An exploration of the incongruity between the Olympic Games and the selfish individualism of late-capitalism. — The primary cultural discriminator between Millennials and Zoomers in Australia is the fact that only the former experienced the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. If the towers falling twelve months later marked our collective loss of innocence, then these games were our sentimental zenith. The depressive malaise that hangs spectre-like over…

An examination of America’s decline through the Neo-Western film genre. — 2007 was a period of burgeoning insecurity for the USA — it had been six years since the towers fell (unofficially terminating the American Century), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were looking more and more disastrous by the day, and though the Global Financial Crisis had not fully taken…

A Meandering Odyssey Through Post-Truthism, Reality TV, Food Pyramids, UFOlogists, Deep Fakes and Complexity Theory — T̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶w̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶i̶s̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶w̶ ̶-̶ ̶A̶r̶i̶s̶t̶o̶t̶l̶e̶ All I know is that I don’t know nuthin — Operation Ivy Introduction (We Found a Thylacine) For a brief 6 hour period last week, I was captivated by rumours that a family of Thylacines (or Tasmanian Tigers) had been spotted in…

‘Tis the season to be watching lots of cricket and once again I have obliged. Yes, every summer I plonk myself down on the lounge and observe approximately seven million hours of my favourite sport, but last year I decided to spend some of the time between overs working on…

For the past few weeks, I’ve been engaged in an email exchange with my favourite anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky. I reached out to him initially to ask whether recent developments in ANNs (artificial neural networks) had caused him to reconsider his famous linguistic theory Universal Grammar. Our conversation touched on the…

A summary of the best free online resources for learning all things Bayesian — For many data scientists, the topic of Bayesian Inference is as intimidating as it is intriguing. While some may be familiar with Thomas Bayes’ famous theorem or even have implemented a Naive Bayes classifier, the prevailing attitude that I have observed is that Bayesian techniques are too complex to code…

3 lessons from the pandemic for all working data scientists — The COVID-19 pandemic has been a tragic, yet illuminating case study in how valuable data (and by extension statistics and forecasting models) can be in a crisis. It has also exposed numerous flaws in society’s relationship with data. While as a data scientist it has been exciting to see terms…

Implementing a Genetic Algorithm from scratch in Python — Genetic Algorithms are a family of optimisation techniques that loosely resemble evolutionary processes in nature. It may be a crude analogy, but if you squint your eyes, Darwin’s Natural Selection does roughly resemble an optimisation task where the aim is to craft organisms perfectly suited to thrive in their environments…