the rabbit hole:

welcome

this page is for my non1-technical ramblings.

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense." —The Hatter

footnotes


1

this is relative to the projects directory.

Masters of Statistics

# Course Code Title Offered Prerequisites Term Type Textbook Notes
1. COMP6713 Natural Language Processing T1 MATH1081,9444 26T1 Elective na
2. FINS5513 Investments and Portfolio Selection T1,2,3 8750 program 26T1 Elective na
3. FINS5536 Fixed Income Securities and Interest Rate Derivatives T2 5513 26T2 Elective na pricing, hedging, risk management. options, futures and swaps (int rate derivs)
4. MATH5856 Introduction to Statistics and Statistical Computations T2 26T2 Elective na recommended for 5905
6. MATH5960 Bayesian Inference and Computation T3 2801/2901 26T3 Elective
7. MATH5825 Measure, Integration and Probability T3 U5705 26T3 Elective na implicit prereq for 5835
8. MATH5905 Statistical Inference T1,2,3 U5846,U5856 27T1 Core na
9. COMP9518 Advanced Machine Learning T2 9517 27T2 Elective na
10. MATH5845 Time Series T2 27T2 Elective na
11. MATH5855 Multivariate Analysis T3 27T3 Elective na
12. MATH5835 Advanced Stochastic Processes T1 U5825 28T1 Core na Difficult. Requires an understanding of Real Analysis and Measure Theory
13. MATH5806 Applied Regression Analysis T2 28T2 Elective na splines, poisson / binomial regression
14. MATH5925 Project (12uoc) T1,2,3 36UoC 28T2 Core na

Queen Mia ⚰️

Tribute

My beautiful, sweet sweet Mia.

Papa's sorry that you're gone, so is Phillip, and especially is Mama.

We were all shocked and saddened deeply. We grieved and still do.

You made it into Papa's arm, and Mama's leg, we got ink.

I see you every-time I brush my teeth.

Recount

  • Mia was born at my parent's house.
  • She had 4 litter-mates.
  • She stayed, the others didn't.
  • Her mother died to traffic weeks later
  • Mia was a cat raised with love from birth.
  • She moved out at 1 and then again 6 months in. Her life became more fun, stimulating and interesting.
  • She lived outdoors her whole life, ate roast beef from Aldi and ate salmon from Costco.
  • She was attacked twice, and turned from the sweetest cat to the "sweetest around family cat"
  • She way loyal and supervised much debauchery along with even more destiny-seeking.
  • She stopped hissing at Phillip eventually, and they even grew together as best-friends for 6-months.
  • Mia was killed1 by a slow moving vehicle.
/blog/mia/
banana-mia.jpeg

Pre-mortem prose:

Mia is a good cat. Very tame. She's been following me around since she was a blue-eyed baby:

Read more >

Running Barefoot

I ran barefoot for upwards of a year. Here are my thoughts on the

Verdict

I do not recommend it. Especially in the city where it is likely that your running surface will be concrete or pavement.

It is terrible for your feet, and worse for your knees. It is dangerous and it is painful, please do not do it.

TODO: insert toes, perhaps a spoiler?

Disclaimer aside, I shall proceed to justify and describe my experience clocking about 150km(?) barefoot.

Read more >

My Undergraduate Computer Science Degree

Summary

It took me 1,577 days to complete my undergraduate degree in Computer Science.

    /

Read more >

Mudita

\[\Huge \sum_{k=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{k^2} = \frac{\pi^2}{6} \]

an infinite sum of rational numbers is equal to an irrational number

Here lies the Sanskrit word Mudita.

The word is defined as sympathetic joy, an antithesis to the words envy and jealousy.

It emerges from the Pāli Canon which religiously and philosophically lie beside the Buddhist teachings.

It is one of the Four Brahmavihārās:

  1. Mettā – loving-kindness
  2. Karunā – compassion
  3. Mudita – sympathetic joy
  4. Upekkhā – equanimity

Noto Sans Devanagari

मुदिता

Siddhanta

मुदिता

Kohinoor Devanagari

मुदिता

Sarasvati

मुदिता

Lohit Devanagari

मुदिता

Chandas

मुदिता

The Babels

This page is for the richness of Babel.

I shall come back to populate it with Biblical history, Emacs inspirations and unpack Jorge's concept of infinity in this blog post.

Human Memory

The human mind is a fickle creature. It is prone to dozens of cognitive biases, and the way it is strengthened, is paradoxical:

To learn, you must forget

The above is a mantra all my students are familiar with, and derives from an understanding of Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve.

Additionally, the human-mind is highly fragile:

  • vulnerable to brain damage (dementia)
  • psychological impairments

And biologically expensive:

  • contributes a meagre 2% of the human mass
  • is responsible for 20% of the body's energy consumption.

Whilst this sword is double-edged; it enables our creativity, capacity for complex thought, reasoning, etc.; the design of this organ leads to largely improper use by its hosts.

Read more >

Phillip the boy Cat

This is Phillip, a.k.a Lord Phillip, Prince Phillip.

/blog/phillip/
peelip.jpeg

Phillip was a Petbarn rescue. We got him at the age of 2 months and 19 days.

He likes to climb trees and nibble on fingers. He drinks lots of water and pants whilst playing. He is more of a dog than a cat.

Phillip enjoys eating egg, butter, cheese and yoghurt. Any diary really. He also like Hashbrowns.

Read more >

2018 Royald Enfield Classic 500

This is my first bike, I bought it second hand:

/blog/enfield/
500-listing.jpg

I got it because it fit my needs:

  • comfortable 2 seater
  • royal enfield
  • affordable

I paid 5.5k AUD for it, and recently had to spend another 2k because the previous owner had let it rust from the rain of the Northern Beaches.

I had also tried to do some work on it and ended up snapping the bolt securing the oil filter cap on the underside of the engine.

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Beyond Code

These days I work in Emacs, but before then I lived in Vim/Tmux for 2 years. My youth though was never this technical nor was it officially programmatic.

I instead spent my time hacking, tinkering and breaking things.

I spent my time in primary school creating hidden folders1 on my student drive to hide games from my teachers. But even earlier than that, I had a penchant for doing the wrong thing.

Read more >

Literate Programming and Donald Knuth

I was first introduced to this concept by Distrotube (Derek Taylor's) "literate config" files. At the time I was not using emacs and thus all the code I was writing was sparingly commented.

Since then, I have entered a world of Machine Learning and Deep Learning, where suddenly in 4 lines, I can sit atop my high-horse and perform sentiment analysis with tensorflow and keras!

  from transformers import pipeline
  classifier = pipeline('sentiment-analysis')
  prediction = classifier("Donald Knuth was the greatest computer scientist.")[0]
  print(prediction)
Device set to use mps:0
{'label': 'POSITIVE', 'score': 0.9997720122337341}

In such an age of abstraction complexity, it becomes paramount to distill what is happening at the last few \((n-k)\) layers.

Read more >

The Bayesian Cat

This blog post has been created to convince you that real-world probability, is in fact Bayesian probability.

Anyone who believes that a frequentist approach is superior may be correct (for that particular example), but it must be said that the Bayesian framework is a superset of this naive and trivial card-playing model of probability.

We are no longer trying to determine the probability of landing a `double-six` dice roll, and rather we are trying to figure out what the probability is that Mia (our cat) will be waiting for us on the porch when we get home.

Read more >