IS Group Archive

© Philip Rubin, Elliot Saltzman, and Simon Levy. All Rights Reserved.

The IS Group (“Interesting Stuff”) is an informal group of scientists and other related individuals that meets periodically, originally in the New Haven, Connecticut area and centered around Haskins Laboratories, to discuss cutting-edge issues in science, technology, and culture, and to foster innovative research collaborations across multiple institutions. The group was founded in the early 1980’s by Philip Rubin and Elliot Saltzman. Below is a listing of some of the earlier meetings.

Previous Meetings

Date and location: 24 February 2024, 6:00 PM, Eastern Time, at the home of Mark Tiede, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and via Zoom

Topic: Genes, Maniacs, Monica

Main Readings:

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History, 2016

Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC, 2023.

Graphic Novel: Daniel Clowes, Monica, 2023.

Video: The Hunt. 2020

Related Books:

Jacques Monod. Chance and Necessity. 1970

Erwin Schrödinger. What is Life? 1944 (PDF here)

Erwin Schrödinger. Mind and Matter. 1958 (PDF here)

—————

Date and location: 15 April 2023, 7:00 PM, Eastern Time, in person at Philip Rubin’s home in Connecticut and via Zoom

Topic: The Geometry of Life

Main Readings:

Jordan Ellenberg, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else, 2022.

Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World, 2020.

Graphic Novel: Deena Mohamed, Shubeik Lubeik, 2023.

Supplementary Reading: Andrea Roli, Johannes Jaeger, and Stuart A. Kauffman. How Organisms Come to Know the World: Fundamental Limits on Artificial General Intelligence. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 9, January 2022.

Video: Smoking Causes Coughing (2020)

——-

Date and location: 30-31 July 2022, at the summer home of Elliot Saltzman in New Hampshire

Topic: Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSA)

Main Readings:

Ross Gayler. Vector Symbolic Architectures answer Jackendoff's challenges for cognitive neuroscience. Semantic Scholar, Corpus ID: 5943414, Dec. 13, 2004

Charles Lowney et al.Connecting 21st Century Connectionism and Wittgenstein

Ross W. Gayler, Simon D. Levy, and Rens Bod. Explanatory Aspirations and the Scandal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the BICA Society, August 2010, 42-51. 2010

Ross W. Gayler and Simon D. Levy. A Distributed Basis For Analogical Mapping. Conference paper. 2009

Non-fiction Reading (optional): Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann

Supplementary Reading (optional)Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Video: All-American Murder (1991)

——-

Date and location: 6:30PM Saturday, 9 April 2022, home of Mark Tiede, Old Saybrook CT

Topic: Causality and Counterfactuals

Nonfiction Reading:

Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

Chiara Marletto, The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals

Tanaka et al., Recent Advances in Physical Reservoir Computing: A Review. Neural Networks, 115, 2019

Fiction Reading:

Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries

    All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries, Vol I

    Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries, Vol II

Video: Big Bug, 2022

Food: Burgers and brats, cooked to order.

——-

Date and location: 6:30PM Friday, 13 August 2021, home of Mark Tiede, Old Saybrook CT

Topic: Modern Physics

Nonfiction Reading:

Frank Wilczek. Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality
Sabine Hossenfelder.  Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray

Fiction Reading: C. Robert Cargill, Sea of Rust

Video: Machete Kills, 2013

——-

Date and location: 6:30PM Friday, 18 June 2021, via Zoom

Topic: The Nuclear Age

Nonfiction Reading:

Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

Music: The Dead Milkmen, Vince Lombardi Service Center

 ——-

Date and location: 6:30PM Friday, 29 January 2021, via Zoom

Topic: Ramsey & Wittgenstein

Nonfiction Reading:

Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers

Lars Iyer, Wittgenstein Jr

Video: He Never Died, 2015, via Netflix Party

——-

Date and location: 6PM Wednesday, 28 April 2020, via Zoom

Topic: Quantitative Finance

Nonfiction Reading:

Gregory Zuckerman, The Man Who Solved the Market

Scott Patterson, Dark Pools

Scott Patterson, The Quants

Emanual Derman, My Life as a Quant

Fiction Reading: Blake Crouch, Recursion

Video: Life After Beth, 2014, via Netflix Party

_____

Date and location: 6PM Friday, 23 February 2018, home of Mark Tiede, Madison CT

Topic: Cognitive Biases

Nonfiction Reading: Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project

Supplementary Nonfiction;

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

Gerd Gigerenzer, Reasoning the Fast and Frugal Way: Models of Bounded Rationality

Simon’s comment: If you could have a 100% chance of getting $1,000 today, or a 50% chance of $2,000 tomorrow, what are the three largest cities in Paraguay?

Fiction Reading: China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

Video: The Room, 2003

_____

Date and location: Wednesday, 19 April 2017, home of Mark Tiede, Madison CT

Topic: Other Minds

Nonfiction Reading: Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Fiction Reading: Zachary Mason, Void Star

Video: Sharktopus, 2010. Simon’s (p)review: Inter-sharksonality!

_____

Date and location: Saturday, 18 February 2017, home of Philip Rubin, Fairfield, CT

Topic: Deep Learning

Nonfiction Reading: Nikhil Buduma, Fundamentals of Deep Learning. O’Reilly, 2015

Supplementary Nonfiction Readings: Understanding LSTM Networks

Fiction Reading: Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

Video: Stalker, 1979

Simon’s review: Three words: This movie f***in’ sucked. Okay, that’s four words, but this movie sucked so bad I can’t even think straight.

_____

Date and location: Saturday, 09 August 2014, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT

Topic: The Grammar of Action

Nonfiction Reading: Ray Jackendoff (2009), Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure (Jean Nicod Lectures) . MIT Press. Elliot suggests focusing on chapter 1, 2, and 4.

Supplementary Nonfiction Readings:

Richard Granger (2006), Engines of the Brain, AI Magazine, 27, 15-32.

Peter Ford Dominey (2005), Emergence of Grammatical Constructions: Evidence from Simulation and Grounded Agent Experiments Connection Science, 17(3-4) 289-306.

Fiction Reading: Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice. Orbit (2013).

Video: TBD

_____

Date and location: Saturday, 31 May 2014, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, Connecticut

Topic: High Finance

Nonfiction Reading: Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. W.W. Norton & Company (2014).

Supplementary Nonfiction Reading: Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. W.W. Norton & Company (2011).

Fiction Reading: Max Barry, Lexicon: A Novel. Penguin Books (2014).

Video: The Machine Girl, 2008

Food: Barbecue

_____

Date and location: Saturday, 26 October 2013, home of Philip Rubin, Fairfield, Connecticut

Topic: Hacking

Nonfiction Reading: Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell . Grove Press (2013).

Supplementary Nonfiction Reading: T.J. O’Connor, Violent Python: A Cookbook for Hackers, Forensic Analysts, Penetration Testers and Security Engineers . Syngress (2012).

Fiction Reading: Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others. Small Beer Press (2013).

Video: Cube, 1997.   Taylor Swift

Food: Chinese or Indian food

_____

Date and location: Saturday, 29 June 2013, apartment of Philip Rubin, Washington, DC

Topic: Signals and Boundaries

Nonfiction Reading: John Holland, Signals and Boundaries. MIT Press (2012).

Fiction Reading: Rudy Rucker, Turing and Burroughs: A Beatnick SF Novel. Transreal Books (2012).

Food: Great Wall of Szechuan.

Video: John Dies at the End, 2012

_____

Date and location: Saturday, 15 December 2012, apartment of Philip Rubin, Washington, DC

Topic: Wild Wild Life

Nonfiction Reading:

Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses. University of Chicago Press (2012).

Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies. Harper (2011)

Supplementary Nonfiction: Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows. Scientific American (2012)

Fiction Reading: David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas. Random House (2004)

Food: Lalibela Ethiopean Restaurant

Video: The Raid: Redemption, 2011

_____

Date and location: Saturday, 03 September 2011, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT

Topic: Information

Nonfiction Reading:

James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, A Flood. Pantheon (2011).

Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Vintage (2009).

Supplementary Nonfiction: Nigel Stepp and Michael T. Turvey, On strong anticipation. Cognitive Systems Research 11 (2010), 148-164.

Fiction Reading: China Miéville, The City & the City. Del Rey (2007).

Food: Take-out from Great Wall of China.

Video: Hobo with a Shotgun, 2011

______

Sunday, 17 April 2011, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT

Topic: Evo-Devo

Nonfiction Reading: Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Bod. Vintage Paperback (2009).

Supplementary Nonfiction: Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo. W.W. Norton & Co. (2006).

Fiction Reading: Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl. Night Shade Books (2010).

Food: Take-out from Great Wall of China. Special kudos to Elliot Saltzman for bringing a unique, and previously never seen, Hostess® CupCakes variant.

Video: Death Proof, 2007

_____

Saturday 23 October 2010, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT

Topic: Modern Warfare and Terrorism

Nonfiction Reading: John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. Wiley (2008).

Supplementary Reading: Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld. Vintage Paperback (2009).

Fiction Reading: Ian McDonald, The Dervish House. Pyr (2010).

Video: Grindhouse, 2007

______

Sunday, 27 June 2010, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT

Topic: The Embodied, Extended Mind

Nonfiction Reading: Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford (2009).

Supplementary Reading: Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers: a novel. Pamela Dorman Books (2010).

Video: Drag Me to Hell, 2009

______

Saturday,12 April 2010, Guilford, CT

Topic: Moral Machines

Nonfiction Reading: Wendell Wallach. Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford University Press, 2008, 288 pages. We were honored by a visit from the author.

Supplementary Reading: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 352 pages.

Video: The Revenant

______

Saturday, 17 October 2009, Guilford, CT

Topic: Music and Mind

Readings:

Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition

Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Video: Tokyo Gore Police, 2008

______

Saturday, 13 June 2009, Guilford, CT

Topic: Life, the Universe, and Everything

The meeting was a tribute to Vince Gulisano, because he suggested both of the books that we will be reading and for many other reasons.

Readings:

Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of our Ancestors .

Charles Seife, Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes .

Video: Los cronocrímenes, 2007

_____

Saturday, 04 October 2008, home of Doug Whalen, Guilford, CT

Topic: Collapse of Civilization

Readings:

Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus . Vintage (2006).

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed . Vintage (2005).

Video: Fido, 2007

______

Saturday, 26 April 26 2008, 6PM, home of Philip Rubin, Fairfield, CT

Topic: Systems Biology

Main reading: Uri Alon, An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits. Chapman & Hall, 2006.

Video: Cabin Fever, 2002

______

17 November 2007, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT

Topic: Again with the Recursion!

Readings:

Suggested readings include:

Other possibilities include:

  • A recent paper by Michael Corballis, The Uniqueness of Human Recursive Thinking (subscription required), American Scientist, Volume 95, No. 3, May-June 2007, 240-248.

  • A draft manuscript by Simon Levy on modeling recursion in cognitive neuroscience. Please contact Simon if you’d like a copy.

Supplementary Readings: Mark Tiede suggested taking a look at The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher.

Video: Tears of the Black Tiger, 2000 and Hot Fuzz, 2007

Food: Pizza

_____

23 July 2007, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT

Topic: The Pirahã Controversy

Main Readings:

Everett, D.L. (2005). Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human LanguageCurrent Anthropology, August-October, 2005.

Nevins, A., D. Pesetsky and C. Rodrigues (2007). Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment. lingBuzz.

Everett, D.L. (2007). Cultural Constraints on Grammar in Pirahã: A Reply to Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues. lingBuzz.

Supplemental Readings:

The Pirahã Language. Wikipedia.

Language LogParataxis in Pirahã

Recursion and human thought: Why the Pirahã don’t have numbers. A Talk With Daniel L. Everett (TheEdge.org)

Colapinto, J. (2007) The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language? New Yorker magazine, 16 April 2007.

Levy. S.D. (2007) Becoming Recursive. Presented at the Recursion in Human Languages Conference (RECHUL) , Illinois State University, 27 April 2007.

Fiction Reading: Ian Watson, The Embedding. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons (1973).

Video: Masters of Horror: Imprint, 2006, by Takashi Miike

Food: Pizza from Bar Night Club

_____

14 Apr 2007, home of Philip Rubin, Fairfield, CT

Topic: Power Laws

Non-fiction main readings:

M. E. J. Newman. Power laws, Pareto distributions, and Zip’s lawContemporary Physics, 46, 323-351 (2005).

Cosma Shalizi. Power Law Distributions, 1/F Noise, Long-Memory Time Series. Sep. 12, 2006.

Michel L. Goldstein, Steven A. Morris, and Gary G. Yen. Problems with Fitting to the Power-law Distribution. EPJ manuscript.

Supplemental non-fiction readings:

Deborah J. Aks. 1/F Dynamic in Complex Visual Search: Evidence for Self-Organized Criticality in Human Perception. In M. A. Riley and G. C. Van Orden, eds., Tutorials in Contemporary Methods for the Behavioral Sciences

Van Orden, G. C., Holden, J. G., and Turvey, M. T. (2003). Self-organization of Cognitive Performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132, 331-350.

Researchers Map the Sexual Network of an Entire High School (article). Network Diagram

Fiction reading: Will Self, The Book of Dave. Bloomsbury USA (2006)

Video: Idiocracy, 2006

_____

06 Aug 2006, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT

Topic: The Physics of Society

Non-fiction Reading: Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, by Philip Ball

Fiction Reading: Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End

_____

21 Dec 2005, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT

Topic: Our Surveillance Society

Nonfiction Reading:

Robert O’Harrow, No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of our Emerging Surveillance Society

Bruce Schneier. Selections from Beyond Fear and Crypto-Gram

_____

10 Jun 2005, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT

Topic: Religion and its Discontents

Nonfiction Readings:

Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Paul Feyerabend, How to Defend Society Against Science

Fiction Reading: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet”

 _____

18 Dec 2004, home of Philip Rubin, Fairfield, CT

Topic: The Fates of Human Societies

Nonfiction Reading: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

_____

23 Nov 2003, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT

Topic: Metropoles

Nonfiction Readings:

Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life and Great American Cities

Douglas Rae. City: Urbanism and its End

Fiction Reading: Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan: Vol 1-3

Video: Cannibal: The Musical, 1993, Trey Parker

______ 

13 Dec 2001, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT

Topic: More Philosophy of Science

Nonfiction Readings:

Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend. For and Against Method: Including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence

Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers

_____

09 Nov 2001, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT

Topic: Philosophy of Math and Science

Nonfiction Readings:

Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery

Paul Feyerabend, Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerband

_____

13 July 2001, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT

Topic: Digital Security

Nonfiction Readings:

Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World

Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computing with Molecules

Isaac L. Chuang and Yoshihisa Yamamoto, A Simple Quantum Computer

David Touretzky’s DECSS site

Fiction Reading: Chris Lawson, Written in Blood

______

15 March 2001, home of Simon Levy, Waltham, MA

Topic: Combinatorial Grammar

Nonfiction Readings:

Mark Steedman, The Syntactic Process

Mark Steedman, Surface Structure and Interpretation

Video: The Cell, 2000, Tarsem Singh

______

(Note: Archival listings from the 1980s and 1990s are currently being sought.)

<   HOME   >