Fun with speculation...

1: Lin Wood tweets that Epsteene is still alive (no way you let THE key witness die in jail).

2: DJT is the consummate showman.

3: DJT tells his loyal supporters to be in DC on the 6th for a "wild party".

(con't)

Trump on climate: I don't believe it. Trump on Khashoggi: I don't believe it. Trump on Russia: I don't believe it. Idiocy? A canny game? Doesn't really matter as much as the underlying intellectual autocracy. In this administration only one opinion matters.

It's an assault on facts and reason. It's an assault on good governance. It's an assault on the bureaucracies that are being discounted. It's an assault on science and history. But it is also an assault on one of the underpinnings of democracy.

We live in a system that is grounded on the idea of collaborative government. Leaders may have a final word but even then, there are typically checks and balances. Hopefully, in this case, such checks and balances may work. But they also are being tested.

The president's position that he is smarter than all the world's scientists, than the entire intelligence community, than experts who have studied any issue all their lives, is, of course, asinine. But his belief that government turns solely on his opinion, is monarchic.

Louis XIV reportedly said, "L'etat est moi." That he was the state. Trump asserting that he knows better than all, discounts all advice, that his brain is enough to chart the course for America alone, is essentially saying the same thing.

Agastya Muni & Kaveri River
#story
This is a story which describes how River Kaveri was brought on earth by Agastya muni. There was a king named Kavera lived in the Brahmagiri hills who prayed to Brahma for a child. He was blessed with a daughter whom he named Kaveri.

Agastya muni married her. A demon, named Shoorapadma, wanted to trouble people so he prevented rain from reaching South India. As a result famine occurred in South India.
Agastya Muni who came that way was very sad seeing this. He started to pray Mahadeva for a solution.

Shiva gave him small amount of Ganga water in his Kamandalu (small pot) and said wherever you spill this water the river will flow from there. Agastya Muni travelled lot of places to find a suitable place to pour water. Feeling tired he kept his Kamandalu and took rest.

At that time Ganesha took a form of crow and perched on the Kamadalu and made a hole that water began to flow as river Kaveri. This place is now called as Talakaveri (Karnataka), located in the Brahmagiri hill.

Tala Kaveri has temple for Agastheeswara, which denotes the story between Kaveri and Agasthya muni. Kaveri is a part of Ganga, thus, also called Dakshina Ganga.
🙏🕉🙏

Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ

The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.

Here is a special thread introducing our series on “The Making of the Islamic World.” It offers 10 episodes about the transformation of Islamicate societies between the 7th and 17th centuries. You can find the series page here: https://t.co/7mL9eWmMmz

This is Chris Gratien posting. I created this series during Fall 2020 for my students as asynchronous material supported by readings and discussion. This is going to be a long thread, but it will be a great shortcut for those looking to make similar use of these materials.

There are two items worth pointing out: 1. This is an overview of the political, social, and cultural history of Islamicate societies. It does not deal with the origins of Islam or many theological questions. It does discuss Islam’s spread and the transformation of Islamic law.

2. This is the first part of a two-part sequence that takes the history of the Islamic world into the present. It emphasizes developments and themes that have particular relevance for later periods.

This is really a multivocal narrative of Islamic history. We feature over 20 scholars from almost as many institutions. Many of those who worked on it, myself included, study the early modern and modern era but have teaching obligations that take us further back in history.