Author: doodledweller
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Agile
Among the greatest social challenges today is how to help marginalized populations productively with minimum unintended consequences. Especially from a policy perspective, to draft a strategy often comes with assigning attributes to certain groups of people, often with negative statistics such as gun violence, drug abuse, and domestic abuse. These statistics have an unfortunate tendency…
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The Dreamer
Solitude: the state or situation of being alone. To be alone, but not to be lonely is not an innate ability. In fact, we’re born with an opposite inclination. Humans are social animals, meant to bond with our kins; and to belong is to feel safe. Yet, we’re also profoundly alone. One sees the world…
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The Introvert
Some kids spent a day learning how to ride a bicycle, but it took me a week. I still remember being alone on a river bank, dirt high and slope steep, full of tall grass. Then I fell and rolling down with me was the bicycle, all the way to the edge of the water. …
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High Rises
Bakers love high rises. A tall and fluffy loaf of bread, a crisp and airy pâte-à-choux, a poofy and pillowy soufflé, a bed of cloud of meringue are the crowning achievement worthy of a brag. Previously, this sort of baking could only be done in a communal oven, which only existed in highly populated towns.…
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Making Bread
I’m no expert at bread making. I’ve tried my hands at sourdoughs, baguettes, bagels, flat breads, soda breads, and they mostly came up short of my expectation. But over the years, I’ve gathered a decent dose of learning for an appreciable bread dough. It makes for a good table bread, to be doused in swirls…
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What Women Want
Within the last century, women’s rights have undisputedly progressed in strides. From Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Rosa Parks, we can’t help but to admire generations of trailblazers who fought so that today’s women can afford the rights to equal pay, to their body, and to vote. In the professional arena, we…
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Treats
Amidst the holiday season, take some time for food that makes you feel warm and cozy. It could be something decadent, festive, or something that you savored in childhood. I’m sharing a few favorite recipes that I’ve learned over the years. Egg RollsFried cylindrical rolls are a ubiquitous Asian food, but their variations lie in…
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Flakes, V: Kouign-Amann
I think of the kouign-amann as a decadent croissant – caramelized, sweet, flaky, and buttery. It is extraordinary that so much sugar and butter could be stuffed inside a yeasted wheat dough to rise into a layered and puffy pastry. In the realm of yeasted sweet bread with large amounts of butter and sugar, such…
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A Rose from Homer’s Grave
This is the third installment of my experiment to leverage machine learning for creative writing. In the first installment, the RNN model was utilized to train text prediction based on characters. In the second installment, the pre-trained T5 model was fine-tuned on a range of sequence length, from 1 to 512 words. For the third,…
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Parachuting
I had composed a list of spaceflight animations for my kid since he was a toddler. They mostly run at ~5 minutes, but his favorite was the longest one, depicting the Space Launch System’s exploration missions to the Moon and to Mars. Recently, all the excitements around the launch of Artemis-1 got him interested in…
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