Talks & Interviews
Geometry to Algebra and Back: 4000 Years of Papers
Video of an invited talk that I presented at the 2023 edition of the Papers We Love Conference at Strange Loop. A complete transcript with corrections, references, and additional notes can be found here.
Stop Writing Dead Programs
Video of an invited talk that I presented at the 2022 edition of Strange Loop. A complete transcript with corrections, references, and additional notes can be found here. I have been informed that this is the most popular talk in the history of the conference.
Computational Creativity
Video of an invited talk that I presented at the 2019 edition of the Clojure-focused ClojuTRE conference in Helsinki.
The Aesthetics of Programming Tools
Interviewed by Ivan Reese for the Future of Coding Podcast. The topic was nominally the aesthetics of programming tools, but the conversation ranged widely.
The defn Podcast
Interviewed by Ray McDermott and Vijay Kiran for the defn Podcast.
The Creative Independent
Interviewed by Rebecca Hiscott for the The Creative Independent. Although I have been giving interviews since the 80s, this is probably my favorite entirely because of Rebecca’s excellent interviewing and editing skills.
Ongoing Projects
Clerk
Clerk is an open source programmer’s assistant for Clojure that combines the advantages of notebooks like Jupyter, Smalltalk-style Moldable Development, and using one’s favorite editing environment. We published a paper on the system at Programming '23, though I strongly recommend the online version over the print one. In addition, our paper on the industrial application of Clerk in the logistics space was presented at Splash/LIVE 2024.
Classic HCI Videos
A collection of classic UX/HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002, presented in the graphical style of the era.
Past Project Highlights
Made to Measure
Berlin-based art collective Laokoon produced a documentary film in 2021 to highlight the privacy implications of using large social media platforms. I helped with the project by training an ML-based voice clone of the film’s protagonist in two languages. Collaboration with Studio NAND, who produced excellent process documentation about the project, which won gold at the Information is Beautiful awards and a DAME (Data Protection Media Prize).
Anyone Still Working Here?
I assisted a bit with the handwriting and geometric projection used by this industrial robot on permanent exhibition at the Futurium in Berlin since 2019. Collaboration with Studio NAND.
Stem Machine
I created a machine learning model that was, in 2019, the best in the world at extracting stems from final mixes. For example, here is the recovered vocal from this thirty second clip of the Beatles classic A Day in the Life.
Maria.cloud
Maria, named for Maria Montessori, is a computational notebook and teaching environment for the Clojure programming language. Collaboration with Matt Huebert and Dave Liepmann. A talk on Maria given at ClojureD 2018 is available here. Maria has been used to teach programming to novices and classical mechanics to MIT graduate students.
Popular Writing
What Does it Mean to Buy a GIF?
An attempt to clarify the NFT (Non-Fungible Token) phenomenon, with an eye toward the history of art markets.
Homesteading
An explanation as to why this site is the way that it is, RSS-feed and all, in the age of social media.
Leopards in the Source Code
An exploration of code re-factoring through the lens of a Franz Kafka parable.
Finding the Best Fighters
An computational method for rating MMA fighters based on their performance in PRIDE FC and the UFC, along with some visualizations of the results.