Mole End

Things that *are* are easy to measure. (Well, actually, they’re not, but that’s another section of this blog entirely. For this moment, let us assume they are.) Things that *are not,* on the other hand, are quite difficult to measure. The Mole’s late mother had a lovely response to a certain class of hypothetical questions.… Continue reading I am the very model of a modern counter-factual

Leo McGineva never existed: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Theodore Levitt at least tried to give a proper attribution; too many people now attribute the remark in question to Levitt himself. What remark you ask, and whence did it come? Excellent questions that have preoccupied the Mole for many hours… Continue reading Hunting the Lion

The Mole has once again relearned an old lesson — “to see a world in a grain of sand” — in his usual way:  get drawn in by the specific, then twig to the wider idea.  This time the context was the seventh episode of Alexis Madrigal‘s podcast Containers and the text was this: Every time I… Continue reading From the Particular to the General

Worldometers (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries) 91-DIVOC (http://www.91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/), the best way to monitor on a log scale. Looking at NY and CA on the US State-level data and switching between log and linear is a great way to build intuition about the math of flattening the curve. SF Chronicle tracker (https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2020/coronavirus-map/), a quick reference for the daily Bay Area… Continue reading The Mole’s Favorite SARS-Cov-2 Links

At times The Mole displays behaviors that might be variously described as having a very narrow craw, or a jaw with a death grip, or an obsessive inability to forget and move on.  Today’s object lesson starts on 23 April 2010 — yes, The Mole not only wrestles with ideas over the span of a… Continue reading Fill in the Blank

Some blog posts are for the ages, others are ephemeral. The Mole acknowledges this post’s place in the latter category, yet still feels it appropriate to write today about what he heard yesterday even if it is relevant only until tomorrow. Last night’s meetup — yes, the third this week — was hosted at Yelp under the… Continue reading All your MLBase are belong to vapor

The Mole is a retiring and self-effacing sort, quick to minimize his own acheivements (such as they are), so he will stipulate without hesitation that Dr. Alexander Gray is more accomplished and more knowledgeable about machine learning than he is.  But the Mole has also known quite a few members of the National Academies —… Continue reading The urticating roots of the Skytree

Last night the Mole attended a pleasant talk by Mark Noworolski on Streetline‘s smart parking system.  (The talk was presented through the good offices of the IoTSiliconValley meetup, capably organized by Drew Johnson and Elle Wood, and hosted by Hacker Dojo.  </shoutouts>)  While the talk was not particularly technically demanding, the Mole was quite impressed by… Continue reading Is that a hockey puck under your car or are you just glad to have a parking space?

The Mole’s grandmother was born in another country, one where English is not the native language.  We will return to this point later.  Our immediate point of departure, however, is that the Mole is currently burnishing his credentials in pursuit of a return to more technical work and has, to that end, been taking online… Continue reading On a Whinge and a Parser

There was some surprise at the beginning of this month that Marissa Mayer was personally reviewing every candidate being hired into Yahoo.  A lot of people, particularly the ones who calculated the ratio between a typical software engineer’s annual salary and the price of the 15 minutes she might spend reviewing a resume (see her… Continue reading Heisenhiring: Marissa Mayer and Paul Krasner