Cortically Magnified

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The music video of Ok Go’s song Writing’s on the Wall is full of optical illusions. My daughter and I tried to figure out how they work.

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How unexpected was the 49.9°C temperature recorded recently? An introduction to extreme statistics

It has become very obvious that extreme weather is a clear and present danger. Globally, 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded, and some scientists are predicting that 2024 will be humanity’s first year beyond the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial average temperature. On a personal level, just last week, my house in Melbourne was without power for more than 8 hours, due to a large-scale…

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Today I visited the National Natural History Museum in Taichung, and I found the exact location where I was introduced to the music of the Beatles! It was a school excursion when I was a boy. In the anthropological hall of the museum, there was a display of the site in Ethiopia where Donald Johanson discovered Australopithecus. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was playing because that’s the music…

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A tribute to Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, an old adventure game. The game has the greatest cover art ever. I haven’t played the game myself, but what could the plot be? Zak McKracken, a tabloid journalist is holding a baguette and a fishbowl, standing on a pile of fallen alien guitarists in cowboy hats. There is a broom with a face, a two-headed squirrel, and a girl holding a…

More detective stories involving perceptual psychology

In a previous blog post, I reviewed Ellery Queen’s classic detective novel The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), which manages to involve color blindness in its puzzles. But I am not done yet! I have a couple more. On one hand, it feels to me that color blindness is gimmicky as a plot device. A mystery writer must be quite desperate for new ideas if she or he has to turn to perceptual psychology…

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A friend shared with me a photo of a sign that says “Brains 25c Drive In”. It’s on the cover of the Bill Frisell album Where in the World? (1991), and many other places. It was a real sign advertising a fried brain sandwich, found in St. Louis, Misouri in the 70’s and 80’s.

A vision scientist's review of The Greek Coffin Mystery by Ellery Queen (1932)

I don’t think mystery novels by Ellery Queen are popular in western countries anymore, but they are still read in Asia. When I was a PhD student, every time I had to travel from my home country Taiwan to the USA, I would buy an Ellery Queen novel at the airport bookstore. This way, I could land in LAX with a solved mystery. Ellery Queen novels are substantial books with very complex plots -…

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Guitar learning diary: As I learn to play the guitar, I realised that I might be able to make musical associations without mental awareness. It’s probably because I am not familiar enough with the language of music to surface musical feelings to a conscious level. For example, yesterday, I tried to play some dominant 9 chords in a book. I was learning the fingering so I wasn’t…

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One of the zanier moments in Penn & Teller Fool Us: While Penn used a magic trick to comment on the New Testament (in which Teller was both the camel and the rich man at the same time), he said that heaven to him was listening to Sun Ra playing Bob Dylan tunes, while eating vegan fudge and watching the Tree Stooges chasing a honey badger on TV.

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I’ve been reading two books about hacking. Interestingly, both books make references to the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The first book is Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley. In an interview of Ron Rosenbaum, whose article Secrets of the Little Blue Box (published in Esquire Magazine in 1971) brought phone…

Mixing code and markups in LilyPond (or, coding for guitarists)

I wrote this post primarily from the perspective of a beginner guitarist trying to solve a practical problem, but the way I approached it naturally landed on functional programming and literate programming. So, you might want to stay around even if you are not interested in playing the guitar. This post is mostly about my experience of learning a very interesting music markup language LilyPond,…

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I had a surreal experience reading Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing by Randall Stross, published in 1993 (I found a copy for free). Stross argued convincingly that NeXT was hopeless. Had I read it in 1993, I would have thought that the analysis was spot on. Who would have thought that in 2023, people would be still using essentially NEXTSTEP? Also, the entire workstation market has been wiped…

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My family has been watching the Penn & Teller: Fool Us TV series. I was reminded of a 2008 paper published in Nature Review Neuroscience about the psychological aspects of magic. Teller was listed as a co-author (among several well-known magicians). There is a very remarkable sentence in the paper: “One of the authors of this Perspective (referring to Apollo Robbins) is a professional…

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Some friends and I ran into a trivia question about an ice cream named after Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. A friend said that it must be a pun, so I suggested “Grapeful Dead”. The answer, of course, was “Cherry Garcia”.

What can we learn from the Simpson's Paradox?

The Simpson’s Paradox is one of the most well-known paradoxes in statistics. A quick google will find plenty of blog posts (many from the data science community) about this puzzling phenomenon. It is clearly a topic of real-world significance. There seem to be some important lessons that we are supposed to learn from it. But what are those lessons? Is it nothing more than a cautionary tale…

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It took me a while to figure out why I like Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues music video. It’s because I like watching the words falling down one by one.

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This is an illustration of the “Brain Sea”. I found it near the end of a comic book by the Taiwanese artist Push. What is the Brain Sea? In Mandarin Chinese, “Brain Sea” (腦海) is a common expression that refers to the mind. This is the end scene of the “Nine Lives Man” saga, where the protagonist (who has been reincarnated into countless life forms in the…

A mind-boggling analogy between machine learning and quantum physics

A recent paper published in PNAS titled “The Fermi-Dirac distribution provides a calibrated probabilistic output for binary classifiers” caught my attention, because it describes a surprising relationship between machine learning and quantum physics. In fact, surprising is an understatement. Mind-boggling is more like it. According to the analogy developed by the authors, positive…

Heh, Emacs LISP function! Lemme give you a piece of advice!

Did you know that in some programming languages, you can give a function a piece of advice? The basic idea is this: if you are using an application or a library written by somebody else, what can you do if you need to modify the behavior of a particular function? You could modify its source code, if your version improves it for everybody. However, if you only want to customize it for your personal…

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During the lockdown, I finally found the time to read the first volume of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. In general, I can’t say I like them as detective stories, because what I am looking for in this genre is brilliant deduction, and Father Brown doesn’t do that kind of thing. However, I was very impressed by a story titled The Sign of the Broken Sword. It’s a…

Beautiful ideas in programming: generators and continuations

In this post, I’ll summarize what I’ve learned from an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of two important concepts in programming: Python’s generators and Scheme’s continuation. The aim is not to teach Python or Scheme programming. Rather, what I want to do is to demonstrate that generators are special cases of a much more powerful construct - continuations.…

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(SPOILERS) We watched a video of Cirque du Soleil’s O. I actually watched the show live in Las Vegas with my wife many years ago, but I had completely forgotten how it begins. Before the curtain opened, a clown invited a man in the audience to participate in a little sketch. The man was reluctant first, but eventually agreed to play along. As he approached the curtain, he was suddenly sucked…

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Thomas Pynchon likes to talk about Godzilla in his novels. In Inherent Vice, there is a funny scene where the main character Doc told his girlfriend Penny that the 1964 Japanese movie Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster was a remake of the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday. Later that night, Doc caught Penny sobbing at the TV, because she watched the Japanese monster movie as a romance. Pynchon is…

Simple exercises with grep, sed and awk in org-mode

For text processing, I had never bothered to learn classic Unix tools such as sed and awk, because I can always use Python's regular expression library. The syntax of sed and awk just appeared to be too arcane to me. However, recently I realize that for many simple ad-hoc tasks, even writing a Python script is too much overhead. This motivated me to learn to use regular expressions directly in the…

Use basic data science skills to debunk a myth about koalas!

Did you know that the koala is the dumbest animal in the world? According to an Internet meme, koalas have really tiny brains because the eucalyptus leaves that they eat are toxic and poor in nutrition. That seems plausible to me, but you shouldn’t believe in Internet memes. Let’s turn to the most authoritative source of knowledge in the world, the Wikipedia, instead. This is what the…

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In the 70’s, it was fashionable for intellectuals to abuse the term “grammar” to refer to any underlying principles. In one of his essays, Italo Calvino used the term “the grammar of tree” to refer to…. essentially developmental plant biology. I thought that was pretentious. But heh, in R programming, people are talking about the grammar of graphics and grammar…

CV & publications

For industry cv, see here. For academic cv, see here. For full list of publications, see Google Scholar For my peer reviews, see Publons Recent presentations 2020: IBM Research Australia Seminar: Title: The traveling salesman in the brain: modeling the formation of topographical maps in the visual cortex using self-organization principles. 2019: New Advances in Biocomplexity Workshop (University…

My Research

1. AI applications in ophthalmology At clinics, monitoring the progression of glaucoma traditionally relies on visual field tests, which is unreliable and time consuming. In collaboration with clinical researchers at NYU, I investigated methods to infer visual field functions directly from scans of the retina, using 3D convolutional neural networks. Publication: Yu et al. (in press) Estimating…

About Me

I am a data scientist and an AI/machine learning researcher in the technology industry. Prior to switching to the industry, I was a neuroscientist with expertise in the visual cortex. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Cognitive Science of University of California San Diego.For my undergraduate degree, I studied Applied Mathematics at the National Chiao Tung University in Hsin-Chu, Taiwan.

Personal Projects

Web apps Parallel Timelines: A webapp for comparing multiple lines of historical events in parallel. Written in NodeJS and React. Data analysis Bayesian regression: An application of Bayesian methods in visual neuroscience. I used Bayesian regression to characterize the scaling relationship between receptive field size and eccentricity. Written in R and the Bayesian package JAGS. The allometry of…

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One music album that I used to play a lot of was called Night of Short Lives. It was published in the 90’s under the artist name Frame Cut Frame. It’s very hard to describe what kind of music it was. The publisher called it “unclassical music”, because the music had the classical texture, but not the classical form. The CD was just one of those random things that I had.

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I found this in a box in the garage that hadn’t been opened in many years. I made it when I was a PhD student at UC San Diego. It’s a set of visual stimuli that I designed for a brain mapping experiment.

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I have been reading Italo Calvino’s If on a winters night a traveller. One chapter is particularly interesting because it draws heavily on the imagery of optics (one of Calvino’s obsessions). It makes a reference to the 19th century British scientist David Brewster for his invention of the kaleidoscope. I hadn’t read about Brewster before so I had to look him up. He was so much more…

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I finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s novel V. about a month ago. I was thinking about writing a review, but what’s the point? Given its classic status, it has been analyzed to death. So just a couple of thoughts. This was Pynchon’s first novel, so we have to ask if it compares well to his later masterpieces. I think a novel worthy of Pynchon’s name must do two things: 1. It must induce a mindfuck.

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My wife and I have a box of CDs that we hadn’t opened in maybe 10 years. We moved them across three continents because we don’t want to get rid of them, but with streaming services, we had very little reason to take them out of the box. We don’t even have a CD player in the house anymore. But there are treasures. We finally decided to take them out during the break.

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I was reading about the Emacs org-roam mode, and came across the Zettelkasten method of notetaking. I hadn’t seen this term before, but the idea of taking notes with cross-referenced index cards sounded familiar. Where did I read about it? Ah yes… in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, the main character Casaubon (an ex-academic who makes a living as a “detective of knowledge”) uses boxes of…

Writing the Emacs configuration script in org-mode: a simple example of literate programming

Program like writers do Programming is traditionally seen as an exercise that translates human thoughts into a format that computers can understand. As a result, the ideas behind the program can become obscured and fragmented in the source code. This is why reading code requires so much mental effort. For me, reading code often feels like solving a puzzle, or reading modernist/postmodernist novels…

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I bought this jam made from the native Australian plant finger lime Citrus australasica. I wasn’t expecting much because with enough sugar, all jams taste alike. But this is very different. At the first taste, it’s like a citrus but then the citrus taste is replaced by something very bitter. It’s weird. I will have no problem finishing this jar.

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Finished William Gibson’s Count Zero. I like William Gibson. There are things that he did extremely well in this novel. But it doesn’t work. The three main threads of narrative are all interesting ideas by themselves, but they don’t add up to a meaningful big picture. In the end, I don’t understand why anything happened. I was planning to read Mona Lisa Overdrive after this one, but maybe not. The…

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Europe was a dead museum from William Gibson’s New Rose Hotel. Clearly an homage to William S. Burroughs.

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So maybe you’ll get the Turing machine after your ass Count Zero by William Gibson.

About this site

I started this site in 2018 to collect all my content in one place. The title “Cortically Magnified” is a play on “cortical magnification” - a concept in visual neuroscience. The site is made with the Hugo static website generator, using a customized theme derived from the Pickles theme. I am working on supporting IndieWeb - an alternative approach to social networking…

How this website was built - a tutorial

I started this website in 2018, because I wanted to collect all my content in one single place. I decided to built it with simple tools, so I could understand how everything works, and fix problems if needed. It’s a hobby like how some people like to build their own kitchens. Lots of tutorials are available on building personal websites, but I still want to write my own, because when I got…

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I like this little episode in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. In Chapter 53, one of the main characters Casaubon, a scholar of European history, unexpectedly ran into Inspector De Angelis in a library. He was surprised that the policeman checked out the same book that he was looking for. Why are you reading such an esoteric book? The policeman answered: “… when…

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In V., Chapter 14, Pynchon made passing references to the Dreyfus Affair - a social controversy that divided France near the end of the 19th century. Just by coincidence, I read something about it earlier this year. The Father Brown story “The Duel of Dr Hirsch” by G.K. Chesterton is a very odd detective story, because it’s really a commentary on the Dreyfus Affairs. The other…

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This is a review of an interesting book:Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, about thought experiments in science.

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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.

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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.

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Finished reading: V. by Thomas Pynchon