The Many-Themed Notebooks of Dr. Shalizi
Who is this person who looks like Trotsky*, writes like Nietzsche and since 1999 has gifted the neuroscience world with his opinions on almost everything of interest to neuroscience researchers? It is Cosma Shalizi, whose chaotic itinerancy has landed him for a time at Carnegie Mellon University (while simultaneously bifurcating to a point attractor at the Santa Fe Institute). He states, My more recent work falls into the areas of heavy tails, learning theory for time series, Bayesian consistency, neuroscience, network analysis and causal inference, with some overlap. But don’t worry, these are only what occupy his thoughts today, or maybe yesterday. His Notebooks site contains over 600 musings – Collective Cognition, Symbolic Dynamics, Pragmatism, Information Geometry – being but a few examples from an extremely diverse collection.
My own experience: refreshing, intellectually enzymatic, really good annotated bibliographies. He pays attention to questions like: Where does this concept fit in? How important is it? How is it being used and how might it be used?
*In the picture, Shalizi appears to resemble Trotsky. Perhaps because it is a picture of Trotsky, who resembles Shalizi.
Posted September 17, 2012 by Dr. Henri Montandon
