Well it's happened, again: time has bent. I find myself back where I was, some years ago, writing down what I'm currently sifting through. The topic has changed, as has the urgency around "getting my thoughts out there", but the intent is the same: inscrutable things become less gauzy when I can process them into language.
Years ago, the problem I kept turning over in my head, and hands, through my writing, was the human body. I wanted to understand, and help others understand, the paradox of knowing yourself better than you could ever know anything, yet still adrift in the sea of novel stimuli. How could ourselves continuously surprise us?
Now, I am keyed into the unknow-ability we foist upon ourselves in the form of data.
Anyone who works with data regularly will tell you that complexity is not hard to find. What starts as a few numbers that can be crunched, summed, and visualized into "being known" rapidly careens out of control into deviously dense networks of relationships that resist easy modelling.
But Those Who Are Willing have special tools at their disposal to meet the complexity: data science, and specifically the statistical methods that have driven the recent explosion of "AI". In the face of torrents of data, modern data scientists wield their Neural Nets and loss functions like old-style blacksmiths, pounding what once was (and will be again) too hard to imagine about into a medium that can be discussed, discerned and acted upon.
The story of how I got here -- why my interests have tilted this way, how the human body still relates to this search, what my curiousity is enlivened by -- will fill out future posts. But getting started (again) is wholly the work of the fastai course, which encouraged me to "write about what you learned". So here I am, resurrecting old practices in order to discover something new.
Enjoy!