overfitting

Freeman Dyson recounts how Enrico Fermi rejected his team's meson scattering model, noting that it had too many free parameters. It is the source of the quote about fitting an elephant.

Geoffrey Hinton's Google Tech Talk linking machine learning to biology, explaining dropout as a form of model averaging and why sexual reproduction and stochastic spiking neurons may prevent overfitting.

A short animation reconstructing a planet's looping orbit using Ptolemy's epicycles and deferents, with the epicycles tracing out the face of Homer Simpson. It shows how enough circles can reproduce nearly any shape.