Interesting little known fact: many Christmas songs were composed by Jews.

(I’m dreaming of a) White Christmas was written by Isidore Beilin (Irving Berlin) which broke all records in 1942 as the first great Christmas hit.

In fact Jews wrote or co-wrote many such hits.
1/11

Santkumaras-The four adorable kids of the Universe.

The Kumaras r the four sages who roam the Universe as children from the Puranic texts of Hinduism named,Sanaka, Sanatana,Sanandana& Sanatkumara.They r described as the first mind-born creations &sons of the creator God Brahma.

Brahma,who had received the knowledge of Puranas from the Universal being(God Himself), imbibed this to his 4 Kumaras.
Sanat Kumaras then taught the Puranas to Narada.Narada transmitted it to Krishna Dwaipayana who in turn scripted them in monumental epic documents of 18 Puranas.

The Vishnu Purana is recorded in two parts,the Vishnu Purana & Naradiya Purana.The teachings of Sanaka of the Kumara brothers r contained in the Naradiya Purana which is also divided in two parts, the first part containing the teachings of Sanaka &second part,teachings of others.

Born from Brahma's mind,4 Kumars took lifelong vows of celibacy against their father's wishes.They r said to wander throughout materialistic &spiritualistic universe without any desire but with the aim to teach.All 4 brothers studied Vedas from their Childhood&travelled together.

The Bhagwata Purana lists the Kumaras among the 12 Mahajanas(great devotees or bhaktas) who although being eternally liberated souls from birth, still became attracted to the devotional service of Vishnu from their already enlightened state.

A lot of people don't understand that Trump & his incoming team didn't face a normal transition period, like it was over a in a matter of a few weeks or months.

The DOJ transition period JUST ENDED when Sessions left. Almost 2 exact years to get it there.

Pompeo at the CIA took over a year before he was done and ready to shift over to the State Department.

All kinds of stuff has been going on behind the scenes nobody leaks or talks about.

We only had the barest mention of the fact the Clinton Email investigation restarted

Nobody leaked in a year that Huber was deep diving into the Clinton Foundation.
Keep that in mind as all the usual suspects continue to INSIST nothing is happening/going to happen.

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.