Texts

I’ve long intended to write about the comparison between the metric and American measurement systems. It’s a topic that periodically resurfaces in American discourse, often sparking passionate debates about tradition versus global standardization. It’s fascinating to reflect on how my own attitude towards this debate has evolved. When I first arrived in America, I had to adapt to these unfamiliar measurements, and I initially resisted. “What’s with all these illogical units?” I thought. It wasn’t even the individual measures that bothered me most — after all, what’s inherently wrong with an inch, and how is a centimeter radically better? No, it was the seeming lack of logic in the system as a whole that irked me. Why are there 12 inches in a foot but three feet in a yard? And then 16 ounces in a pound? It all seemed arbitrary and inexplicable. ...

I made my first machine learning project when I was 12. I used 24 matchboxes, 55 (give or take) cherry pits, gouache paint, paper, scissors, glue, and colored pencils. That was all I needed to start working with machine learning in the 1980s. My dad gave me a book by Martin Gardner describing a simple game and a machine for playing it. He called the game Hexapawn because it used just six pawns on a 3x3 board. ...