The working title, “How to BASH one out in 30 minutes,” was rejected by committee.

This is an article I wrote in tandem with a lunch-hour presentation for my work (which was then cancelled due to COVID). If you’re in a hurry, you can get a quick overview from my slides. I’ll assume you’re familiar with unit-testing as a concept (see the slides for a bit of a refresher) and just want a quick overview of useful tools available in Python.

For my first year introduction to Geographic Information Systems, I was tasked with an enjoyably nonspecific final project: “essay on maps”. They expected the class to go away, do some data analysis, and write a report on what we found. I decided to take them a little more literally.

[CN: transphobia, gender dysphoria, sexual harassment, rape]

Recently, I had a long discussion with some of my partner’s friends about the safety implications of trans access to single-sex spaces: specifically the risk posed by men pretending to be trans, rather than by trans-women themselves. These are highly intelligent, well-educated and well-meaning people – by no means were they suggesting trans people shouldn’t have access, only that they were worried that it would allow for abuse. Ultimately, I think their concerns are misplaced, but I think they’re probably representative of a large swathe of the population in both concerns and their self-confessed lack of engagement with the issue. They aren’t involved in the wider discussion currently going on, often in bad faith, lead by transphobic “feminists” who wield exactly these misplaced concerns in order to curtail the rights of trans people – but this discussion is now reaching boiling point, and so it’s that which I want to talk about today.

When defining neural networks, even in a framework as concise as Keras, you often find yourself writing far too much gumpf.