Map of Africa

A useful map of Africa that features population densities: good to know where the people are.

Hello world (again)!

New possibilities and new horizons do not necessarily demand new infrastructure, but in this case my first shared hosting provider, A Small Orange, was long ago sold to a mega-provider and the prices have gone up while the services have somewhat declined. When I asked about alternatives, one hosting provider, CynderHost, stepped forward and invited me to try them out. So far, I have liked what I have seen, and it was time that I moved, if only to re-learn some of the basics of hosting and also to have a sense of what it is to move and what all needs to be moved. There are bound to be some hiccoughs along the way, but, in the end, you might as well embrace the change. It’s coming anyway.

Dreams from an ML Perspective

Some really fascinating research suggests that dreams could be our brain’s way of avoiding overfitting when learning from experience. The idea is based on the fact that data scientists often introduce noise and voids into training data in order to keep models developed by ML like neural networks from becoming “over-fitted” — that is, very good but too narrow to be useful. This idea draws upon a long-standing interest in cognitive and computer sciences with analogy and the way humans both learn from analogous situations but somehow our mental models remain flexible enough to adapt to less-analogous events.

Coverage and publication.

Losing the Thread

The Army has a new recruitment campaign which allows you to explore interactively where your interests lie and how they might fit within the Army. I first came across it on Reddit, and I was curious to see what it might reveal to me.

It starts straightforwardly enough: