Atlhack

– Alex has restarted his efforts to programmatically generate bad poetry.
— fixed the bit-rot in his old Lisp/inference-engine version
— started porting code for rhymes into Python
— NLTK is going to make this a whole lot easier.
— (((UP EVERYBODY) (ACROSS ALL DELIRIUM) (COME SAVE MAN WHILE OUT)))
— This wants to be running on App Engine, so people can vote snippets of text as POETIC OR NOT.

– Lindsey went to rehearsal for the choral piece she’s going to perform, answered a bunch of questions from her students, and is reading some papers about Foundational Proof-Carrying Code. And is still waiting to hear back from Jane Street.

Some of the grad students around Bloomington have started a weekly “study party” on Sunday afternoons at the local coffee shop — we need to hijack this and get them to work on cool side projects.

Also, our friend Will Byrd is getting a local hardware-hacking group together… he’s got Arduinos (etc) and is building animatronic kitties.

Lindsey is writing some OCaml, evaluating lambda calculus expressions. “Also known as programs!”, she adds.

Alex is learning numpy and using it to model some Markov processes. It’s for an NLP class, but the use of numpy is totally gratuitous. He keeps meaning to autogenerate some bad poetry.

Happy hacking, ATL and Bay Area hackers!

Tonight: a bunch of kids from the CS department out at Soma Coffee
near Downtown Bloomington.

Alex:
– polishing up his latex skills
– doing some R
– reading Statistics book
– (ok, this is all for class; should be doing a side project…)

Lindsey:
– reading about intelligent agents in Russell and Norvig
– answering student questions for B521 (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/classes/b521)

Andy (another IU CS Ph.D student):
– Working on a related works section for a paper on a Ruby-based
compiler toolkit (RubyWrite) and reading about those related systems.

Also present: Ben, Mark, Christine, Rebecca, and Wren.