Nico Foley

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and Adrien Baranes, among others, followed this up this line of thinking around 12 years ago, with a rigorous mathematical definition of curiosity.. I don’t think the monkey results were ever published, but under their criterion neither humans nor monkeys are curious

His DC office lets you leave a message if you press 3

When I was living in Prague (~20 years ago) the fare system was you either bought tickets (stamped at boarding) or had a photo-pass, there were random checks at any time during travel, fine was equivalent to a 6 month pass.. I didn’t see any fare evasion (I got checked about once a month)

My next door neighbor, Roxanne Lanquetot, died this morning at the age of 92. Her husband Guy, and son Sergei who had schizophrenia predeceased her. She spent her life teaching, in social work, and with NARSAD. She was a delightful woman who eventually pushed me towards psychiatric neuroscience. RIP

I think there is a dichotomy between the constant lies of the authoritarian right and the endemic hallucinations of LLMs, and that things like deep convolutional networks can do amazing things that no one notices

For the record, Apple doesn’t either.. need to reverify my MacBook WiFi logins from my phone all the time

I can confirm that I am extra careful and nitpicking with authors I know and respect for two reasons 1) I probably tend to agree with them, which means blind-spots through inattention and 2) I want them to produce the best work (that I know they can do)

Beta traveling waves in monkey frontal and parietal areas encode recent reward history - PubMed Brain function depends on neural communication, but the mechanisms of this communication are not well understood. Recent studies suggest that one form of neural communication is through traveling waves (TWs)-patterns of neural oscillations that propagate within and between brain areas. We show that …

So under this interpretation prior trial no rewards (even if predicted) are a distraction

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37669966/

There’s actually an equestrian statue of Franz Siegel at the end of my block.. if only he’d have been half as good a commander as a recruiter

I’m reading Pride and Pleasure by Amanda Vaill about the Schuyler sisters, and it is fabulous

NYC for life!

On a cruise (don’t cry for me) that has starlink internet.. they are blocking the Bluesky app 🤬

All 4 non-military people I know who’ve done late in life PhDs got started by going to a few conferences, talking to PIs whose lab has interesting posters/talks and seeing if there’s some side project that they’ve always wanted to do, but never gotten around to, that you can execute

Isn’t that like a phenomenally good way to clear your mind? I try to keep my email read, but over three computers I have about 500 tabs open, and clicking on the wrong one.. oh boy

Angband and many other rogue-likes, I thought Horizon: Zero Dawn maxed your power mid-game, some of the expansions for Pathfinder: WOTR

Note to file: do not try this with legacy network IT systems

There is a great neighborhood bar/pizza joint, Woody’s, in Boston that I frequented in grad school.. loved chatting with people at the bar.. went 0 for around 150 on who is Adam Smith

You witnessed the playoff debut of two great young pitchers who we’ll be hearing more from

Dunno if you can fix the toothbrush, but reorienting is as my cousin says, toots Magoots!

Eat eggs, your preferred style, preferably on toast

I’m just glad nobody died.. those buildings are death traps.. no fire breaks, wooden frames, high ceilings that provide a lot of oxygen even if the facade isn’t breached

Sienna knows how to party (I have several Palio flags)

There’s something about using a controller for something that’s “fast” like in Madden or GTA and using HOTAS for something that has momentum that feels right.. the only game that I think has gotten that feeling right for MKB recently was the Horizon games

No love for HOTAS? Some of my favorite gaming experiences was playing MechWarrior 2/3/4 and Wing Commander 3/4/5 with a real joystick

My 4th reader decided to let me know during my defense that he, not the Japanese group who I thought I’d tracked down through the literature, had invented one of the experiments I was modeling.. knowing his sense of humor I’m sure he waited deliberately, I found it memorable

You’re correct, but I couldn’t think of a better word

Counter point: hire a Turkish or Iranian woman who has made it through the PhD process and you will have someone who is almost unimaginably competent in all things (Iranian men also get a very high score, don’t know enough Turkish men)..

I find getting a Bloody Mary mix (no alcohol) as the first drink really helps.. it has enough enough salt to be really unpleasant if you have more than one.. but in the lower oxygen level on a plane it seems to help a lot

The inkhorn scholars are never quite dead

Not exactly an answer to your question but this goes back a long way, to strophes and antistrophes in Greek theater, where the chorus would make a poetic argument while moving from right to left, then make a counter argument of the same length moving left to right