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)
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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)
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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)
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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!
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 Body . 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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17 November 2007, home of Mark Tiede, Madison, CT
Topic: Again with the Recursion!
Readings:
Suggested readings include:
Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did it Evolve? Science, 22 November 2002, Vol. 298, no. 5598, pp. 1569-1579.
Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff (2005). The Faculty of Language: What’s Special about it? Cognition, 95(2), 201-236.
W. Tecumseh Fitch, Marc D. Hauser and Noam Chomsky. (2005). The evolution of the language faculty: Clarifications and implications. Cognition, 97, 179-210.
An additional unpublished appendix : N. Chomsky, M. D. Hauser and W. T. Fitch. Appendix: The Minimalist Program
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
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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 Language. Current 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 Log: Parataxis 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
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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 law. Contemporary 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
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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
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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
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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”
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
Fiction Reading: Chris Lawson, Written in Blood
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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
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(Note: Archival listings from the 1980s and 1990s are currently being sought.)
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