Author: Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

A discussion of Grit at Innovate Pasadena

A discussion of Grit at Innovate Pasadena
Brian Nolan and Michael Ugino, co-founders of Pasadena-based Sellbrite, talk: “Grit – What it Takes to be a Successful Entrepreneur“

Instagram filter used: Moon

Photo taken at: Cross Campus Pasadena

Hector Zenil

I’ve run across some of his work before, but I ran into some new material by Hector Zenil that will likely interest those following information theory, complexity, and computer science here. I hadn’t previously noticed that he refers to himself on his website as an “information theoretic biologist” — everyone should have that as a title, shouldn’t they? As a result, I’ve also added him to the growing list of ITBio Researchers.

If you’re not following him everywhere (?) yet, start with some of the sites below (or let me know if I’ve missed anything).

Hector Zenil:

His most recent paper on arXiv:
Low Algorithmic Complexity Entropy-deceiving Graphs | .pdf

A common practice in the estimation of the complexity of objects, in particular of graphs, is to rely on graph- and information-theoretic measures. Here, using integer sequences with properties such as Borel normality, we explain how these measures are not independent of the way in which a single object, such a graph, can be described. From descriptions that can reconstruct the same graph and are therefore essentially translations of the same description, we will see that not only is it necessary to pre-select a feature of interest where there is one when applying a computable measure such as Shannon Entropy, and to make an arbitrary selection where there is not, but that more general properties, such as the causal likeliness of a graph as a measure (opposed to randomness), can be largely misrepresented by computable measures such as Entropy and Entropy rate. We introduce recursive and non-recursive (uncomputable) graphs and graph constructions based on integer sequences, whose different lossless descriptions have disparate Entropy values, thereby enabling the study and exploration of a measure’s range of applications and demonstrating the weaknesses of computable measures of complexity.

Subjects: Information Theory (cs.IT); Computational Complexity (cs.CC); Combinatorics (math.CO)
Cite as: arXiv:1608.05972 [cs.IT] (or arXiv:1608.05972v4 [cs.IT]

YouTube

Yesterday he also posted two new introductory videos to his YouTube channel. There’s nothing overly technical here, but they’re nice short productions that introduce some of his work. (I wish more scientists did communication like this.) I’m hoping he’ll post them to his blog and write a bit more there in the future as well.

Universal Measures of Complexity

Relevant literature:

Reprogrammable World

Relevant literature:

Cross-boundary Behavioural Reprogrammability Reveals Evidence of Pervasive Turing Universality by Jürgen Riedel, Hector Zenil
Preprint available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01671

Ed.: 9/7/16: Updated videos with links to relevant literature

Randomness And Complexity, from Leibniz To Chaitin | World Scientific Publishing

Bookmarked Randomness And Complexity, from Leibniz To Chaitin (amzn.to)
The book is a collection of papers written by a selection of eminent authors from around the world in honour of Gregory Chaitin s 60th birthday. This is a unique volume including technical contributions, philosophical papers and essays. Hardcover: 468 pages; Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company (October 18, 2007); ISBN: 9789812770820

📖 14.0% done with Carioca Fletch (Fletch #7) by Gregory McDonald

📖 14.0% done with Carioca Fletch (Fletch #7) by Gregory McDonald

An interesting start with a nice dash of the cultural part of what it means to be a Brazilian to set the stage of what is to come in the book. The reader is nicely made to feel the cultural clash of American and Brazilian along with the frustration Fletch surely feels.

Book Review: Confess, Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald

Read Confess, Fletch by Gregory Mcdonald (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Confess, Fletch Book Cover Confess, Fletch
Fletch (in the stories' chronological order: #6)
Gregory Mcdonald
Fiction; Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
1976
Kindle e-book
192
Amazon / Overdrive

When Fletch stumbles upon the nude corpse of a beautiful young woman in his borrowed Boston apartment, he must match wits with the determined Inspector Francis Xavier Flynn as he tries to clear his name and find the real killer. Winner of the Edgar Award.

I had originally meant to read all the Fletch canon in chronological order from the perspective of the stories’ timeline. Unfortunately the immediate availability of the books threw a small curve into the process, so I’ve read this slightly out of order. Doing so has thrown me as I’ve been under the assumption that Fletch was generally a journalist working for the same Los Angeles paper the entire time.

The Order I’ve read the series in so far

Fletch Won
Fletch and the Widow Bradley #3
Fletch, Too
Confess Fletch #6
Carioca Fletch #5

At the opening of this he’s going by the name of Peter Fletcher which was quirky, even knowing how much I.M. dislikes his given names, and he seemed to have a far more Italian flair and a rich man’s flâneur attitude toward life compared with his previous character. Gone was the ne’er-do-well under employed hero and in his place was a well-to-do more suave man. What was I missing/forgetting from the intervening books? It wasn’t until about halfway through the book that the Fletch character I’ve come to enjoy popped out of the woodwork as himself.

In stark contrast to the almost no plot line of Fletch, Too, which I found disappointing, this one starts off like a shot. The opening scene of the story starts out with Fletch in an apartment swap and calling the police to report a body of a dead woman in the flat which he’s staying for the next few weeks.

“This is the Police Business phone.”
“Isn’t murder police business?”
“You’re supposed to call Emergency with a murder.”
“I think the emergency is over.”
“I mean, I don’t even have a tape recorder on this phone.”
“So talk to your boss. Make a recommendation.”

The following morning he’s on the hunt for the missing art collection of an Italian nobleman who’s been kidnapped and presumed dead.

What follows is a nicely developed set of A and B plot lines that rival even those of the original Fletch. (N.B. I’ve still yet to reread the original, so it’s been over 25 years that I’m making this comparison.) The characters are great and the dialogue as witty and snarky as ever. This is Fletch as it was meant to be. Reading this after Fletch, Too brings my faith back for Mcdonald’s work.

I just hope the rest are just this good.

The added benefit is that apparently Mcdonald spun off the Frances Xavier Flynn character from this work into another series, and he’s a sufficiently complex and interesting enough character that I’m glad the Fletch odyssey isn’t really over once I’m done with these eleven.

From a time period perspective, I’ll again note, as I did for Fletch and the Widow Bradley, that this book (written in 1976) had some very progressive views about gay/homosexual lifestyle that I wouldn’t have expected.

Book Review: Fletch Too by Gregory Mcdonald

Read Fletch, Too by Gregory Mcdonald (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Fletch, Too Book Cover Fletch, Too
Fletch #9 (in the stories' chronological order: )
Gregory Mcdonald
Fiction
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
1986
Kindle e-book
256
Overdrive

(Description from the Trade Paperback edition:) After a few delays, it looks like Fletch is finally getting hitched. It’s a small affair, just a few friends, the bride’s parents, the groom’s mother, and, just maybe, his father. Except Fletch’s father is supposed to be dead.

But somebody delivered the letter, signed Fletch (senior) and containing an invitation (and a pair of plane tickets) to visit the old man in Nairobi for the honeymoon. Never mind Fletch and his bride were planning a ski trip to Colorado. No sooner does the couple land in Africa, than the search for Fletch’s father begins. There’s a murder at the airport, reports of the old man’s incarceration, and the hospitality (and evasiveness) offered by pop’s best friend, who flies them across the continent, just a step or two behind (or maybe ahead of) the old rascal.

The plot opens up just days after we left Fletch in Fletch Won as we follow Fletch and his new bride Barbara on a honeymoon neither of them anticipated taking. It took much longer than I would have liked to get into the first few chapters, and never really got moving along even when it seemed like something interesting could happen.

I really can’t believe I had the patience to make it through to the end. There was a minor twist at the bitter end which was poorly foreshadowed and a bit too predictable. There was no real mystery at all and definitely no “detective” work or journalistic probing which usually moves the plot in Fletch books along. I would almost suspect that the long-time editor of the series died and no one else could reign the writer in to produce something more compelling.

I kept wondering where the plot was going and why I should keep carrying. So far, of the 4 I’ve read in the series, this was, by far, the least gripping book in the series. The dialogue was poorly attributed, if at all, which made reading and understanding things even more of a chore. It also wasn’t as sharp or witty as usual and characters are “off” and unsympathetic. The plot was just generally flat and didn’t pay off despite what could have been an interesting twist with Fletch witnessing a murder well before I would have anticipated as the end of the first act.

I’m hoping that though it was the second in the chronological story timeline of the Fletch canon, the fact that it was one of the last written means that Mcdonald was just getting tired of the formula and trying to close out the series in some stilted way. I still have higher hopes for the others remaining on my list.

In an odd way, the title was interesting from both a character standpoint as well as it being a follow up to Fletch Won.

Reading Progress
  • 8/7/16 marked as: want to read; “The Rio Olympics reminded me that I’d gotten Carioca Fletch to read back in the 80’s and never got around to it, so I thought I’d come back and revisit the series.”
  • 8/14/16: marked as currently reading
  • 8/14/16: 10%
  • 8/18/16: 30% “Took a bit to get into the first few chapters, but eventually gets moving along. The plot opens up just days after we left Fletch in Fletch Won.”
  • 8/29/16: 64% “I keep wondering where this is going and why I should keep caring. So far this isn’t the most gripping book in the series. Dialogue isn’t as sharp as usual and characters are off. The plot is just generally flat.”
  • 9/2/16: 100%

Mendeley integration is here! Import your Mendeley reference library into Overleaf

Liked Mendeley integration is here! Import your Mendeley reference library into Overleaf (overleaf.com)
You can now import your reference library directly from Mendeley to Overleaf, to make it easy to manage your references and citations in your projects

My first pull request

Replied to My first pull request by Clint LalondeClint Lalonde (ClintLalonde.net)
Crazy to think that, even though I have had a GitHub account for 5 years and have poked, played and forked things, I have never made a pull request and contributed something to another project unti…
Clint, first, congratulations on your first PR!

Oddly, I had seen the VERY same post/repo a few weeks back and meant to add a readme too! (You’ll notice I got too wrapped up in reading through the code and creating some usability issues after installing the plugin instead.)

Given that you’ve got your own domain and website (and playing in ed/tech like many of us are), and you’re syndicating your blog posts out to Medium for additional reach, I feel compelled to mention some interesting web tech and philosophy in the movement. You can find some great resources and tools at their website.

In particular, you might take a look at their WordPress pages which includes some plugins and resources you’ll be sure to appreciate. One of their sets of resources is allowing you to not only syndicate your WP posts (what they call POSSE), but by using the new W3C webmention spec, you can connect many of your social media resources to brid.gy and have services like twitter, facebook, G+, instagram and others send the comments and likes on your posts there back to your blog directly, thereby allowing you to own all of your data (as well as the commentary that occurs elsewhere). I can see a lot of use for education in some of the infrastructure they’re building and aggregating there. (If you’re familiar with Known, they bake a lot of Indieweb goodness into their system from the start, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t have it for your WordPress site as well.)

If you need any help/guidance in following/installing anything there, I’m happy to help.

Congratulations again. Keep on pullin’!

The Science of the Oven (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

Bookmarked The Science of the Oven (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History) by Hervé ThisHervé This (Amazon.com)
The Science of the Oven Book Cover The Science of the Oven
Hervé This
Cooking
Columbia University Press
2009
Hardcover
206
Personal library

Mayonnaise "takes" when a series of liquids form a semisolid consistency. Eggs, a liquid, become solid as they are heated, whereas, under the same conditions, solids melt. When meat is roasted, its surface browns and it acquires taste and texture. What accounts for these extraordinary transformations? The answer: chemistry and physics. With his trademark eloquence and wit, Hervé This launches a wry investigation into the chemical art of cooking. Unraveling the science behind common culinary technique and practice, Hervé This breaks food down to its molecular components and matches them to cooking's chemical reactions. He translates the complex processes of the oven into everyday knowledge for professional chefs and casual cooks, and he demystifies the meaning of taste and the making of flavor. He describes the properties of liquids, salts, sugars, oils, and fats and defines the principles of culinary practice, which endow food with sensual as well as nutritional value.

For fans of Hervé This's popular volumes and for those new to his celebrated approach, The Science of the Oven expertly expands the possibilities of the kitchen, fusing the physiology of taste with the molecular structure of bodies and food.

Instagram Single Photo Bookmarklet

Ever wanted a simple and quick way to extract the primary details from an Instagram photo to put it on your own website?

The following javascript-based bookmarklet is courtesy of Tantek Çelik as an Indieweb tool he built at IndieWebCamp NYC2:

If you view a single photo permalink page, the following bookmarklet will extract the permalink (trimmed), photo jpg URL, and photo caption and copy them into a text note, suitable for posting as a photo that’s auto-linked:

javascript:n=document.images.length-1;s=document.images[n].src;s=s.split('?');s=s[0];u=document.location.toString().substring(0,39);prompt('Choose "Copy ⌘C" to copy photo post:',s+' '+u+'\n'+document.images[n].alt.toString().replace(RegExp(/\.\n(\.\n)+/),'\n'))

Any questions, let me know! –Tantek

If you want an easy drag-and-drop version, just drag the button below into your browser’s bookmark bar.

✁ Instagram

Editor’s note: Though we’ll try to keep the code in this bookmarklet updated, the most recent version can be found on the Indieweb wiki thought the link above.