codeXgalactic hosts technical writings of the work of Christine Corbett Moran, Ph.D., as well as musings on productivity. For polished write-ups on humanities subjects, check out corbett.medium.com
About the CodeX
Posted on
You Know, We Can Just Stop Consuming the News
I’ve been listening to the 80,000 hours podcast a lot recently*. On the podcast they had a discussion of why you should stop reading the news with Brian Caplan, which pointed to Rolf Dobelli’s book Stop Reading the News. I picked up the book, also read it, and promptly stopped reading (and watching or listening) Read More …
Taking an extra decade to read the classics
After posting Bridging the Great Stagnation: Why Taking an Extra Decade to Master the Fundamentals Matters, I got wind from my dedicated social contact who braves Twitter that some are interested in a book list alongside. Rather than post specific books, I’ll post my personal algorithm for the content I focused on reading during each Read More …
Bridging the Great Stagnation: Why Taking an Extra Decade to Master the Fundamentals Matters
In the 1800s, educated elites were expected to be proficient in Latin, Greek, classical literature, religious knowledge, moral philosophy, public speaking, writing, basic arithmetic, geometry, natural philosophy (covering fundamental physics, astronomy, and biology), music, art, poetry, classical and national history, geography, French, and social graces. Physical activities like horseback riding, rowing, and fencing were also Read More …
Obsidian
Update: After a year hosting technical in progress works via Obsidian publicly, I decided to go back to using it personally (one vault) and for work (a second vault) without using the publish feature. I find Obsidian great but the interface for browsing didn’t provide a substitute for a blog, which is what I was Read More …
Machine Learning and Satellite Imagery
Back in the spring, I had some fun doing experimentation around machine learning models for labelling satellite imagery with atmospheric conditions and various classes of land cover/land. You can check out my work in an open source Kaggle notebook. For this I trained on the data provided in the Planet Kaggle competition, Understanding the Amazon Read More …
Exo-itement! What’s in an exoplanet name?
I’ve now added it to one of my life goals: name an exoplanet! If you could name a planet, what would you call it? Read More …
I wrote a book: Mastering Quantum Computing with IBM QX
I wrote a book during my pregnancy on quantum computing. Packt approached me, based on my work in quantum computer simulation and education (kickstarted in this post). They asked me to write a book proposal, which they accepted, and then we negotiated an advance. My writing goals were a chapter a week. After our baby was Read More …
Back at Caltech: Supermassive Excitement
I’m delighted to be back doing numerical relativity research at Caltech after taking a year leave to deploy to the South Pole with the South Pole Telescope collaboration. I will continue to be involved with the South Pole Telescope data analysis in parallel with my work at Caltech to simulate formation pathways for supermassive black Read More …
5-qubit quantum computing simulator
Since IBM released access to its 5-qubit quantum computer, with accompanying tutorial and ability to simulate and program it easily (via a graphical language that spits out a simple code for archival along with results), I’ve been kind of obsessed. As I worked my way through the tutorials in IBM’s simulator, for my own benefit Read More …
When Antarctica Just Isn't Cold Enough: South Pole Telescope (SPT) Fridge Cycle
As you might have heard on my website, my newsletter, my Twitter, or, if we’re colleagues at Caltech, at work, I am currently working on the South Pole Telescope (SPT) onsite at the South Pole in Antarctica for January-November 2016 (I am employed by the University of Chicago). I have taken a sabbatical from my NSF Astronomy Read More …