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I built a Linux machine!

04. October 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: technology · Tags: computers, linux

Thanks to PCPartPicker, NewEgg’s tutorials, and the BuildAPC reddit, I learned a lot about computers in the last month, which culminated in me building a little Linux machine, so I can learn Linux!! Yay! Click through for pics! :)

Building a computer is something I’d wanted to do since I was a kid, and learning Linux is something I’ve been interested in doing for the past few months. So this was an awesome experience and a lot of fun! I’m already wanting to build another one, but I guess I’ll have to wait. More »

So you want to keep your twitter bot functional

01. October 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: computer science · Tags: computer science, debugging, programming, twitter

A few weeks ago, I posted about how to build a twitter bot. I wish it stopped there. Unfortunately, all code has bugs (ahem, I mean, features). There are two bugs in my code. The first one I understand, and could probably fix if I tried, but I haven’t because it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. The second one I don’t understand, but I do know how to fix it. More »

It lives!!

06. September 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: artificial intelligence, computer science · Tags: artificial intelligence, html, javascript, programming, tic tac toe, video games

I started reading a book about artificial intelligence. It’s an older book, but only $4 and it came highly recommended as a starting point, since a lot of the basic concepts are still the same. Based on the things I was reading and this xkcd, I figured it might be within my capabilities to write a program that plays Tic Tac Toe. And I have. Sort of. You can play it here. Kinda.

See, the concepts of artificial intelligence and the basics of programming aren’t so hard. What’s hard is making it work in the “real world.” More »

Lessons learned

17. August 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: education · Tags: academia, allomorphs, education, grading, LaTeX, learning, linguistics, morphology, teaching

I finished teaching my first class about two weeks ago, and have had some time to reflect. Overall, I think things went pretty well, although I haven’t seen my course evaluations yet. More »

So you want to make a Twitter Bot

12. August 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: computer science, linguistics · Tags: amazon, bot, cloud hosting, endangered languages, historical linguistics, linux, programming, python, social media, tweet, twitter

A few months ago, I created a bot on Twitter. @AllTheLanguages tweets a new language from the Ethnologue database once every hour or so, and will do so for about a year. Give or take. Sometimes the bot goes down and I have to reboot it. And there are some other bugs too. But more on that in another post…

When I tell people that I made a twitter bot, the first thing they ask (after “why?”) is “how?” Well, today, I’m going to answer that! Why? Because it was fun! How? Well, it’s complicated… More »

spammers…

06. August 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: blog · Tags: blogging, comments, spam, wordpress

I monitor all comments before allowing them to be posted. Basically, if you have a sketchy looking URL, or if your comment is not related at all to the post, it won’t get through.

So far, I’ve gotten hundreds of comments, but I haven’t had a single comment I’m 100% sure is legitimate. About a dozen or so have been vague praise which didn’t include any URLs or other product endorsements. I let these through… until I noticed a strange trend: More »

Programmer humor

31. July 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: computer science, video games · Tags: 3DS, boo, boolean, ghosts, luigi's mansion, programming

Boo is boolean, apparently.

Grade inflation

30. July 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: education, statistics · Tags: causation, college, correlation, grade inflation, statistics, university

I’m teaching my first class as instructor of record this summer. I’ve TA’d and graded for a number of classes, and tutored, and given talks at conferences and so on, but this is the first class that’s been completely mine! The final exam is this week, and one thing I’ve worried about is grade inflation.

Zipf’s Law

15. July 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: linguistics, statistics · Tags: data, data science, dolphins, graphs, language learning, linguistics, logarithms, programming, R, statistics, wikipedia, zipf's law

Language has a pretty interesting property known as Zipf’s Law. That is, language data (and even subsets of language data) have a Zipfian distribution. There are a small number of highly frequent words, and a large number of highly infrequent words. Moreover, the frequent words tend to be short, grammatical (words that are grammatically required but don’t really mean anything) and the infrequent words tend to be longer, lexical (words like nouns and verbs which have some sort of referent or meaning).

What does this mean? Well, to show you I downloaded all of the English wikipedia (and you can too here). More »