Posts

My thoughts and other musings

  • Is Data Science Dying?

    Data Science  · 

    February 2023

    I often get told by aspiring data scientists: “I want to be a data scientist. What’s the best way to do it?”. On one hand, data science is the perfect field to go for the naturally curious and analytically rigorous, plus the compensation ain’t bad. On the other I fight the urge to shake them, and beg, for...

  • Top Ten Metal Albums of 2022

    Music  · 

    all images hosted on metal-archives.com

    Although it seemed like 2022 brought forth a radical shift in the outside world, it felt oddly normal musically. Albums were being churned out. Concerts happened. We got through a whole year largely unscathed from a cataclysmic disaster. It felt like spontaneity was finally allowed to proliferate; I personally did not have “see Eyehategod in...

  • Nobody Escapes The Online Inquisition

    Music  · 

    Thoughts are my own and do not represent that of Vektor.

    The online inquisition claims another victim. Recently, Vektor, a sci-fi thrash band, were signed and dropped by Century Media within a few days. For context, there was a video from 2019 showing frontman David DiSanto shouting at his then-wife and throwing a pillow at her during an altercation....

  • Music NFTs Are Like Battle Jackets

    Music, Crypto  · 

    All photographs are taken by Peter Beste at peterbeste.com

    peterbeste.com

    Symbolic acts, so vivid

    Yet at the same time were invisible

    -Death, Symbolic, Symbolic (1995)

    Music fans have long expressed their individual cultural identity, from showing off their band shirts, to collecting vinyl, to broadcasting their Spotify Year in Reviews. The culture is embedded into the music....

  • Broken Things Crypto Can Solve

     · 

    The Blockchain Hammer

    When you get into crypto, everything else starts looking like it can be fixed with crypto. This was the thinking that drove the “Blockchain not Bitcoin” meme of yesteryear, an idea the market disproved in the 2018 crypto crash. Just because that wave of scammy ICO’s tried to solve problems that didn’t exist (or at least,...

  • CSA Challenge - A Midsummer Cornucopia

    Cooking  · 

    A CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture, is a service that delivers produce from a farm directly to the consumer. I subscribe to Angelic Organics, a farm from Caledonia, Illinois* (they’re not paying me to plug them, but they’re great!). Each CSA delivery is unique in its own way, and with that comes new culinary challenges. This is part...

  • Why Exploring a Cuisine is Best Done Inauthentically

    Cooking  · 

    When in your kitchen, do as you do

    Lately, I’ve felt the strongest desire for culinary exploration that I can remember. The lockdown has imposed a scarcity of resources, forming conditions ripe for culinary ingenuity that I’ve drawn plenty of inspiration from. At the same time, the lockdown has derailed my travel plans, leaving a void for adventure that I...

  • Lessons Learned From Surviving the Post-Undergrad Job Hunt

    Personal  · 

    Dear recent grads and those in college,

    Unless you got mad connections, are that mythical post-grad already with 2 years experience somehow, a savant of sorts, or in that top 1% of the talent pool, the post-college-grad unemployment experience can be a hellish and demoralizing experience, with the uncertainty of your future leading to persistent questioning of the worth of...

  • Discovering Descriptive Music Genres Using K-Means Clustering

    Data Science  · 

    I was mulling over what to watch on Netflix one night when it recommended me “Critically Acclaimed, Visually Striking Crime Dramas”. If Netflix can generate eerily descriptive movie ‘genres’, why not extend this to music? Just like movies, we have more ways to describe music than we have existing genres.

    So, I sought to find similarities...