rkp8000

I would also highly recommend Gandhi the Man, by Eknath Easwaran.

Another very useful trick I learned for handling criticism, especially when you're standing nervously on stage and the critic is being unfriendly, unreasonable, and unlikely to change their mind about anything:

If you don't feel you can give a quick response in a way that will bring them to your side right away, instead of arguing simply keep a notepad handy and (visibly) take a quick note about what they said and thank them. Most folks that raise unreasonable criticisms at talks just want to be heard, and in my experience they may even suddenly become very friendly to you for visibly acknowledging their comments, opening the door for a productive and constructive conversation.

I love Markdown. I'm a bit surprised, though, that you still can't open a .md file by default in most web browsers. It seems like it should be quite trivial to have the browser automatically convert it to html and display it.

Computing entropies of high-dimensional random vectors for a theoretical neuroscience study. The journey is mostly a repetition of (1) almost giving up because it's completely hopeless, (2) taking a hot shower, (3) realizing there might actually be a path forward, (4) almost giving up because it's completely hopeless.

A notable and interesting point of this article is that convolutions and correlations (convolutions without flipping the filter) are quite a bit more subtle on the sphere than on Cartesian spaces. For a convolution between a function and a filter on R^N you just "slide" the filter around, integrating at each shift, which produces another function on R^N. On a sphere, however, there is not a clear cut way to slide a filter around a sphere. For instance, there are multiple ways to slide a filter centered at the north pole to the south pole, which will result in different filter orientations.

More generally, the space of rotations, which is the argument of the convolution (analogous to the shift amount being the argument of a standard convolution), is 3D (3 Euler angles), whereas the space of points on the sphere is 2D (polar and azimuthal angles). Thus, whereas convolution over R^N returns a function over R^N, convolution over the sphere actually returns a function over the 3D rotation group SO(3). This has interesting consequences for e.g. the convolution theorem on the sphere, which is not as clear cut as simply rewriting the standard convolution theorem in spherical terms.