I’ve been re-watching AMC’s epic series Halt and Catch Fire. As a historical drama covering computer and internet developments and an seizing opportunity with ambition in the 70s to the 90s, it was nostalgic and motivating to watch when it came out in 2014. It never really got that popular. It was sort of scoped […]
Conditional probability, P(X|Y), gives the probability of x given y, as opposed to the unconditional probability P(X). Conditional entropy, H(X|Y), measures the uncertainty in x as opposed to unconditional entropy H(X). It follows from information theory that H(X|Y) <= H(X), or in other words ‘entropy only goes down (or stays the same) when conditioning on […]
The choice of a window in a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is an art due to tradeoffs that it implies. When the time domain signal with a single frequency (e.g. a sine-tone) is transformed into the frequency domain, it creates a lot of other ‘phantom’ frequencies called sidelobes. The no-window choice of the rectangular window […]
‘Uncertainty’ as a word is very useful in talking about probability theory to the general public. Because we associate fear and doubt and other emotions with uncertainty in the casual usage, the word immediately gets across the point that at least some of the variance is due to the observer’s mental state, which translates well […]
Like everyone else, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT for many different tasks. Here is a short story that I used ChatGPT to create. It seems able to do the basic request, which was to use mysticism to tie longevity biotech progress and mycology together with a metaphor in a vaguely sci-fi style. I decided the […]