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Showing posts from October, 2026

The Bear of Delmore - from my poetry bookshelf

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  The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me Jack Vaughan reads The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me By Delmore Schwartz “the withness of the body” The heavy bear who goes with me,    A manifold honey to smear his face,    Clumsy and lumbering here and there,    The central ton of every place,    The hungry beating brutish one    In love with candy, anger, and sleep,    Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,    Climbs the building, kicks the football,    Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city. Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,    That heavy bear who sleeps with me,    Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,    A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,    Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope    Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.    —The strutting show-off is terrified, ...

A New History of the Scientific Revolution 2015

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  D idnt find The Invention of Science  [Harper] full of the excitement the name might have augured. Author David Wooton determinedly grinds through the history, with some dramatic diversions, but mostly with a focus on the act of definition of terms. The span from Tycho Brake to Isaac Newton pretty much forms the basis of the book. The stumbling search for terms that describe 'what' the inventors were doing gets a lot of attention - that along with the murky manner in which terms like "machine", "science", "invention" and "experiment" come to describe what goes on. It is less than deft - the way that Wooton shows the birthing of clarifying words. It's laborious, at least for those who may not be his student. At times The Invention of Science is a trip through volumes of the OED. Maybe that's not so bad. At some point, things come together, and the race is on.  In  The Invention of Science , the author focuses on locating what he ...

4th of July Invite

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 4th of July Invite - 1970s or1980s -  "My friends, I would like to say that never, in my political history, have I ever enjoyed the privilege of presenting such a great, beloved man. A human being, not only beloved in this fair country, but beloved world over. His name, a name that’s imprinted on every heart in America: Governor Slingwell Slugwell!" http://www.lordbuckley.com/LBC_The_Word/LBC_Transcriptions/Governor_Slugwell.htm

Neural Nobel 2024

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Oct 8 2024 Original Post - The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that neural network science pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2024. The two researchers are cited for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” The Nobel award is a capstone of sorts for two premier researchers in neural networks. This computer technology has gained global attention in recent years as the underpinning engine for large-scale advances in computer vision, language processing, prediction and human-machine interaction. John Hopfield is best known for efforts to re-create interconnect models of the human brain. At the California Institute of Technology in the 1980s, he developed foundational concepts for neural network models. These efforts led to what became known as a Hopfield network architecture. In effect, these are simulations that work as associative memory models that can...