Claire North - "84K"

Good stream of condolences. Makes it harder to read at times. Lot of London +England references (places) which makes it quite enjoyable. "Children of men" done in a quiet version of trainspotters prologue / Death Flag Blues.

Around one third, a bit of a struggle to keep going. I got a bit tired of Theo's passive stance. Maybe that was intentional, as later things kept moving and his actions never felt out of character.

Quite a dystopian story how money is everything, every crime can be bought, measured in money.

Theo, meassuring the killing of his former friend. Trying to find his daughter.

    howled!
    And in the darkness the others answered and shrieked their darknesses to the sky, the sound echoing off the water, the cry of the hunter, the predator that drinks the hot fresh juices from a still-beating heart.
    hoooowwwwwwwwllllll!!!

    Around the business school, the security men shut their students in and told them to wait until the buses came, secured with metal plates against reflective glass, a driver who kept a stun gun lodged between handbrake and gear stick.
    hoooooowwwwlll!!

    Neila did not sleep, and neither did Theo.

    At 1 a.m. they met each other, both going to the kitchen sink for a little more water.

    Theo said, "There's a queen of the patties. They say she was one of the first, the oldest - the first woman they ever condemned to make burgers on the patty line. Half the meat they use is wasted anyway, but it doesn't matter. The government subsidises the companies that run the prison, to make sure they make a profit so they can carry on being efficient rehabilitators, says it's better that way, cheaper in the long run, so the companies don't worry if they waste stuff. There's mountains of minced meat at the back of the yard, the flies are so thick it looks like a living thing. My dad died on the patty line, but the contracts say that the government can't sue for negligence and why would they? Only a patty. Only another patty."

    The discretion clause worked its magic. When you weren't allowed to talk about a thing, sometimes it was just easier to ignore it, pretend it had never happened. Theo Miller vanished and people wondered where he was, and those who knew . . .

    . . . did not answer.

    They boy went back to halls, began to pack, not sure where he was going, not sure what he was meant to do now.

The next morning there she was, with Andy. She was going to dump him. She knew she would. It was just . . . really hard. Because once he was dumped, what was she supposed to do?

    What was she supposed to do?

    Their eyes met, and he walked on by and did not look back.

    Went to the train station.

    Threw his phone out of the window.

    Took three trains and a bus.

    Back to Oxford. Back to the safe place that had always been a lie, he never should have been there, he was never going to make it. Some mad fantasy of his patty-line dad, some hilarious criminal's joke.

    Made a big deal of consuming it, every last bite, licking his lips, wiping his face with a napkin, spreading the detritus, putting the napkin down, picking up a single, skinny dry chip from the basket by him, taking a bite, half a chip gone, chewing with his mouth open, then the other half, licking his fingers, picking up another, watching Theo. His skin was the colour of monsoon earth, his hair was going badger grey at the temples and crown. His nails were buffed down to tiny, soft stubs. Two tendons stood out below his jaw and down his neck, like the lines of a suspension bridge.

    He ate chips.

    Theo waied.

    Another chip and

    another chip and

    Theo waited.

    Faris took another tchip, and didn't eat it ,but held it sticky in one hand and at last met Theo's eyes.

Knave of coins, the Devil (inverted), the Priest, sven of wands, three of coins, the Fool, three of cups, king of coins, the Hanged Man (inverted).

    Neila said, "I don't like the word 'mister'. It's weighted down with this idea, this baggage like you say 'Mr Smith', and there's this idea isn't there in your immediately of what Mr Smith must be because the word, the gender identifier, it imposes so many cultural ideas about strong and right and reliable and . . ."

    Theo made paste with spniach and mushroom sauce.

    ". . . once stopped at customs - this was when I could afford holidays - and they said 'We are going to search you' and I asked why. They didn't give me a reason, but they took me to the men's room. The men's. I was so . . . I said I'm not . . . And I begged them I was crying I was just - but what the system says matters more and I . . ."

    They ate in silence, counting down the hours until the morning. Low brick houses, white window frames, roads without trees, pawnbrokers, betting shops, a bit in the centre of town for the parents to take their kids shopping for £1 water pistols and a pot of paints that the baby would eat in the car back home. A theatre, abandoned, squatters sleeping in the place where the fly bars once had been, cardboard mattresses laid across metal beams and in the musty, mousy warmth of the orchestra pit.

    "I don't ask anything," Neila mused as they sat together by candlelight. "Loneliness is a state of mind. You have to want something, to be lonely. You have to need some sort of reassurance, someone to tell you that this is who you are. I'm not lonely. I don't want anything. I don't need anything or anyone to tell me that . . . you know that, don't you? You know that's how I . . ."

He walked into town, past the seafront apartments where the old folks had sat in long bay windows to watch the yacht club and the passing trawlers, along the shopping street of boarded windows and street lamps with no bulbs in them. Baskets still hung from some of the lamps, the soil long since washed away, the exposed roots rotted to wisps. One the wall of the local Indian takeaway someone had graffitied, WILL YOU MARRY ME? but if an answer had been given, it hadn't endured.

    "Do you regret?" she asked. "Do you look back, do you look at - when you think about the time you've had and the things - do you regret? Is that what you feel?"

    Theo thought about it.

    "I think I would," he said at last. "If there wasn't something more important to do."

Later, Neila stood alone at the back of the Hector, hand freezing on the rudder.
    The fucking cormorant didn't even bother to fly away when she flapped at it now, just sat there on the roof of her fucking boat, minding its own business in the most insufferable way.

And in the days before

    Helen sat with Theo on top of a hill as the sun set over the vales. In the town below someone was screaming, screaming, until they were silenced. Queen Bea didn't hold with that sort of thing, not in her neck of the woods, but on the other side of the valley there were the tearers the ragers the faders the zeroes the

    Helen said, "Is it enough? Theo? Is it enough? Have I saved my son?"

    And Theo didn't answer, and things dind't seem to change that much after all.

    The next day they too went to the races.

    "Blessed are her hands," whispered Bea as they trudged down the hill, coat and skirts hitched high, nose blue, ips white. "Blessed are those who break the silence."

    "Half the people we ask don't even know if the queen is real, they can't imagine it, anything changing. But the idea makes them feel better. That maybe they can do this really small thing like this up yours to the world and maybe it'll make a difference., maybe they count. That's all the queen really is. She makes people think stuff they do matters. If you take that away, we're all just fucked really. Just totally fucked."

    Well.

    Maybe it would be easier to have a puppy. Or a cat. Lovely self-cleaning things, cats are.

    I wanted to talk to you, Mr Miller.

    I thought that perhaps

    in its way

    I owed it to you. Or maybe no, not to you you aren't

    but to Lucy

    I owe it to Lucy, to this child who is

    she's only a child she's

    I owe her, monstrous though she is. To tell you, to tell her father - she's going to be all right. I'm going to, and I don't care what Simon says I'm going to 

    she's going to be all right. I'll make sure of it I'll make sure she's . . ."

Yelena Moskoving - "Virtuoso"

Weird. I read this basically two times. And the second time, I didn't remember that much. I recognised the story when going through it, but that's it.

It's enjoyable, not an easy read per sé, but some fierce language. Less a story with plot than a fierce description of "what to love" fully means, in all its ugliiness.

The wife's tears split like hairs. "Clear," the man pronounces again, the woman in uniform is squeezing the wife's forearms. The wife shuts herslef up with her own gasp and peers. The current races through the flesh to the heart and pulls the body up, chest bowing, ribs splintering beneath her skin, and for a moment, the wife thinks she's getting up this time. But the body cinches in and collapses, thump, back down into the millions of rose-colored bristles. Her shoulder blades hit the floor and spread, and the head winces then stops. The mouth inert. From her slack, parted lips, a viscous blue foam is seeping out.

Mr Bolshakov started rubbing himself off, emitting ointments of moans, all the while the springs pushing in and out o my gut till I thought I'd wet myself or shit myself or split my spleen. But he finished off and stood up and finally left the room.
    I slid out of that space, then felt it coming, so I pulled the bed cover down and vomited onto the sheet, then closed the comforter over that spot, ha ha.
    Then I went back to those army boots and reached into my pocket and got out the matches.

* 

Before the police or the school got whiff of it, I ran back to our building and pulled Janka into the bathroom with me and locked the door. She knew I'd done something irreversible. I said hush for a minute. We were squeezed in against the toilet and we waited in silence to hear if there were any footsteps in the hallway. There weren't any, so I unzipped my jeans and plunged my hand in and fished about in my cunt and pulled it out for show. Ta-da, I showed Jana the tight wad of money wrapped in plastic.
    Janka said, "He's going to kill you!" I said, "No one can kill me, I'm already an angel!" Then I kissed her. Janka said, "Where are we gonna hide this?" I said, "Where else?" and stuffed that money-roll back into my cunt.

I'll see you later though? Jana said. Later? Aimée responded, with a disbelief that felt too expansive for one evening. Yes later. Can I? The words were turning their heeavy bodies, right, left. Later, at my place? Aimée asked, her voice somewhat dulled from the question. Would that be okay, Jana replied, feeling her thumb bend into her palm, her forearm tense, her weight shift. Because I need to go and see this friend, she was explaining again.
    There was a certain relief in the act of going over each other's words, in the doorway, with no utility, there was nothing more to understand, the information was exchanged and the Uber was waiting downstairs, and they were repeating each other's words as if they could each grasp something of each other that they could individually keep, because just then, there was an urge to keep something of the other, because disbelief is expansive especially when the day is turning over its edge, and one can feel their whole lifetime in the words they must throw away at the threshold of a door.

The Dark and the Wicked

OK horror, the slow burning kind. Few good bits, where the brother Michael leaves his sister to be with his family and away from the madness, then kills himself because he has a vision of his wife and kids being dead.

But the lack of explanation was a bit of a hindrance here. Felt a bit too random.

Swarm testing

 https://users.cs.utah.edu/~regehr/papers/swarm12.pdf

Intriguing idea where creating subsets of features to test, and intentionally leaving certain features out, produces much better results. 

Good Will Hunting

Don't think I ever saw it.

Solid stuff.  Good for a night in a hotel next to an airport.

Coherence

Enjoyable enough.

Bit silly how a comet would cause quantum mechanics, but you have to accept that.

Appreciate that they don't really "solve" the final bit.

Brian Chistian - "Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions"

If you want the best odds of getting the best apartment, spend 37% of your apartment hunt (eleven days, if you've given yourself a month for the search) non-committally exploring optinos. Leave the checkbook at home; you're just calibrating. But after that point, be prepared to immediately commit – deposit and all – to the very first place you see that beats whatever you've already seen. This is not merely an intuitive satisfying compromise between looking and leaping. It is the provably optimal solution.

Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī, author of ninth-century book of techniques for doing mathematics by hand. (His book was called al-Jabr wa'l-Muqābala – and the "al-jabr" of the title in turn provides the source of our word "algebra.") The earliest known mathematical algorithms, however, predate even al-Khwārizmī's work: a four-thousand-year old Sumerian clay tablet found near Baghdad describes a scheme for long division.

"Someone at Michigan" was almost certainly someone named Merrill Flood. Though he is largely unheard of outside mathematics, Flood's influence on computer science is almost impossible to avoid. He's credited with popularizing the traveling salesman problem, devising the prisoner's dilemma, and even with possibly coining the term "software".

We think of chess, for instance, as medieval European in its imagery, but in fact its origins are in eight-century India; it was heavy-handedly "Europeanized" in the fifteenth century, as its shahs became kings, its viziers turned to queens, and its elephants became bishops.

A record of 0-0, an arm that's a complete unknown - has an expected value of 0.5000 but a Gittins index of 0.7029. In other words, something you have no experience with whatsoever is more attractive than a machine that you know pays out 70% of the time! As you go down the diagonal, notice that a record of 1-1 yields an index of 0.6346, a record of 2-2 yields 0.6010 and so on. If such 50%-successful performance persists, the index does ultimately converge on 0.5000, as experience confirms that the machine is indeed nothing special and takes away the "bonus" that spurs further exploration.

Chester Barnard, "To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been."

First, assuming you're not omniscient, your total amount of regret will probably never stop increasing, even if you pick the best possible strategy - because even the best strategy isn't perfect every time. Second, regret will increase at a slower rate if you pick the best strategy than if you pick others; what's more, with a good strategy regret's rate of growth will go down over time, as you learn more about the problem and are able to make better choices. Third, and most specifically, the minimum possible regret - again assuming non-omniscience - is regret that increases at a logarithmic rate with every pull of the handle.

... where people were given a choice between two options, one with a known payoff chance and one unknown - specifically two airlines, an established carrier with a known on-time rate and a new company without a track record yet. Given the goal of maximizing the number of on-time arrivals over some period of time, the mathematically optimal strategy is to initially only fly the new airline, as long as the established one isn't clearly better. If at any point it's apparent that the well-known carrier is better - that is, if the Gittins index of the new option falls below the on-time rate of the familiar carrier - then you should switch hard to the familiar one and never look back.

More generally, our intuitions about rationality are too often informed by exploitation rather than exploration. When we talk about decision-making, we usually focus just on the immediate payoff of a single decision - and if you treat every decision as if it were your last, then indeed only exploitation makes sense. But over a lifetime, you're going to make a lot of decisions. And it's actually rational to emphasize exploration - the new rather than the best, the exciting rather than the safe, the random rather than the considered - for many of those choices, particularly earlier in life.

debeaking chickens on farms may be a well-intentioned but counterproductive approach: it removes the authority of individual fights to resolve the order, and therefore makes it much harder for the flock to run any sorting procedure at all. So the amount of antagonism within the flock in many cases actually increases.

"ordinal numbers" (which only express rank) to "cardinal" ones (which directly assign a measure to something's caliber)

The researchers showed that simply knowing more makes things harder when it comes to recognizing words, names, and even letters. No matter how good your organization scheme is, having to search through more things will inevitably take longer. It's not that we're forgetting, it's that we're remembering. We're becoming archives.

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

 

In the face of uncertainty [...] for time management: each time a new piece of work comes in, divide its importance by the amount of time it will take to complete. If that figure is higher than for the task you're currently doing, switch to the new one, otherwise stick with the current task.

 

 [heterogeneous collection of short tasks] "interrupt coalescing"; if you have five credit card bills, for instance, don't pay them as they arrive; take care of them all in one go when the fifth bill comes.

 

power-law distributions / scale-free distributions, characterize quantities that can plausibly range over many scales.

 

Examining the Copernican Principle, we saw that when Bayes's Rule is given an uninformative prior, it always predicts that the total life span of an object will be exactly double its current age.

[...]

Bayes's Rule indicates that the appropriate prediction strategy is a multiplicative rule; multiply the quantity observed so far by some constant factor. For an uninformative prior, that constant factor happens to be 2, hence the Copernican prediction; in other power-law cases, the multiplier will depend on the exact distribution you're working with.

 [...]

 

In a power-law distribution, the longer something has gone on, the longer we expect it to continue going on. So a power-loaw event is more surprising the longer we've been waiting for it - and maximally surprising right before it happens. A nation, corporation, or institution only grows more venerable with each passing year, so it's always stunning when it collapses.
    In a normal distribution, events are surprising when they're early - since we expected them to reach the average - but not when they're late. Indeed, by that point they seem overdue to happen, so the longer we wait, the more we expect them.
    And in an Erlang distribution, events by definition are never any more or less surprising no matter when they occur. Any state of affairs is always equally likely to end reguardless of how long it's lasted.

 

 

It is indeed true that including more factors in a model will always, by definition, make it a better fit for the data we have already. But a better fit for the available data does not necessarily mean a better prediction.

 

If the study were repeated with different people, producing slight variations on the same essential pattern, the one- and two-factor models would remain more or less steady - but the nine-factor model would gyrate wildly from one instance of teh study to the next. This is what statisticians call overfitting.
    So one of the deepest truths of machine learning is that, in fact, it's not always better to use a more complex model.

 

Taste is our body's proxy metric for health. Fat, sugar and salt are important nutrients, and for a couple hundred thousand years, being drawn to foods containing them was a reasonable measure for a sustaining diet.
    But being able to modify the foods available to us broke that relationship. We can now add fat and sugar to foods beyond amounts that are good for us, and then eat those foods exclusively rather than the mix of plants, grains, and meats that historically made up the human diet. In other words, we can overfit taste.

 

 

R.F. Kuang - "Katabasis"

Literally dark academia, going to hell to get their professor back...?

To be honest she had never gotten round to trying Proust, but Cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read Proust, and she figured Hell was a good place to start.

Legion (series)

Enjoyable.  Not yet sure where it's going, but each episode so far has been great in storytelling pace.

Robert Plant - "Monkey"

Found via "Legion" (series). 

Haunting. should see what the rest is like.