated and allow any translcuded pages to update if they wished.

      I also considered webmentions for transclusions, but more appropriately it's microformats that would allow proper, bi-directional transcluion of text.

    1. "memex"

      And here a neologism that never got to be used as it deserved.

    2. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass.

      This is not exactly true, and I believe it was not true at the time, of how libraries arrange information, Dewey

    3. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.

      I wonder if these remarks are previous to the standard library arrangement that we use today.

    4. Progress is inhibited by the exceedingly crude way in which mathematicians express their relationships.

      Just ask Steven Wolfram about this

    5. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.

      And yet, this is what most programmers fail to do.

    6. One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects them for examination.

      This is one of the most important aspects of the essay. Noting that he is continuously talking about the work of a scientist, he stresses the act of recording, of looking at reality. This is radically different from what Ahrens claims in his book "How to take Smart Notes", in which there is not a single hint to the fact that you must look through the window and not just into previous works.

    7. much in the manner in which a British labor leader is elevated to knighthood

      I would love to understand what he means.

    8. the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population. There are, however, machines for solving differential equations—and functional and integral equations, for that matter. There are many special machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the tides. There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the scientist and in small numbers.

      This is a very valid argument in the context of the essay. He is not only exploring validity of technical developments, but the commercial viability. Mass production lower costs, but if not many people care about something, it will not be mass produced. However, machines to perform operations few people care about exist. Therefore...

      This is the inverse of the story of the GPU, but very relatable to the space industry.

  2. Jan 2021
    1. “many institutions can’t estimate the number of postdocs they have within an order of magnitude.”

      WHAAAT?

    2. by allowing the job market, and the job market only, to police our understanding of what’s rational, we’re ignoring that doctoral study is a way of accomplishing what the market typically cannot — a long-term, self-directed research project.

      This is the point that should have been developed further. There is a role for PhD/Postdoc positions that develop technologies that the market would not have developed by themself.

      State-incentivized pursue of STEM fields may be rooted in this notion, of generating higher value. The question is who absorbs the risk. Are individuals (the PhD candidate) or governments? And who reaps the benefits (corporations?)

    3. debt

      Opportunity cost or actual debt?

    4. Peter Pan syndrome

      Must check what this is

  3. Oct 2020
    1. The idea of the hermeneutic circle is to envision a whole in terms how the parts interact with each other, and how they interact with the whole. That may sound a little bit out there, so let’s have a look at a concrete example.

      This is a general concept, the rest of the article extrapolates the idea to the act of reading. This may be a stretch, since it implies that whatever can be broken into parts will belong to the hermeneutic circle, while this only applies to interpreting (text)

    2. As objective you may try to be, interpreting a text doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The hermeneutic circle captures the complex interaction between an interpreter and a text.

      This is the only useful idea in the text. Whatever we read has the context in which it was written and the context in whcih it is being read. Is this a hermeneutic circle as described earlier? Don't think so.

    3. While you do so, you can even take notes to keep track of the evolution of your interpretation.

      This is exactly the opposite of what Luhmann was doing (he only read things once)

    1. Work is where you spend the majority of your waking hours

      A week has 168 hours, if you sleep 56 hours a week, and work 40, and commute 10, you still get 62 hours if your wake time for something else. How you spend them is up to you.

    1. Facebook is creating a toxic environment, now pushing the idea of groups towards users faces. What output is the platform expecting?

    1. Two months later, Gray hired a local law firm and sued Facebook in Irish High Court, alleging that his “repeated and unrelenting exposure to extremely disturbing, graphic and violent content” had caused him lasting psychological trauma. Shortly thereafter, about twenty more former Facebook moderators in Dublin contacted the law firm representing Gray to ask about possible lawsuits against the company.

      If this happens in Ireland, how many are going to be unnoticed?

    2. This is the story of how Facebook tried and failed at moderating content. The article cites many sources (employees) that were tasked with flagging posts according to platform policies. Things started to be complicated when high-profile people (such as Trump) started posting hate speech on his profile.

      Moderators have no way of getting honest remarks from Facebook. Moreover, they are badly treated and exploited.

      The article cites examples from different countries, not only the US, including extreme right groups in the UK, Bolsonaro in Brazil, the massacre in Myanmar, and more.

      In the end, the only thing that changes Facebook behavior is bad press.

    3. Charlotte Willner joined three years later, as one of the company’s first employees to moderate content on the site. At the time, she said, the written guidelines were about a page long; around the office, they were often summarized as, “If something makes you feel bad in your gut, take it down.”

      This is not what will happen later on

    1. “The passion economy is the summation of the many different ways people are aligning their incomes with the things they care about – and this is a trend that we’ve seen increase dramatically during the pandemic.”

      This is only possible while value is created somewhere else. 'Passion economy' is a priviledged economy.

    2. While technology has made it easier for people to monetise their time in the gig economy, through apps such as Uber and Deliveroo, this work is often precarious, demands long hours for low pay, and sees the worker under the control of a large company

      This is a problem of regulation and the view of uber as an employer and not as a platform.

    3. The emerging market sees people earn a passive income from pursuing what they are passionate about, putting a premium on individual talent in areas such as life coaching, fitness coaching and podcasting.

      This argument circles back to the idea of "doing what you love"

    4. new research

      No clear what this research is