AltSci Blog

Dear friends,

I've told some of you about my big plans in March, but I wanted to write a big open letter to everyone for good measure. When I graduated college, I feel really silly for not sending an e-mail to everyone I knew telling them that I had graduated and was looking for a job. Now that I'm switching careers, I thought it'd be wise to send an e-mail. This time I'm not looking for a job.

I'm leaving the security industry in a few months to pursue independent research in nanotechnology. It's taken a long time for me to achieve my goal of feeling confident about my financial situation so that I can pursue research without spending years in academia as a grad student or as a researcher working on someone else's project in industry. It's not that I think those things are bad, in fact they can be great, just not a good fit for me. I've been very independent for pretty much all my life and I'm impatient waiting for nanotechnology which I predicted would be in full swing years ago. If you're not familiar with nanotechnology, there's a lot of very cool science going on which is headed toward the molecular scale, smaller even than Intel's new 14nm resolution CPUs. Applications are wide-ranging and could change the way we make things. Not just computers, not just medicine, and not just solar panels. It's the reason I got my Bachelor of Science in Physics and had I been smarter about it, I may have gotten a research job back then and be where I am right now but with 10 years of research behind me. So this is me righting myself.

You may have read my first attempt at Español attack. This is a major improvement and expansion. You can expect it to be approximately 20% better than the last version. But wait, why such a small amount? Because we are using artificial intelligence to learn a human language. Artificial intelligence is going to get very good in the near future, but until then we have this. I hope you enjoy it.

I produced this learning tool while in Mexico. From basic knowledge of the language to a set of words and sentences I can throw together, this page of common words can help you train yourself what to learn first. I have done this type of language learning guide before. I also created a very nice Twitter - Google translate mashup, but both services were modified, the Google translate API became a pay API which broke my mashup.

This page represents the output of a histogram of words used in a small corpus of Spanish. This mathematical concept is quite easy to understand for linguists: tally each word used, sort by highest tally. I wrote a piece of software that does this for any corpus, including HTML and foreign texts.

Version 0.2 improves upon 0.1 and does not lose the original benefit of version 0.1 by adding a more complex and larger corpus and retaining the original order of 0.1 for all old words. I made a handful of fixes (removing vosotros and English words) which should make the page a little easier to read. If you started using version 0.1, I will politely ask to upgrade. If you have any improvements you'd like me to make, please feel free. I made the SVG available to you so that you can modify it. It isn't too much to ask of you to send it back if it has helped you.

You may have read in my previous photoblog post or the one before that I have been suffering from sleep deprivation. A few of the nights it was rain on my fiberglass skylight. Sunday morning it was fireworks at 5:15am. There should be a video below of 1 minute of it.

To the person responsible for this outrage: go fuck yourself.

Javantea out.

People have been asking what I've been up to. I've been reading, drumming, walking, and taking photos mostly. I've done a tiny bit of shopping, a bunch of eating, and a bit of sewing. I've also been sleeping irregularly, but that's a different blog post.

This one is going to be a photo blog. It's going to describe a few things using photos and descriptions that are in the Gallery. The photos are in reverse chronological order, so if you want a chronological playback, start at the bottom and work upwards. I'm not sure why though.

I went to the Peña de Bernal yesterday. It is one of the world's largest monoliths.