http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog Nonperiodic Central Trajectory Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:03:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en David said I should learn about Geometric Algebra. So I wrangled Steve into an explanation over beers at the Fort St. George. It looks very interesting and I wonder if there aren't uses for it in machine learning. Here are some tutorials: Imaginary Numbers are Not Real ... http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/07/17/learning-about-geometric-algebra/ This fantastic map shows the expansion of Walmart locations across the US over time. http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/07/12/walmart-growth-over-time/ I am writing a paper on nonparametric Bayesian density modeling and I would like to compare my technique to the standard approach of the infinite mixture of Gaussians (iMoG). You can read Carl Rasmussen's paper to get a feel for what it's all about. My plan is to ... http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/05/29/infinite-gaussian-mixture-modeling-with-fbm/ Our downstairs neighbors, who are our very very good friends are moving away. They're huge karaoke addicts and so we got them a fun parting gift: Rock Band for the PS2. This game is so much fun, it's painful. Obviously, I know people have liked it, and ... http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/05/07/rock-band-best-cooperative-game-ever/ One of our very good friends, Holly Dunsworth, is going to be on National Public Radio (NPR) for "This I Believe" this coming weekend as a part of "Weekend Edition." You can read her essay here. An excerpt: I believe in evolution. It's easy. It's my life. I'm a ... http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/05/05/holly-dunsworth-on-npr/ I have this fairly nice setup for my home office, since I work from home more or less exclusively. I like to play the occasional PC game, so I have a reasonable video card setup. I had two eVGA 7600GT video cards in an SLI configuration. Well, ... http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/05/02/video-card-ugliness/ Oliver Stegle and I just got our paper Gaussian Process Product Models for Nonparametric Nonstationarity (pdf) accepted at the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning in Helsinki. Here is the abstract: Stationarity is often an unrealistic prior assumption for Gaussian process regression. One solution is to predefine an explicit nonstationary ... http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/05/01/gp-product-model-paper-accepted-at-icml-2008/ I believe the original article is in Science, here. The article is only available if you or your institution has an AAAS membership. This behavior seems a bit odd for a group calling it self an "Association for the Advancement of Science." http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/04/20/global-comparison-of-acceptance-of-evolution/ There are good cops out there, but sometimes the news makes it seem like they're all up to no good. Here's a short video of a good cop doing his job well at a protest in LA. It seemed like it was worth sharing. http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/03/16/good-cop-at-protest/ While I'm complaining about Erlang: why doesn't Google ever return any hits on the documentation? If I google "perl sprintf" the first hit is the documentation page http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/sprintf.html. The same thing happens if I Google "python array" or "lisp map" or "php echo." If I type "erlang ... http://www.nonperiodic.net/blog/2008/02/20/ungoogleable-erlang-documentation/