Hello and welcome to my Coronavirus Genome Walkthrough. (Hoping someone comes out with that Vaccine Speedrun soon. This boss battle is really shaping up to be an intense one and we’ll need all the artifacts we can get.) Here, I aim to provide a mechanistic explanation of the SARS-CoV-2 genome’s syntax and semantics. Let’s investigate what the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome actually does as if reading…
If you meet me in person, you might notice that I’m carrying around one of these knitting projects. Both projects bear patterns that are imbued with deeper mathematical stories. Rule 110 Scarf My first knitting project is a scarf that depicts Wolfram’s Rule 110 elementary cellular automaton. Hang on, what’s an elementary cellular automaton? Maybe you’ve heard of Conway’s Game of Life ? Conway’s…
Pilot, the startup I work at, announced our Series B today. This is really exciting for me. I’ve been here for a little over a year and a half now. I joined right before the Series A , and since then we’ve outgrown offices twice and hired to more than 4x what our size was when I joined. This funding round raises our valuation to $355M (!) and also includes a strategic investment from Stripe,…
If you’ve seen my other posts, you probably already know that I am a sucker for good visual notations. Some of my favorites include circuitry for lambda calculus and Feynman diagrams . So when I heard about a graphical notation for linear algebra, I really wanted to learn how it works. I decided to learn enough about Graphical Linear Algebra to be able to use the notation to express and solve one…
Last April, I attended GaryConf WATCON Deconstruct 2017, got to listen to some excellent speakers, and enjoyed the opportunity to give a talk of my own: Programming Languages as Notations . Here are the slides . When I was deciding what to talk about, I had been reading a bunch about the history of notations in math and physics. It’s really fascinating how different people throughout history have…
Lately, I’ve been playing around with inventing a visual writing system for lambda calculus. Lambda calculus (λ-calculus) is a sort of proto-functional-programming, originally invented by Alonzo Church while he was trying to solve the same problem that led Turing to invent Turing machines. It’s another way of reasoning about computation. Python’s lambda is an idea that was borrowed from…
Cross-posted from the Khan Academy engineering blog . If you’re trying to bring the best learning experience to people around the world, it’s important to, well, think about the world. Khan Academy is translated into Spanish and Turkish and Polish and more – and this includes not only text, but also the articles, exercises, and videos. Thanks to the efforts of translators, learners around the…
I enjoyed reading Andrej Karpathy’s The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks lately – it’s got some fascinating examples and some good explanations. I’ve been playing around with the char-rnn code from that post, and I want to share some of my experiments. Chemical formulas and names First experiment: I trained char-rnn on 3,892 real chemical compounds, both organic and…
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