todo: fix link: 
todo: fix link: portrait
//ws2005.wikisym.org/space/Bayle%2BShanks/portrait6.jpg
My personal homepage is at http://purl.net/net/bshanks.
Here’s a picture of me holding a “sea hare” that Katherine and I found at the beach, near the tidepools! More pictures at Katherine's web site.

Here’s Katherine holding a whelk:

Here’s a giant keyhole limpet:

Contents
Diary
Feb 25, 2008
Haven’t said anything here for a long time, and don’t keep a diary-like blog anywhere right now (was planning to use LiveJournal for that, but haven’t done so yet), so I thought I’d check in.
What I’ve been doing:
- Decided that I’d have to allocate more of my free time learning ‘academic’ things if I want to succeed in academia. Spent many months (of spare time) learning about the P vs NP problem and thinking about it (but I am still not an expert in that now; I spent most of the time following up on my own ideas about it, rather than reading about what other people have done, so I am still ignorant of most of the work on it – but I am happy with that choice).
- Did half a neuroscience phd project, abandoned it, did a neuro side project, started a new phd project, am 2/3 through it. The current project is data-mining some gene expression data (the data was produced by another team). So my project is more related to the ‘hardware implementation details’ of the brain rather than my primary interest (‘What algorithm does the brain implement?’), but I think that the outcome of my project will be useful to other neuroscientists in a practical sense, so it’s important to do.
- Got a new laptop, got Debian configured on it, wrote it up.
- Am in the middle of going through all of my old computer archive CDs, reorganizing their contents and putting the result on a few DVDs.
- Explored web hosting providers. Currently using https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ and http://www.vpsvillage.com/
- My hands hurt when I type or mouse. Explored options. Using this, this, and this for now. Doesn’t fix the problem, but is better than nothing. Can’t wait until you can just track full body position with sensors or cameras or whatever and create arbitrary ‘air keyboard’ gestures. Can’t wait until there is integrated, high quality open source voice recognition in Debian GNU/Linux. I hear that Dragon Naturally Speaking is good, but I haven’t seriously looked into it because I am assuming it won’t help much if I insist on using GNU/Linux.
- A 64-bit Debian package for Second Life that doesn’t crash my computer is finally available so I spent a few days learning how to create/program stuff in there. Made a simple avatar for myself, programmed it. Haven’t explored the world yet though

- Ruadhan and I ran out of time to work on our collaborative filtering website idea when it was about 2/3 done.
- I haven’t been reading /. or anything and so am a few years behind on tech news
- Decided to learn some more programming languages to broaden my horizons before I spend more time producing Python code for my open-source projects. Right now I’m learning Haskell. Maybe I’ll learn Lisp next. Going to read a few books about programming, too (Design Patterns, SICP, The Art of Unix Programming.
Projects to-do eventually:
- Itching to get back to WikiGateway, but see previous point. By the way, has anyone done what WikiGateway was trying to do while I’ve been inattentive? Because then I wouldn’t have to do it

- Still psyched about my Grand Vision to tie together WikiGateway, Parliament, and CommunityProgrammableWiki into a literate-programming, democratically governed CommunityProgrammableWiki proxy that allows a subcommunity to interact with their favorite wiki using wiki software extensions that they wrote themselves (without the involvement of the admin of the target wiki site, or, for that matter, any admin at all). Plan is still to do WikiGateway and Parliament first, then CommunityProgrammableWiki. Thinking of using a Darcs backend. But first, I’m going to learn some more languages.
- Thinking about going to computer science grad school, in which case I’ll need to take the GRE subject test, in which case I’ll need to brush up on those areas of the undergrad computer science curriculum that I missed (I did AI in my undergrad, but as a cognitive studies major, not cs, so I didn’t take some of the standard undergrad cs courses, although I took a lot of them. I feel like I know many of the parts I need to know for practice, and could learn the others as needed, but that isn’t good enough for a standardized test)
- Trying to learn more math
- The collaborative filtering web(site|service) with Ruadhan. This project, if completed, would (almost) subsume RatingGroups (and some other things I’m interested in) as a special case (other almost-special cases of this system include conventional academic peer-reviewed journals, del.ico.us, reddit, amazon/netflix/stumbleupon-style recommenders, etc – i say ‘almost’ because to do any of these things, you’d still have to implement a special-case frontend to use the backend that we’re writing). We planned to interoperate with del.ico.us and some of these others. I’d still like to do this project, but I don’t know if this or WikiGateway or Parliament or PICA is my first priority.
- Other things that I plan to do Someday: reading and writing wiki text here, PICA (arg I want a different name though), reputation stuff. (Reputation stuff isn’t a high priority for me unless other people get excited about it)
- Dunno which of my online projects is my priority – but before doing any of them, I’m learning some more about programming. Doing my neuro phd, learning enough cs to maybe get into cs grad school, learning neuroscience and math are greater priorities for the moment – I have a long to-read list of books covering these areas. Parliament or the collaborative filtering project wil be prioritized if my collaborators (Dana and Ruadhan, respectively) get excited about working on them again. In general, it seems that one major factor influencing my allocation of time to a project is whether someone else is actively working on it with me.
Summary:
I’ve been slowly working my way through my neuroscience PhD? work. Spent a bunch of time thinking about P vs NP. Been spending much of my free time organizing my personal stuff, and some of it learning new things, rather than working on my projects or visiting CW. This will probably continue for the foreseeable future. Perhaps someday I will be able to work my online projects into my day job – until then I guess they will have to happen sporadically when other commitments allow.
CommunityWiki-specific stuff
GoalStatement
To keep up with the community here, and to help the corpus by linking things together which are related, and/or simplifying and consolidating when I see an opportunity.
Midterm wiki-related goals
- Clean up the code on WikiGateway for release.
- In theory, someday I’d like to read some of the actual content on MeatballWiki from the last few months instead of just dealing with meta issues.
For more detail, see section “Mid-term wiki goals” on BayleShanksAttic.
Technical goals for wikis
License for my contributions
All of my contributions on CommunityWiki are hereby placed in the public domain unless otherwise indicated.
http://www.primarilypublicdomain.org/post/
(I’m not going to include the PrimarilyPublicDomain link in each of my posts here, but you may assume it)
Messages
Bayle!, thank you so much for the update!
See also BayleShanksAttic for less important parts of my homepage.
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