A Scientific Research Vault
Exactly a year ago, I closed The Emperor’s New Mind by Sir Roger Penrose, slid it onto my bookshelf, and just stood there for a second….The book didn’t just earn a spot on my shelf, it earned a permanent place in my head.
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Lately, we’ve all been marveling at the growing number of rockets blasting into the sky. Companies like SpaceX launch rockets so often that it feels normal, and many of us celebrate when small satellites go into orbit around the Earth.
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Let me start by confessing something, even after reading a lot about the science behind it, I probably couldn’t explain how entropy works in thermodynamics without sneaking a quick peek at Wikipedia. But I am, without apology, obsessed with questions – the weirder, the better.
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You’d expect the same input to get the same answer, right? But in machine learning, that’s not always the case.
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I just finished City of Illusions, and it’s one of those books that quietly works its way under your skin. It’s the third in Le Guin’s Ekumen series, but you can read it on its own too, as a standalone novel. It was first published in 1967.
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What if you could send a pulse of light into a device, and have it appeared ‘faster’ or ‘slower’ dependingon which direction it came from?
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Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark have found a fascinating link between how humans and machines learn, through a mathematical shape called convexity. This concept could be key to understanding how both brains and algorithms organize ideas and make sense of the world. I stumbled upon their paper, “On Convex Decision Regions in Deep Network Representations,” and I was absolutely awestruck. Not just by the insights in the research itself, but by the sheer brilliance behind it. It’s one thing to read a paper that makes you think differently,…
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Researchers at Technical University of Denmark have found an interesting connection between how humans learn and how computers learn. It talks about a special shape in math called convexity. This shape might help us understand how our brains and computer programs figure out ideas and understand things around us.
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Have you ever felt like you’re dreaming with open eyes? If not, read A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. Last year, when I first read Kafka on the Shore, I remember closing the book and staring into nothing for a full minute. It was the kind of book that makes silence hum with meaning. Today, after finishing A Wild Sheep Chase, I felt that same humming.
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In a breakthrough discovery, a new thing in cell biology called a hemifusome has come to light. It showed up when researchers used cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), it’s one of the ways to take super-detailed 3D images of cells while they’re still in a fairly natural state. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, which involves a lot of processing that can mess with delicate structures, cryo-ET keeps things closer to how they actually are in living cells. It was Dr. Seham Ebrahim and her team who used this method to uncover hemifusomes in…
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Isaac Newton figured out how gravity behaves way back in the 1600s. He could describe what it did, how apples fall, how planets move, but he didn’t really know why it worked. Even he wasn’t totally satisfied with it. One of his ideas was that maybe invisible particles were pushing things together from all directions. That didn’t hold up, but the question remained, how does gravity actually happen?
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What would the writings of Murakami be if not fiction? That question caught my attention, kind of like a loose thread dangling from an old, comfy sweater. I kept thinking about it over and over. Because if you really sit with Murakami’s novels, Kafka on The Shore, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Norwegian Wood, A Wild Sheep Chase (currently reading) to name a few, then you’re aware of how important cats, well, metaphysical side doors, rivers, clouds, flash-backs, memories, blurring effect of reality and dreams, music, solitude are these.…
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Scientists have been studying tiny magnetic bits inside solids called spins. These spins are important because they could be the building blocks for future technologies that use quantum physics, like super-secure communication or super-fast computers.
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Imagine you’re standing on a road where cars drive in both directions. Generally, the speed limit is the same whether you’re heading north or south. That’s exactly how light usually works in most systems, the “speed limit” stays the same no matter which way it’s going. This is called reciprocal control, the system treats both directions equally.
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I usually have three to four books on the go at any given time. There’s a rhythm to it, a kind of balance. Typically, it’s one work of literature, one non-fiction, something light for the in-between moments, and always, always a science fiction novella. This time, I picked up Let’s Get Together by Isaac Asimov, first published in 1957. I’m a huge, huge, and huge fan of Asimov’s works.
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