A life in words

  • Soy Combatiente

    Desde crío Me conducían el soñar. Todo era imposición. Desde niño Controlaban lo que iba a pensar. Mataban la ilusión. Lo que no mata, me fortalece hoy! Ser combatiente Me fortalece hoy, por hoy, por hoy! Y nunca quise ser igual. Nunca me latió ser del rebaño. Pensar tan diferente hoy, Hoy me tiene vivo…

  • Hubris

    When I saw that the various things I was working on and talking about with people brought a Tennyson poem, Doctrine and Covenants 45, a book about pre-Columbian civilizations, and my own poetic musings together in one place, I was filled with intellectual vanity. At his request, I started telling my professor my thoughts about…

  • Visualizing Texts as Networks

    For a recent project in my text mining class we were required to explore ways of visualizing textual data. This is a tricky problem due to the nature of text, mainly because it is both categorical and sparse. Visualizing numerical data is, relatively speaking, a piece of cake, because real numbers can all be related…

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion…. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations…. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form….John Stuart Mill, On LIberty