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 …

Durham University Institute for Computational Cosmology visit

Visit to the Durham University Institute for Computational Cosmology I spent last week hosted by the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, staying in “Castle” one of the historic colleges of the university, an actual, honest to goodness Castle and a World Heritage Site. Durham University has a lot to offer, a huge cosmology and astronomy department, Read More …

General Relativity (thesis series)

To start with some bonus material, the featured image of the post is from Einstein’s notebook during the period during which he was developing general relativity. This post is a continuation series of posts goes through the elements of the concordance cosmology: general relativity, inflation, the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, cold dark matter (CDM) and a Read More …

Concordance Cosmology (thesis series)

This series of posts goes through the elements of the concordance cosmology: general relativity, inflation, the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, cold dark matter (CDM) and a positive cosmological constant. I will start with a review of the historical, theoretical, and observational advances that led to each model’s widespread acceptance. The posts are excerpts from my Ph.D. thesis, lightly modified for blog format. No mathematical equations are written, with the intent of making the introductory material accessible to the non-specialist. A full bibliography of references in posts in this series is available. Read More …