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In 8 hours, family and friends will gather at our home to celebrate my graduation. It’s a big deal - I left Kenya for Princeton, graduated and now work at Microsoft. I’ll probably need to say something at some point. Here’s that thing. I’m humbled, not because I’m striving to be virtuous, but from realizing that my current state is a series of non-deterministic yet compounding luck [TRoL] , [Housel] ....

Today the sun is so angry that it has descended a few feet to prove its power. Point noted. I adjust my baseball cap in self-defense. Similar metaphor in Catheryne Valente’s “The Sin of America” : There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes so near to earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everyone else. Two people on a farm....

On graduating, I pictured myself blossoming into a voracious autodidact. Unlike those pesky pre-requisites scattered through college, the topics I’d dive into will be 100% my choice! Two years after graduation, I’m underwhelmed by my progress so far. This post examines my current predicament. OneNote Notebooks Fortunately, OneNote is not part of M365 else I would need to pay for continued access. Useful for annotating primary sources. Handwritten annotations make me feel as if I’m actually learning something....

I recently downloaded citations data from Aminer . I seek interesting papers to read during my free time [note]. The database has the following structure: Table Columns Remarks papers paper_id, title, venue, year, number of citations, abstract 3,079,007 papers from 1936 to 2018 authors name, appearance order, paper_id 1,766,547 distinct names (out of 9,476,165 names) paper_references paper_id, cited_paper_id 25,166,994 references Approach 1: Citation Count For one, we can answer that with a SQL query: SELECT papers....