Thoughts on rkempe’s blog

Why Don’t High Schools Prepare Kids for CalArts? (Throwback Thoughts)

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:58:53 -0400

I recently saw a tweet that said something along the lines of “it ticks me off that high schools don’t prepare kids for schools like CalArts.” This idea kind of bugs me, because as someone who graduated from a magnet arts high school with a selective application process,

The Researcher Alignment Matrix

Mon, 25 May 2026 23:06:44 -0400

Ever since I decided to get myself involved in academic research two years ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the habits and behaviours of the different researchers I’ve interacted with. Most researchers are crazy, but they’re crazy in different ways because their actions are driven by different forces.

Understanding your particular brand of influences and craziness as a researcher and comparing it with those of others may help you to understand why your collaborations with some researchers work very well and why others drive you insane. Therefore, I hereby present to you the “Researcher Alignment Matrix”.

Types of Questions (Part 1)

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 21:54:14 -0500

I think the way we teach kids to think about and categorize questions is completely wrong. If I think back to any time I’ve been taught about questions formally, I’ve always been taught to think about the 5 W’s: Who, What, Where, When, Why – and the H: How? These are perfectly good questions to focus on if you’re a journalist writing a news story, but most of us are not journalists, and I’ve found a broader range of questions to be useful or relevant in my day-to-day life.

You Need to Ask More Questions

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 23:06:26 -0500

Have you ever considered how people who are more knowledgeable about something than you got that way? A lot of them got there by asking the right questions. The reality is that most people are not going to bother to explain themselves to you if you don’t bother to come to them with questions. Some people don’t realize that you don’t know the things they know.

“Warm” vs “Cold” Networking

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 23:57:33 -0400

“Networking” seems to be one of those buzzwords that everyone uses and nobody can properly define, which I find extremely annoying. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and maybe I can help offer some clarity. I’m starting to think that there might be two types of networking, which I’m going to refer to as “warm networking” and “cold networking”. If you’re familiar with the idea of “warm contacts” vs “cold contacts”, that’s where I’m borrowing this terminology from.

30-Minute Meetings Are a Scam

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 23:08:58 -0400

Really, most meetings should be 15 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour long.

Quick Thoughts From the First Academic Conference I Attended (Like, a Year Ago)

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:39:19 -0400

I think the best thing to do as an undergrad at a conference is to be observant, since it’s pretty low-stakes at that point. Part of doing this is to see how academics interact to see whether or not you want to do this. What do people wear, how do they speak, what do they talk about, etc.

If you can, ask questions of the speakers after talks! Asking good questions during sessions is powerful (it gets you noticed!)¹

There seems to be a rough heuristic that you have to be a decent-ish speaker to become a professor.² (Virtually all of the professors I listened to were strong speakers; the grad students and post docs were a mixed bag.)

If you can, introduce yourself to people and join conversations; try to fully be a participant.

Lee Miller’s “Hitleriana”, “Partial Witnessing”, and the Line Between “Document” and “Art”

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:03:08 -0400

This is (almost) verbatim text from a journal entry I wrote for a seminar I took on immersive documentary. I thought it was interesting enough to put here, even though parts of it might not make sense if you haven’t read the works I’m talking about. For context, my class had previously read an essay called “Disaster City” by Barrett Swanson, in which Swanson participates in a disaster recovery simulation, explores his personal fascination with disaster scenarios, and explores the blurring between reality and fiction that occurs in those simulations. A lot of our conversation had to do with rituals and performative preparedness and how they can be used to enable cognitive avoidance of the root causes of certain issues, creating a false sense of safety for the person practising (or even observing) the rituals.

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read Lately, Episode 3

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:23:47 -0400

You know the drill. In the last episode I did of this series, I said the next one would be coming shortly, huh?

Yeah, right. I lied. These come out when they come out.

Reading Academic Papers Is a Nightmare

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 12:03:33 -0400

So I’ve been saying for a while that reading academic papers is a skill. However, what I didn’t realize is that having a pretty good idea of how to read a paper from one discipline doesn’t quite map to knowing how to approach a paper from another field. Academic papers are all confusing nightmares, but papers from different disciplines are nightmarish in different ways, which means that while some parts of the basic reading approach can stay the same, others will have to be discarded or relearned.

Why Does Theory Matter in Computer Science? (Meta-Commentary)

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:53:01 -0400

When I first started doing this writeup, I did not expect to still be working on it 6 months later. Finishing this was a long, long overdue task for a while. This is the second write-up I’ve done of a talk I’ve given. The first one I did was for “How to be a Talentless Hack in Public”, which I published in zine form first, before then publishing the text on this blog several months later.

You Need to Be Proactive

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 11:29:39 -0400

One of the things that has been repeatedly drilled into me over the past year or so is the fact that if you want people to do things for you, you’re most likely going to have to harass them. (I don’t mean literal harassment, by the way – please don’t commit a criminal offense and say I encouraged you.) This is true especially when working with highly busy people like managers and professors. If you want something, you can’t just assume they’ll intuit that and give it to you – you have to ask (and assume they’ll forget, then ask them again). If you need them to do something for you, you’ll need to remind them, and inform them of the deadline, likely multiple times. Everyone has their own problems to worry about and the thing you need might not be top of mind. The burden of remembering is on you.

I’m Still Not Entirely Sure What a “Poem” Is

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 23:17:58 -0400

I think there might be people out there who think I’m a poet, and I think it’s terrifying. I haven’t been a poet since my middle school days of writing rhyming couplets about hating school and my early high school days of writing terrible prose with line breaks. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure the main reason I wrote so many poems in grade nine was because my teacher seemed to have no idea how to grade poems but very strong opinions about fiction, and I felt like I was terrible at writing fiction and wanted a shot at a decent grade. Man, high school was such a great time.

Some Thoughts on Webrings

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 19:52:28 -0500

Today, I found out that some students at Carleton University have started a “webring” (or well, close enough) for students in computer science and engineering to post their personal websites. (In fact, this blog also joined that webring, and you can find a link to the rest of the pages in the webring here.) I thought this was a really cool idea, so I asked how they came up with it. It turns out that a few other CS and software engineering (+ adjacent) programs in Canada have also started such webrings.

I Am Slowly Discovering That I Have No Idea How to Read

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 14:55:31 -0500

Over the last month and a half or so, I’ve come to the conclusion that I actually don’t know how to read, which is definitely a jarring realization to be having after over 18 years of formal education.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little bit cheeky here. I am not literally claiming to be illiterate or even functionally illiterate, and it would be stupid of me to do so, since clearly I am writing this blog post and have written many other blog posts where I reviewed books. However, one of the things my high school education didn’t prepare me for, and that my four years of training and education in engineering and computer science have completely failed to teach me, is how to both get through and learn from – “learn from” is the key term here – a large volume of readings on a weekly basis.

Do You Need to Understand the Math Behind a System to Implement It?

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 14:17:20 -0500

A while ago, someone in a Discord server I’m in asked how much of the math behind a system you need to know to implement it. I thought it was an interesting question, and I felt qualified to answer it, so I ended up writing quite a lengthy response. It just occurred to me that it might also be useful to other people, so I thought I would clean it up a little bit and archive it here.

The Nonfiction Spectrum

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 23:50:00 -0500

I write across multiple genres, but my main genre is Creative Nonfiction, which writers typically refer to as “CNF” for short. Unfortunately, I always end up having to explain what CNF is to people, because the common view of nonfiction seems to be that it’s entirely comprised of informative texts and academic essays (with maybe the occasional memoir slipped in).

Earlier today I was thinking about this, and I thought it would be really funny to place various types of “nonfiction writing” on a graph with labelled axes to prove my point. I present to you the “Nonfiction Spectrum”. On one axis, we have how “accessible” or easy to understand the text is; on the other, we have how “artistic” the presentation of the text is.

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read Lately, Episode 2

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 20:08:03 -0500

Here’s another roundup of some interesting things I’ve come across lately and would like to talk about! As always, I’m sure there’s some great stuff I read but cannot for the life of me remember.

This one is extremely late, since I’ve been incredibly busy and finding time to write has been hard. I think I looked at some of this stuff back in… November? October? Oops. I’ve decided I want to keep these to only 4–5 items per post, so more posts should be coming shortly! There are definitely other things I’ve looked at that I want to talk about.

Research Papers Shouldn’t Be Read in Order; or, How to Read a Research Paper

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 13:44:15 -0500

I just finished a blog post where I discuss things I’ve recently learned about how to read research papers. I almost included this as a point in that post, but I think it’s important enough to warrant its own article.

Here’s the idea: you absolutely should not be reading the sections of a research paper in order.

It took me a while to learn this one – I can’t remember if I first read this advice somewhere, if someone told it to me, or if I reverse-engineered it from advice I got about how to write papers. It doesn’t matter which one came first, really – my point is that I only found this out in a roundabout way through googling and trial and error and harassing people with questions.

Some Thoughts on “Academic Training”

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 10:36:42 -0500

I’ve long said that university education starts to make a lot more sense if you look at it as a precursor to academic training. Historically, there have really been two major types of undergraduate university training, in my opinion: there was the liberal arts type of education, which was meant to turn rich people into cultured members of society (several of whom then went on to pursue academic training and scholarly activities, because they were rich and could afford to do so), and the more specialized type, which is meant to make the student literate enough in the major foundational ideas of the field to pursue additional training at the graduate level. If I remember correctly, universities functioning more like businesses is relatively new, the idea of university being a place for vocational training is relatively new, and the idea that most adults should get a university degree to be employable is also relatively new. (Also of interest: see “credential inflation.”)

Quantity Over Quality In Art (and Life)?

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:37:55 -0500

I’ve always been a quantity over quality artist, and what I mean by this is that rather than being intentional about what I’m doing or meticulously planning things, I typically make a lot of garbage and hope for the best. This isn’t a particularly efficient way of working, but I personally find it quite effective. There are three main benefits of half-assing my art process that I would like to point out here:

How to Watch a Technical Research Talk (or Workshop, or Tutorial) Recording (and Make the Most of It)

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 22:13:50 -0500

When I’m trying to approach a highly specialized topic for the first time, one of my tactics is to find a recording of a research-geared workshop about it and watch it as my introductory crash course. The benefits of this are as follows:

I am learning about the subject from (hopefully) a credible expert in the field.
Workshops and talks usually try to be self-contained, which means basic background info will likely be given and I won’t have to pore through 10 different research papers, searching for an obscure definition, in vain.
Talks typically have the benefit of including visuals and informal intuition conveyed by the speaker, which generally won’t make it into academic papers, because they’re not rigorous. However, the visuals and informal statements and intuition are invaluable for gaining a better understanding of the information.
The speaker will generally include a bibliography and mention related works, which is a great jumping off point for further investigation and saves me from having to figure out what the seminal sources are myself.

However, there are also some drawbacks:

Why do People Have Trouble Seeing Photography as Art?

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 18:25:58 -0500

In some ways, photography is to visual artists what piano is to musicians. I can get you to play a somewhat accurate rendition of Mary Had a Little Lamb in about 2 minutes, and if it isn’t in tune, that’s the piano’s fault, not yours. Similarly, if you have a camera, you can create an image in about two seconds, and if the image quality sucks, it’s probably the camera’s fault, not yours. But have you ever tried playing a bowed instrument? I did, for over a year. I doubt I ever actually played a note in tune, and my tone quality bordered on unlistenable. Drawing is similarly difficult; my first two years of drawings are generally not good.

What Reading a Research Paper Feels Like

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 07:43:10 -0500

You’ve started a new job, you’ve stumbled into a conversation that’s been happening for several decades, and you’re feeling way too lost to even begin to follow what anyone is talking about, let alone participate. You’re confused, so you go see John, who seems to be semi-acquainted with the people having the conversation. You briefly sketch out what (you think) you heard, and tell him that you didn’t really understand anything anyone said. Maybe he can help you?

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read Lately, Episode 1

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 23:51:41 -0400

Here’s a look at some of the articles and books I’ve been reading lately, or at least, the ones that stuck out to me. Originally, I wanted to do this as a weekly series, inspired by Cory Doctorow’s link posts where he comments on various articles he’s read - but I don’t have that kind of time. Also, I’m really not that great at remembering the various articles I’ve stumbled through online, so you’re going to get these when you get them.

Some Advice for Taking Your First Proof-Based Math Course

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 00:00:01 -0400

If you are like me, you did not particularly enjoy math in high school, so the idea of learning an entirely new type of math in university might be terrifying to you. I know this can be scary and overwhelming (it was for me!), so here are some things I learned when taking my first proof-based mathematics course. Hopefully you find this helpful.

"Learning" Textbooks vs "Reference" Textbooks

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0400

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the fact that there are two main types of textbooks. There are reference textbooks, which are for people who are already versed in the subject area, typically academic researchers, professors, and the like. They tend to be large, contain massive amounts of information, and be unintelligible to everyone but their target audience. Then, there are expository textbooks, which are for people who actually want to learn things (aka me, a confused undergraduate student).

On Being an Artist on Instagram (and How It Can Suck)

Sat, 21 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0400

I was chatting with one of my friends yesterday, just to check in, when our conversation moved from small talk to the topic of being artists on Instagram. We’re both pretty unknown on Instagram, and I suspect she’s just as unsure as I am about how much of an audience she actually wants for her work, but the discussion was still mostly about how “well” we were doing. And as of right now, she’s doing much, much better than I am, despite the fact that I have had my account for about two and a half years longer than she has. To be fair, she is a much better artist than I am, which totally accounts for some of her success. However, not all of it can be attributed to that. At all.