Entries by mdcalabro

Clustering Images with Autoencoders and Attention Maps

(Note: You can find the full notebook for this project here, or you can just scroll down to see the cool images it makes.) I recently approached a new project where I wanted to create a model that sorted images into similar, automatically-generated groups. I hadn’t done an unsupervised clustering project with neural networks before, […]

Short List for Healthy Living

Here’s what healthy living means to me, in its most basic components: 1. Put good things in my body. Pretty much the only things that count are water and vegetables. A good protein and some fish oil. Most other things are so-so. 2. Don’t put bad things in my body. Sugar is the main thing […]

Dichotomy and Integration

So many things in life feel impossibly true. Or rather, they could be true, if only their opposite didn’t also feel so obviously true. What’s the deal? Are our minds too rigid to understand nuanced things? Is there some deeper universal truth that manifests itself in two apparently incompatible ways? Like wave-particle duality in quantum […]

#015: 20-Minute Breath/Body/Heart Meditation

If you’ve tried out some of the 10-minute meditations, see if you can find twenty minutes for this sit. If it feels daunting to do that, notice where those feelings are coming from. Does it feel like you don’t have enough time? Are you worried you’ll get impatient? Is it just scary? Try it out, […]

Taking the Plunge Part V: Sadness and Living

Where to start. I just turned 33. I feel kind of old. I have a knee injury from playing ultimate frisbee. I live in Portland, OR, and bought a house. I saw the total solar eclipse and it was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen (Chile/Argentina 2019 anyone??). I’ve been exploring parts of myself […]