A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” Maker culture, with its goal to get everyone access to the traditionally male domain of making, has focused on the first. But its success means that it further devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving, by continuing to enforce the idea that only making things is valuable.

Ani Pema Chodron, the author of the book, gave a commencement address to the 2014 graduating class of Naropa, University of Boulder, Colorado. She did so, to keep her promise with her grand daughter, who was amongst the graduating class. The speech went viral on the net and this book is an offshoot of it. It contains the full text of the speech and a Q&A session. The title of the speech and hence the book, is inspired from a quote by Samuel Beckett.

This book gives a a macro picture of machine learning. In this post, I will briefly summarize the main points of the book. One can think of this post as a meta summary as the book itself is a summary of all the main areas of machine learning. Prologue Machine learning is all around us, embedded in technologies and devices that we use in our daily lives. They are so integrated with our lives that we often do not even pause to appreciate its power.

I stumbled on to this book a few weeks ago and immediately picked it up after a quick browse through the sections of the book. I had promptly placed it in my books-to-read list. I love anything related to information theory mainly because of its inter-disciplinary applications. The principles of information theory are applicable in a wide range of fields. In fact it will hard to pinpoint a specific area where concepts from information theory have not been applied.

Once quiet, we will hear an inner voice proclaim, “You are not enough.” So why not just avoid the compost? Why not skirt the stinking heap? For centuries poets and philosophers, theologians and therapists have taught us that turning over these compost piles is a risk we must undertake, for within these same mounds lies the fertile matter out of which new life arises and is nourished, a cyclic alchemy always at play, just as it is in any garden.