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Whitman Bot

Whitman

Machine learning amazes me - and so does my brother in law Aaron Moe, professor of English, literature genius, and ecopoeticist. Whenever I hang out with Aaron, I learn something. Among many things, Aaron is an expert on E.E. Cummings and the works of Walt Whitman. One of our conversations led to an idea: what if we were to adapt some of the advances of leading machine learning engineers to mimic the prose of Whitman? You could feed the bot a “seed” of a few words, and then see how Walt might finish your sentence.

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Shiny Potatoes

Shiny

In an effort to explore the vast possibilities of R Shiny, I built a very simple Shiny app using data from a survey designed and conducted with colleagues in Ethiopia. The data explores the relationships between different seed potato storage technologies (which turn out to be very important!) under different hypothetical future conditions.

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Beautiful Disaster

Ariadne

Alright, it’s finally become clear: I might not be totally right in the head. I, along with my two closest friends, just bought a 90 year old wooden boat. Ariadne needs a lot of work. We are planning for a 3-5 year restoration before she returns to her normal self. I’ll try to record some of the process in periodic blog posts.

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Sexy vs. Unsexy

boredom

Or: why clickbait is destroying our civilization

Well, it’s possible that clickbait isn’t destroying our civilization, at least not as much as it’s destroying my productivity. It’s becoming clear, however, that the culture of instant gratification and avoidance of boredom is as dangerous as it is understandable.

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