Internet Favourites

Sometimes I stumble upon things on the internet that deeply fascinate me. I always feel an urge to share them with my friends - and often feel disappointed with underwhelming reactions. I've now made peace with the fact that every mind is different - what resonates with me often won't resonate with my friends in the same way, or at least, not at the same time. In the end, our fascination for something is less dependant on its quality than it is dependant on our (unconscious) openness to it at a given time. Oh and that applies to people too.

Who knows - maybe your mind is currently open for some fascination? Maybe you'll find something here...


  • Something Left Unsaid - Lyle Mays Interview. This one really shook me for some reason, so much wisdom in it about his vision of the music industry and the process of creativity - of course, it can extend to so many different fields. I really went through a hardcore Lyle Mays phase - this was after I saw Pat Metheny’s concerts in Montreux - I of course was completely mindblown, started digging and found out the extent of Myle’s Genius.

  • Universal Mind of Bill Evans This shook my world when I first saw this in my teens. It still leaves me inspired everytime I hear it.

  • Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?. Easily one of my top 5 favourite papers of all time. The idea is so obvious yet so clever: could we use modern Neuroscience methodologies to understand a known “complex-distributed system”: a microprocessor. Turns out that (rather unsurprisingly if you asked me) - modern Neuroscience techniques (connectomics, ablation studies etc…) are rather poor tools to get good insights into how a microprocess works. Surely they must better suited to understand the brain - a orders-of-magnitude more compelx system? Lol.

  • Carlos Kleiber Conducting Tristan Und Isolde This is a mystical (you’ll understand my use of this word once you look at the vid) recording of Kleiber conducting Tristan Und Isolde’s Liebestod from the pit. Luckily, we also have the same recordings for the Love Duet and the Prelude - and they’re equally fantastic. Watching Kleiber conduct is just magical - the music flows from him in such a unique way, and every single hand gesture, facial expression, and body movement embodies the character and direction of the music. And it all looks so effortless, so natural. He’s everything I dream of when it comes to orchestra conducting.

  • Paul Graham - How to Write Usefully Paul Graham is one of the most compelling writers of this generation. This is one essay of his where he teaches us about writing. An essay I surely should go through frequently given my growing love for writing.

  • Peter Thiel’s Religion - David Perell. Peter Thiel is certainly controversial character - which, regardless of one’s opinion on him, makes him interesting to looking into. This is what David Perell did, and what he found led him in a completely different path - that of Rene Girard and his famour Mimetic Theory.

  • You and Your Research - Richard Hamming. Read this from a recommendation by Jimmy before the start of my PhD. Inspiring read that one should go back to very frequently while conductin research.

  • Neural Network Training Makes Beautiful Fractals A beautiful short piece of work where the author performed a grid search over learning rates for a very simple network. The results is some absolutely fantastic fractal visuals of hyperparameter space convergence/divergence. Indeed, this is not so surprising - after all - “Both [fractals and DNNs] involve repeatedly applying a function to its own output. In both cases, that function has hyperparameters that control its behavior. In both cases the repeated function application can produce outputs that either diverge to infinity or remain happily bounded depending on those hyperparameters.” Obvious - isn’t it?

  • Nadia Boulanger - Par Bruno Monsaingeon Easily the most influential piano teacher of the past century, this documentary, by the fantastic Bruno Monsaigeon pictures her as well as many of her great students discussing music, and showcasing her genius.

  • Sviatoslav Richter - Par Bruno Monsaingeon A documentary that’s very dear to me on Richter, one of my all time favourite artists.

  • The Bitter Lessons - Richard Sutton Gotta love the plain HTML of this article - somewhat funny given the topic. Every scientist should read this - especially anyone interested in computing. This is what made me understand that Neuromorphic Engineering, as fascinating and beautiful as it was, wasn’t gonna make the cut.

  • The Coffe-House of Surat - Leo Tolstoy. A short “coffee-house chat” written by Tolstoy, where everyone talks about why their religion is the best one. You’ve guessed it, no one manages to convince anyone else - but they do find some form of (unexpected)agreement in the end…

  • Lennie Tristano - Tangerine Look at that left hand… Oh and he’s blind, of course.

  • Tantacrul: The Battle for how We Read Music Excellent “documentary-movie” (yes I wouldn’t call this a “Youtube video”) on the history and evolution of music notation.

  • The Language of The New Music - Wittgenstein & Schoenberg This started my Wittgenstein obsession phase. I’m glad it ended though.

  • Why I’m Awlays Late - Tim Urban A classic essay - the first one I ever read from Tim Urban.