Quote of the Day

"Indeed, there are a lot of reasons to think that inequality will continue to worsen. The current concentration of wealth in the United States has already become self-reinforcing: as the economist Simon Johnson has argued, the financial sector has used its lobbying clout to avoid more onerous forms of regulation. Schools for the well-off are better than ever; those for everyone else continue to deteriorate. Elites in all societies use their superior access to the political system to protect their interests, absent a countervailing democratic mobilization to rectify the situation. American elites are no exception to the rule.
That mobilization will not happen, however, as long as the middle classes of the developed world remain enthralled by the narrative of the past generation: that their interests will be best served by ever-freer markets and smaller states. The alternative narrative is out there, waiting to be born."

- Francis Fukuyama

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Rabbi David Wolpe on Hitchens

He won my then 12-year-old daughter’s heart when they first met by bending down, putting out his hand and saying “Hitchens here.” Granted, during that debate he mentioned that his only prayer had been for an erection, but I like to think she retained only the first impression.

Needless to say, there are many ways in which I think Hitchens was wrong, sometimes reckless in scattershot attacks, too flip or glib or ready to buy the certainties of today’s science.  But what a loss.  What a rare constellation of gifts and courage and learning he brought to this world. Once in Boston, half an hour late, cigarette in one hand and red wine in the other, he crossed the lobby of the hotel, spotted me and said “Hello, darling.”  There was a slight smile on his lips and a rhetorical killer look in his eye.  I knew it would be a long evening.

- More Here

Deja vu - Chinese Real Estate Bubble Pops

"Only thing we learn from history is that we never learn anything from history" - Friedrich Hegel; yet an other proof here:

Real estate woes are already sending shockwaves through China's broader economy. Chinese steel production -- driven in large part by construction -- is down 15 percent from June, and nearly one-third of Chinese steelmakers are now losing money. Chinese radio reports that half of all real estate agents in the southern city of Shenzhen have closed up shop. According to Centaline, more than 100 local government land auctions failed last month, and land sale revenues in Beijing are down 15 percent this year. Without them, local governments have no way to repay the heavy loans they have taken out to fund ambitious infrastructure projects, or the additional loans they will need to keep driving GDP growth next year.

Blogging the Stanford Machine Learning Class - Chris Wilson

Littler over 24 hours after the end of class, I am already feeling naked with so much time on hand. Chris Wilson induced a premature virtual nostalgia with his hilarious blog on ML class - here.

At Week 2 in Stanford’s machine learning course, the childishly simple homework assignments are growing more complex. Last week I wrote, “The great joy of learning new concepts in math and science is that they transport you into a simplified world, in which only a few things govern our lives and all problems can be solved—basically, a Richard Scarry book for the matriculating crowd.” In that case, we were making models of housing data based only on home size. Now we’ve got to worry about the number of floors and bathrooms, too. We’ve graduated from Richard Scarry to a more complex world that is beginning to get hairy.

So far, we’re still more occupied with student learning than machine instructing, though the path ahead is getting clearer. We’ve started learning a little programming in a language called Octave, which appears to be a graphing calculator on steroids, but it’s mostly to manipulate matrices, where we store data on all the values for the mathy part of this class. I understand that professor Ng has to introduce us into the really groundbreaking stuff gradually, once we have a strong command of the traditional ways that statistical modeling works, but right now I confess I feel more like I’m qualifying to be an actuary than a machine overlord.

My failure to complete the major, which I still regret, tuned me in to this peculiar divergence: You’re meant to be either a scientist or a fan of science, and you discover which one you are when the math gets rough.

The math is getting rough in this class. Matrix multiplication still twists my mind around, but it’s manageable with enough trial and error in the programming assignments. The larger lesson of the past week in Stanford’s machine learning course is that networks themselves possess a supreme intelligence, and developing one to treat your information well is not so different from allowing a computer to code itself. This is true of even very simple social networks in which no math need be applied.


The best analogy I have read in a long long time!! 

This brings us to the “lazy hiker principle.” The real name for this technique is the “gradient descent algorithm,” but like I mentioned last week, the machine-learning professors could use a little help in marketing their material.

What Made Christopher Hitchens Great

"I hope that we will remember Hitchens as we remember great artists. Like Stravinsky, who induced a riot with his paradigm shifting Rite of Spring, Dylan, who was called “Judas” for going electric, Picasso, who portrayed women the way he did, or Warhol, who treated art like Ford built the Model-T, Hitchen’s opinions and rhetoric replaced the expected with the unexpected while maintaining a coherent structure and clear vision; he didn’t change the medium of journalism just like Stravinsky, Dylan, Picasso or Warhol didn’t change music or visual art per se, but he did offer ways of understanding the world that nobody else had done previously. Like the groundbreaking artists of the past, his initial rejections and ongoing diatribe with mainstream thought eventually gave rise to new definitions of what is good or normal and what ought to be valued.

This is what made Hitchens great: like the Parisians who were so taken back by the dissonance of Stravinsky’s ballet, Hitchens’ critics so desperately wanted his inharmonious rhetoric and writings to resolve but knew, at the same time, that the tension he created and the chords he struck were why he will be remembered as one of the best."

- More Here

Quote of the Day

"Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god.
Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realise that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods."

- Christopher Hitchens

Best Eulogy For Hitchens...

"In the annals of history, only Orwell, Voltaire and maybe a half-dozen other guys could match’s Hitch ideological bravery and breadth of political knowledge."

- Neal Pollack

The Sidney Awards 2011 - David Brooks (Part I)

Again this year I was able to read (& predict) only half the number of the essay's in the list; savouring the rest now. Complete list here:

Alan Lightman writes in “The Accidental Universe” in Harper’s that the existence of life is so incredibly improbable that there can be only two realistic explanations: Either there is a God who designed all this, or there exist many, many different universes, a vast majority of which are lifeless. Many physicists are gravitating to the latter theory. Our universe is just one of many. The universal laws of physics aren’t really universal. They are just the arbitrary arrangements that happen to prevail in our own little universe.

Quote of the Day

"Sorry if this topic is too personal, Andrew. I do not want to be intrusive. I have lost friends and cannot quite put in words or even hold consistent thoughts about it. I just wanted to send you a huge teary hug. I started to read Arguably yesterday. I had already read many of the essays there, but I had to keep reading him. Today I woke up to this news, went directly to the Dish to read it only in your words, and cried for the best bastard damn writer who made me nod in agreement as much as shake my head in exasperation. This one goes to him, to you, to your friendship, and to all the writings, passions, ideals, debates, disagreements, infuriating facts, pet peeves, anger, love, wonder and humanity that each of you shared with all of us."

- A Reader's email to Andrew on Hitchens 

What I Learnt From Hitchens?

Thank you for giving me that eternal confidence to talk and stand up against bull shit.