• 9 Posts
  • 731 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’m a spy for Facebook and or the Russian/US government. Maybe something to do with China on the side too, not sure. In my free time I shill BP products to the children in my neighbourhood and have a passive income clubbing seals during my winter break. Due to a debilitating sense of laziness, I invite food delivery workers into my home and have my way with them in lieu of payment. At night I climb unto my roof to look at the star(s) whilst perching over the street and mutter to any night joggers about being vengeance incarnate. My interests include anime, dog-walking, and folding paper cranes.



  • This should be quite easy to do (in principle). Every scientific paper has a doi, and any citation of said paper will create a directed backlink to that paper.

    You can use this to build a connected graph of dois (nodes) bound by references (edges), and then use that as a basis for clustering (e.g. DBSCAN) which would naturally group papers by their topics.

    To represent this in a 2D space you could do fancy embedding using some kind of distance metric between each doi, but you actually don’t need that if you know that one of your 2-axes is going to be time.

    For less fancy embeddings, you can just feed the entire graph into graphviz and it will handle the rest.







  • I was cycling home one evening down a remote unlit path, when I saw this kid slumped up against a tree in a ditch. Concerned, I doubled back and called out to him “hey, are you okay?”

    He didn’t look my way, just quietly responded with some hesitation “…yes.” Unsettled by the hesitation, I asked him again another way “is all well? Do you need help?”

    Again, he barely looks my way and in a very quiet voice responds “…no.” I didn’t know what to do at this point, as a non-native speaker I’d exhausted my conversation options.

    I try to cycle on but do so slowly, looking back at an increasingly skeletal looking figure resting against that tree in that small ditch.

    In the distance I see another cyclist coming way, and I hail him to a stop with my flashlight. The guy thankfully speaks English, and I tell him about the kid and the tree, and to check up on him.

    I ride on a bit more but I look back to see that the other cyclist did stop and appears to be having an equally difficult monotone conversation with the kid too. Resigned to the fact that I did all I could, I cycle on.

    A little bit further down the path I see two kids walking towards me. “Hey!” I cry, “there’s another kid down by that tree over there! Do you know him?”

    “Yeah, he’s our friend” comes the easy reply, and then the kicker, “we’re playing hide and seek.”









  • The one above is my favorite “There are No Flowers in the Real World” by David Lapham (of The Darkness and Batman fame). Anything written by him, Troy Nixey, Gregory Ruth and Paul Chadwick are worth reading.

    • “An Asset to the System” by Troy Nixey
    • “Butterfly” by Dave Gibbons
    • “Deja Vu” by Paul Chadwick
    • “A Path Among Stones” by Gregory Ruth
    • “A Sword of a Different Color” by Troy Nixey
    • “The Miller’s Tale” by Paul Chadwick
    • “Wrong Number” by Vince Evans
    • “Broadcast Depth” by Bill Sienkiewicz
    • “Saviors” by Spencer Lamm

    Skip: “I Kant” and “Run Saga Run” and anything by Peter Bagge. Neil Gaiman also wrote a small story called “Goliath” but it’s not something I clicked with.