A colleague recommended a book called “Computer Age Statistical Inference” by Efron & Hastie. I love the organization. Part I - classical stuff. Part II - Early computer-age methods. Part III - 21st century topics. That’s exactly the type of textbooks that we need.
Idea: a Python dialect called Pynchon (after Thomas Pynchon). A pynchonic code is probably not very pythonic. Brevity is highly discouraged. Variable names should be all puns. In fact, Pynchon should be a concatenative language like Forth. This way, statements can be chained together into a longer and longer statement… until the entire program is one single statement.
Finished reading: V. by Thomas Pynchon
As a PhD student, I took a class in animal behaviour. I didn’t work very hard and have forgotten most of it. However, since I became a father, I have been thinking more about this class. One of the papers I read was the classic “The social function of the intellect” by Nicholas Humphrey, first published in 1976. The paper is packed with insightful analogies. For example, Humphrey offered an interesting interpretation of Robinson Crusoe. According to him, Crusoe’s life on the island was a relatively simple and easy one, which he managed without too much trouble. His life only became challenging after the arrival of Friday. What he meant was that it’s the complexity of society, rather than the challenges of survival that drive the evolution of intelligence. I can see this in my daughter. Her life before 4yo was quite easy and carefree. When she started to have friends and social relationships in the childcare, that’s when things became complicated. 📚
This is a good article about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
I walked past Melbourne University’s Grainger Museum, which is dedicated to the Australian composer Percy Grainger. Kudos to the Wiggles for adapting one of his compositions into a children’s song.
An obscure historical note from Thomas Pyhcon’s novel V.: there is a Chopin museum in the Spanish island of Mallorca, where you can see a cast of Frédéric Chopin’s hand. Chopin spent a winter there in 1838.
I know that overgeneralisation is a controversial topic in the study of language acquisition, but here is an example: Zoe (4yo) used to say “even better”, but recently she started to say “even gooder”.
An interesting topic I studied in an animal behaviour class was about the concept of culture in animal societies. I started to think about the transmission of culture recently because I noticed that my 4yo daughter Zoe’s childcare playgroup has developed their own culture. When Zoe started to use a new word, I used to assumed that she learned it from the childcare educators. But recently I noticed that the children are teaching each other. For example, Zoe referred to her gym teacher as “torch Aaron” or “toch Aaron” instead of “coach Aaron”. I thought it was her own coinage until I heard other children talking about “toch Aaron”.
Another example is using the word “phew” as a verb. She said “I was playing with Esther and then Samantha came to phew us.” What’s phew? She said it was going “phew phew phew!” Clearly it’s the children’s own word.
Watching these children using their own words was like scientists observing monkeys learn to wash potatoes from each other.