As I write this post, my bathtub faucet is dripping ever so slightly in the distance. The plumbing is very old and squeaky, and the valves don't work very well. When you want to change the water temperature, you have to carefully turn both the hot and cold
I love minutia because they—like Leibniz's monads—so often reflect important features of the larger world around them. This is particularly true in mathematics where minor details of definitions can reflect years of collective thought and refinement by generations of mathematicians, and where changes to those details
While studying machine learning, I've been struck by the many philosophical parallels to human learning and cognition—particularly in the ways that both humans and machines make errors. We're all familiar with the fact that our human mental models of the world, shaped by our experiences,