Julian's Polymath Explorations

 (Updated Nov. 2022) Wouldn't it be fantastic to have a "butler" to help us as we constantly face drowning in information? That need was crushingly pressing for me , as a polymath with a thirst for knowledge in several fields, not to mention numerous very technical jobs over the years, several complex research projects, old notes from college and grad school, an endless stream of online courses I take , a tech startup I founded and used to run, the many conferences I attend, life in general, and even hobbies that tend to generate abundant information (such as flying airplanes and studying multiple foreign languages!)   I was immensely eager for some sort of powerful assistance, something so helpful that I could poetically describe as an " annex " to my brain.. In this blog entry, I'll describe how deep frustration with existing software tools led to the start of the open-source BrainAnnex.org project, a web-based knowledge representation and manageme...

Informative, fascinating class and a VERY entertaining professor, with a delightful understated humor and clear explanations, motivations and examples. I was expecting a class entirely about Mathematical Logic... so I was surprised (a good surprise, it turned out) when I discovered that this class roams much more broadly into the Philosophy of Logic.  I was satisfied that enough chapters were about Mathematical Logic - and actually I found the broader context interesting.  For example, I had long heard about Aristotle's syllogisms , but had never looked into them. While there are no Math prerequisites for this class, you'll probably find your head spin by the middle of the course, unless you have a "mathematical predisposition."  (I have a Master's in Math, so for me it was a fun and light "feasting on proofs"...  but a lot of people might feel differently!)  Nonetheless, this great course is quite worthwhile to at least START... ...

Last updated May 2023 Q: "How is aging a disease?" A: It's a dynamic system that veers away from its homeostasis (normal equilibrium point): hence a form of slow-progressing illness. Labeling it as 'natural' is a surrender to our traditional state of ignorance and powerlessness, which fortunately is beginning to be changed! Aging is "normal" only from the point of view of the "selfish gene", for whom the body is a disposable carrier. Individuals organisms - for whom self-preservation has a different meaning than for genes - have received scant help from evolution... with rare exceptions such as the T. dohrnii jellyfish (which I discuss here )... but now the time has finally arrived for our rational design to remedy some of the cellular flaws that evolution never bothered to correct!   The above is my standard answer to an oft-asked question. The science of aging is by all evidence very misunderstood by the general public.  Hype,...

Time for the opening shot of a series about Semantic Technology , and in particular contrasting-and-comparing the opposing (but perhaps ultimately complementary) camps of:   RDF Triple Stores , aka Triples-Based Graphs.   For example, Blazegraph or Apache Jena   (Labeled) Property Graphs .  For example, Neo4j or Blazegraph (For this article, I'll assume that you have at least a passing acquaintance with both.  Here is background info on Triplestores and Property Graphs ) It’s my opinion that modeling in terms of Subject/Predicate/Object triples (aka RDF ) might be appealing to mathematicians or philosophers for its minimalist foundation (though a lot of baroque add-on’s quickly come out of the closet!) Modeling in terms of (Labeled) Property Graphs might be appealing to computer scientists, because such graphs appear more usable and less clunky once you start actually doing something with them. Perhaps because I straddle both the Math and CS camps...

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” -Socrates.  [UPDATED Mar. 2021] Acquiring knowledge has been a hobby of mine since 4th grade, so it's no surprise that I'm the proverbial "kid in the candy store" when it comes to online courses!   As of writing, I have followed over 20 so far, and trying to decide what the next one will be... Utopia or Dystopia? You ever find yourself imagining the future, and wondering whether it'll turn out to be “utopian” or “dystopian”? Well, the state of higher education in the United States is decisively dystopian , with its absurdly ballooned costs and runaway student loans (a “bubble” that may burst sooner or later, mark my words!),  BUT there’s a counterpoint that is decisively utopian , namely the explosive rise of free online courses 😊 Here’s a brief 2012 Ted talk about the rise of free online courses , dated but still of interest. The gist of that TED talk is that online learning has com...

You might recall, around the year 2000, a Grand Breakthrough in biology: the complete sequencing of human DNA.   People hoped that proteins would be next.  But now, about 20 years later, we're not at that level of understanding when it comes to PROTEINS rather than DNA...  Why? Because proteins are devilishly complex . If you're managing a database (relational or semantic) featuring proteins, you might think that the entities (records) of your database are simply "proteins", and that you're just going to need a number of fields (attributes) to describe those records...  Right?  Wrong! A little basic biology brush-up for starters...  Recall that DNA is a sequence of 4 "letters" ( nucleotides .)  Proteins are sequences of 20 "letters" (amino acids. )  So, why the immense complexity of proteins? There are 20 200  possible amino-acid sequences for a 200-residue protein, of which the natural evolutionary process has sampled only an in...

What is Time?  And why does it seem to "flow" in just one direction ("arrow of time")? Few questions could be more spellbinding - and almost intractable - than that! In this blog, I'll periodically include detailed reviews of some online courses I've taken. REVIEW OF ONLINE COURSE " Mystery of Time " (course by Cal Tech prof. Sean Carroll, produced by "The Great Courses" in 2012) Another fascinating course by Sean Carroll!  He's very ambitious to not only tackle the Universe - and the difficult abstract concept of Time's Arrow (direction) - but also to make it accessible (sort of) to a (serious and determined) lay audience. Speaking of "layperson", even though that's the intended audience, I'd only recommend this course to people who are used to, at the VERY least, watching (and enjoying!) documentaries on topics such as quantum mechanics and relativity. Let's face it: to seriously tackle...

“ VALENTINA ” [UPDATED JUNE 2021] - Whether you're a hobbyist, or someone who just needs a good desktop computer, or an IT professional who wants a wider breath of knowledge, or a gamer who needs a performant machine, you might have contemplated at some point whether to build your own desktop computer. If you're a hobbyist, I think it's a great project.  If you're an IT professional - especially a "coder" - I urge you to do it: in my opinion, a full-fledged Computer Scientist absolutely needs breath, ranging from the likes of Shannon's Information Theory and the Halting Problem - all the way down to how transistors work. And what about someone who just needs a good desktop computer?  A big maybe on that - but perhaps this blog entry will either help you, or scare you off for your own good! To build, or not to build, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of OEM's cutting corners and limit...