Ocassional Notes
29. December 2021
When I was a child, they had a plotter at my mom’s office. I don’t remember the model, but it was something like a HP 7550A. I was fascinated by it, and I’m sure I watched it go for many hours. From that, I’ve always loved plotter technology. I’ve always kind of wanted to make my own. Last year, the urge became too great and I tried out the branchiograph project. I didn’t get the best results for various reasons.
02. November 2021
Non-negative matrix factorization is a fast technique for generating embeddings from a dataset. More concretely, given a matrix you can decompose it into two matrices that are approximattely multiplicands of the matrix. I.e. given matrix M, it finds matrices A and B such that M ≈ AB.
01. November 2021
The 100 emoji is iconic; it’s a symbol recognized across cultures and it has a semiotic impact globally. In a world where most societies have standardized around a base-10 (or decimal) number system, a doubly-underlined 100 is a shining beacon of success, or total mastery. The forthright and striking symbol of flawless execution, total knowledge, and success lends itself naturally, in this remix culture we live in, to imitations. If 100 can be thus underlined, can we convey the same messages by borrowing the style of the emoji but with different content? Of course we can, that’s what cultures do.