Some Favorites

Favorite painting:

• On A Mission by Annelein Beukenkamp

Favorite fiction:

• Ulysses by James Joyce
• JPod by Douglas Coupland
• Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Favorite nonfiction:

• The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin
• Longitude by Dava Sobel
• Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty

Favorite poetry:

• “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• “A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman

Favorite play:

• Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward

Favorite albums:

• Anything Nameless and Joymaking by Paper Bird
• A Sky Underground by Paper Bird
• Hot Fuss by The Killers
• Give Up by The Postal Service
• Buena Vista Social Club by Buena Vista Social Club
• Blue Train by John Coltrane
• Stan Getz And J.J. Johnson At The Opera House

Favorite classical:

• Mozart: everything, but especially the 3rd movement of the Gran Partita, the Clarinet Concerto, the string quartets, the overture to Don Giovanni…
• “Pavane pour une infante défunte” by Maurice Ravel
• “Der Erlkönig” by Franz Schubert (and all the Lieder as performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau)
• Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan

Favorite sui generis:

• Homestar Runner by The Brothers Chaps

Favorite games:

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
• Pokémon Yellow
• Pokémon Silver
• Undertale

Favorite shows:

• Frasier
• Arrested Development

Favorite movie:

• Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back

Favorite podcast:

• No Such Thing As A Fish

Favorite AI paper:

• Graves, Alex. “Sequence transduction with recurrent neural networks.” 2012 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) — Workshop on Representation Learning.

“The ability to transform and manipulate sequences is a crucial part of human intelligence: everything we know about the world reaches us in the form of sensory sequences, and everything we do to interact with the world requires sequences of actions and thoughts. The creation of automatic sequence transducers therefore seems an important step towards artificial intelligence.”

Favorite non-neural-network learning algorithm:

• Decision trees

Favorite quotation:

• “The filling of a very deepe flaggon with a constant streame of beere or water sounds the vowels in this order: w u o a e i y.” (Isaac Newton, in his journal)

Favorite essays:

• “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks” by Andrej Karpathy
• “Software 2.0” by Andrej Karpathy
• “The Bitter Lesson” by Rich Sutton
• “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” by Richard Rorty
• “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens” by Richard Rorty, in Essays on Heidegger and Others
• “Good Readers and Good Writers” by Vladimir Nabokov