Another PhD in Computational Sciences and Informatics. I wonder if I could pick one of these up then after I get my PhD in CS and have a job. They have a quantum information science area and I have always been interested in being able to program and think about problems with quantum computers. Especially with application to AI.
Might want to work here: http://www.nas.nasa.gov/quantum/index.html (NASA’s QuAIL Quantum AI Lab!).
I’d like to see both of these applications created. I might in the future discuss in more detail how I would go about implementing them.
A friend of mine recommended http://www.vpnbook.com/freevpn as an easy way to get out of uncensored internet. I also found SoftEther which is a VPN project that provides a few VPN protocols. That way if one is being blocked you can try another. Another interesting project I found was tinc. This seemed a bit old. However, due to the obscurity of the implementation it is probably not blocked. A hacker vpn called ChaosVPN also seems a bit extreme.
http://samy.pl/ has some interesting networking tools to get around firewalls and other network and hacking type tools.
All of this is due to the fact that I want to be able to remote desktop to a friends computer on a computer that sits behind a firewall. Which made me think that oh I might be going to China and I would like to be able to get on gmail while there. So, I looked into vpns!
I got the sublime text editor (version 3). I got it because I wanted something cool to develop in for python.
Following this, I installed flake8 (however i don’t think I installed flake8 corectly…), and TrailingSpaces (which I adjusted my borrowed user prefs file accordingly).
I also installed a lot of the things mentioned here. I got the python lang prefs.
Instead of Git I installed sublimeGit.
SublimeREPL installed need to configure.
Mecurial is installed.
May want to consider Javatar for java development.
I just found http://traces.cs.umass.edu/index.php/Smart/Smart. UMASS has a nice set of data that can be used for doing stuff with the smart grid. Might be interesting.
Oh my! I went to Kogiya Korean BBQ in Annandale, VA. It was pretty good. I wouldn’t go there often (or probably by choice). It is a bit pricy for what you get. I tried to eat with the chopsticks, but I need practice (since I’m going to China). I ate some sort of pork ribs that had a spicy sauce on them that was really good (but a bit fatty). There was some beef brisket thing that I really didn’t care for (that was really fatty and the fat wasn’t tasty and the meat had no marinade or sauce on it so wasn’t flavorful). There were various sauces and such that I we could try. Although I found I didn’t really care for any. I also had some rice which was a nice respite to have something a bit normal between bites of the meat.
I went with Bryan and his friend from work JZ. His friend from work uses the word doge from dogecoin(**) (crypto currency) as a verb, noun, adjective and without any consistent connotation. So, basically it allows your mouth to move and emit sound, leaving your listener to interpret the meaning given the context. It sort of reminds you of why little babies make noises/cry. But I might be a bit harsh. He is really into asian stuff. I think he wants to move to Japan and become an english teacher. He also wouldn’t mind going to the Netherlands to become an astrophysicist (since according to him they have the best grad program in that area). He talks constantly. He reminded me of Nathaniel.
The adventure tonight was the fact that Bryan told me that we were going to eat at a different Korean BBQ and then when I got there I checked my phone (since the restaurant had wifi) and found out that he texted me the adjusted location. Thankfully I had wifi, otherwise I wouldn’t have found out until I got back home!
(**) http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge I’ve been notified that doge is not from the cryptocurrency, but from a meme. My friend Stephen told me about this.
“Holy Toledo! Either that bird hit a land mine or you just shot down a kamikaze pigeon!” — Klinger (M*A*S*H Season 8 Episode 12). LOL Hilarious!!
“The pentagon. The weird looking building. Four walls and a spare. Monument to Murphy’s law.” — Cornel Potter (S8E13)
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century-is-about-to-change-medicine-forever-2015-2 a rather long but interesting article about the DNA editing tool CRISPR. This tool was not created, rather it was found. Microbes (or whatever they are called) have been using this to defend against invasion for a long time. The way the article makes it out to be that there exists a war at the micro scale being waged constantly. The combatants aren’t dumb either. They have a memory, they have tools, they communicate, they learn! It is truly amazing. What kind of mechanisms do they have to cooperate? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22999189 discusses this and this article talks about how cancer cells cooperate and even have free riders. In order combat the cancer they change the code of the dna to make it so that there are more free riders so the tumor dies. Cellular organization is very elegant.
This is interesting. In the future this could be a way to hack a MAS that may be built on similar principles. The fact is that we try to avoid freeriders but if the system is flooded with them the system will decay.
I know this sounds all conspiracy theory like, but it seems possible that people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who have recently made comments about the potential threat of an artificial intelligence take over, were only doing it so that there would be more articles written about AI and how its highly unlikely given current state of the art. I mean there has been so much press about this issue lately that I don’t think that as many people would have even known about the true current state of AI. So, the conspiracy is that Bill and Elon really know how unlikely it is to happen any time soon and they know how hard getting all of the news outlets to talk about AI and the current research. So, they made the outrageous claims to get attention to an area that needs it. Which other than making them look bad I think it was useful.
I’m going to be a mentor again for Botball. This time I’m partnering with David, Kevin and Stephen and we are mentors for the middle school that David helped at last year. So, hopefully that means we will have more success than I had last year with Kramer middle school. This weekend is the intro/get everyone up to speed days and hopefully we can make use of the fact that the middle school participated last year to our advantage.