I can be hard to reach. If you need to reach me, leave a note for me at google+.

Who am I?

My current technical interests focus on natural language processing and artificial general intelligence. I've held jobs working in the above areas; unfortunately, I now pursue these only as a hobby. The NLP directory has pre/re-prints of some of the academic publications that have come out of this work. My primary research platform is the open-source OpenCog project. For me, OpenCog provides a general technical setting where I can experiment with different machine learning theories and algorithms, with both connectionist and symbolic processing flavors. I've compiled a messy list of related open-source AGI projects here.

I've spent many years at IBM; most recently working on the Linux kernel for Power architecture-based mainframes. The Linux on the PowerPC wiki is a good place to find out more about IBM Linux mainframes and systems. I've been active in the Linux community; I was a founder of the Gnome Foundation; and was the lead developer for GnuCash for over 7 years. I've founded three dot-com startups, all of which failed to enrich me financially. I was a founding member of the OpenGL Architecture Review Board; and spent 8 years learning about and designing 3D graphics hardware and software. I have a PhD in theoretical physics from SUNY at Stony Brook. Currently, I am utterly infatuated with mathematics, and have made large contributions to over 400 math articles in Wikipedia. BTW, y'all, global warming is for real. Do something about it.

Vytautas O. Virkau Memorial Archive

Vytautas O. Virkau Memorial Archive.

Linas' Mathematical Art Gallery

A colorful exploration of some well-known, but under-examined equations. I think some of this is high Art, and much of the rest of it should be an eye-opener for even jaded fractal mathematicians.

The Art Gallery has been running for fifteen or twenty years while being silent about the underlying math. I suppose its high time to make amends. The core idea of the dissertation is that the shapes of fractals are describable through Farey Fractions, which appear naturally through continued fractions, which have the symmetry of the Modular Group SL(2,Z), which is inter-twined with the Riemann Zeta and the structure of the set of rational numbers. Besides the four basic operations on the real numbers (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), there is a fifth basic operation which is rarely taught in primary school and under-appreciated at higher levels, namely, "Farey Addition" or, expressed correctly, group multiplication in SL(2,Z). The modular group doesn't just lead to Pellian equations and algebraic numbers, it in fact intertwines all rational numbers (and their extensions to reals and p-adics) in crazy, fractal ways. This is why, for example, one sees Farey Fractions in the Mandelbrot Set. In number theory, the structure of the Modular Group provides a unifying theme for understanding the nature of factorization and primality. This is why, for example, power series and Dirichlet series (such as the Riemann Zeta) exhibit such crazy fractal Cantor-Set type patterns. Despite this connection being seen by Weierstrass as early as 1872, its more-or-less entirely ignored in standard textbooks on Analysis and Number Theory. A series of articles tries to provide some of the underpinnings for the above breathless assertions. Some highlights include:

• Distributions of Rationals on the Unit Interval (or, How to (mis)-Count Rationals) is a high-giggle-factor review of some so-called "facts" about fractions that you learned as a child, and which every math teacher ever since has repeated, but which are simply not true. I used to think Number Theory was boring until I saw this.
• The Bernoulli Map, the Gauss-Kuzmin-Wirsing Operator and the Riemann Zeta reviews the basics of using the Frobenius-Perron Operator as a tool for studying fractals, and then applies it to to Bernoulli Map and the Gauss Map. Along the way, we discover that the eigenfunctions of the Bernoulli Operator are the given by the Hurwitz Zeta, and show the connection between them and the traditional fractal eigenfunctions. The details of the connection between the Riemann Zeta and the Gauss-Kuzmin-Wirsing (GKW) Operator are presented. A couple of exactly-solvable toy models of the GKW are presented as well. About half of this is a pedagogical introduction; the other half is a presentation of all-new results.
• A series representation for the Riemann Zeta derived from the Gauss-Kuzmin-Wirsing Operator is a less rambling, more tightly focused extract of the above, meant for publication.
• The Minkowski Question Mark and the Modular Group SL(2,Z) shows that the distribution of Farey Fractions transforms under the dyadic representation of the Modular Group. It constructs the Minkowski Question Mark Function as a set-theoretic representation of (a subset of) the Modular Group. Reviews the hyperbolic rotations of binary trees. This paper provides the core background material for the structure of the Modular Group that is used in the other papers of this series.
• Symmetries of Period-Doubling Maps identifies the Modular Group SL(2,Z) as the basic symmetry group of a large class of fractals. Although this relationship is obvious, it never ceases to amaze me that books on modular forms never mention fractals, and that books on fractals never mention modular forms, despite the obviousness of self-similarity of the Modular Group. Even Mandelbrot's most recent book, published in 2004, doesn't breath a word of this. This paper develops the Takagi or Blancmange Curve as a fractal curve that transforms under the three-dimensional representation of the Modular Group. It then shows how to build higher-dimensional representations out of the Bernoulli polynomials.
• Continued Fractions and Gaps provides a very curious function that is discontinuous on the rationals and whose discontinuities seem to be perfectly randomly distributed. I find this to be a rather dramatic result, possibly because I've never heard of such a thing before. I've stared at a lot of fractals and space-filling curves, but nothing like this.
• Annotations to Abramowitz & Stegun includes a set of annotations to the classic Handbook of Mathematical Functions, including new integrals over Bessel functions, and some sums over the Riemann Zeta function.
• Gap Theory develops some basic relationships between continued fractions, fractals and Farey Numbers.
• My Wikipedia User:Linas web page. I've written or revised some two hundred-plus articles on assorted mathematical topics.

Political, Economic and Social Screeds

Some short essays on emerging economic and political forces. Most of these are just sly, corrsive expressions of anger and hostility, a lashing out at events beyond my control. Kind of like those ugly tv/radio talk shows, just not from the wacko right-wing nut-job perspective.

• American Political Unreality, 2008. Yes, politicians are from outer space, and they arrived in a flying saucer called "journalism". How can you tell? They focus on everything except what is actually important.

• Why did Bush promote warrant-less wiretapping? Why is Obama continuing these Bush policies? I can guess why, and I really don't like it. Stop Illegal Spying!.

• Wikipedia needs new leadership! I used to have various essays about the structural and cultural problems in Wikipedia, and the things that could be done to solve them. These were posted on my WP user page. Unfortunately, the malicious and stupid leadership there found these so offensive that they deleted the essays. Boo-yah! So now my profile is just soo very squeky-clean and totally inoffensive. To anyone, that is, except me. You might never guess that I'd been raped by the admins there. Woo hoo! Go Wikipedia!

• This is Your Brain on Drugs explores drug use in America today, and the political forces wrestling with this social problem.

• Labour of Love - The Volunteer Economy Free-market economists, thinkers and pundits (correctly) champion the power of free markets to create a better world. Yet if one opens a history book, it is hard to find a historical figure that was motivated by greed. Both prominent and emerging social and economic institutions are marked by excellence due volunteer, freely donated efforts, rather than wealth accumulation. When will we recognize the economic benefits of channelling this powerful force with social, political and governmental norms?

• Free Software ~ Free Trade? An examination of the powerful economic forces driving the acceptance of Free Software/Open Source in corporations and businesses. When we realize that Free Software is not just a (political) philosophy, or a social or anthropological movement, but an economic force akin to the removal of trade barriers, we can finally understand why its adoption by corporations promises to be a sea-change in the way that software is used. Reviews a business case study of a very large, failed technology project. If you thought the Internet was big ... this is bigger.

• DeCSS: Consumer Politics in the 21st Century A moral/sociological/legal diatribe about the immorality and evil ethics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the corporations that wish to squish human endeavor in the name of the protection of intellectual property.

• Open Source and Code Quality The relationship between the software worker and the software means of production leads to fundamentally new economic forces that will change the very nature of the software industry.

• Banned! A collection of outlaw computer technology, harvested from the net. Why would I mirror such dangerous and subversive material? In order to protect my personal freedoms -- and yours. Seems that greed and lust for power -- happily wrapped in the flags of "free enterprise" and "democracy", continue to lie at the root of many political and social evils and ills.

Linux Enterprise Computing

(Old, out of date) References, resources and a guide to prominent Free Software systems and technologies, from the corporate computing perspective. This is a snapshot of what Linux tech was like back in the late 1990's. Topics include:

• Linux Project Management and Bug Tracking Tools.
• SQL and other Databases for Linux.
• Linux RAID Solutions.
• Linux Network Address Translation Solutions.
• Linux Software RAID HOWTO. (old, out of date, covers an earlier version of Linux Software RAID).
• Network Management Tools for Linux. (old, out of date).
• Linux X.25 and Frame Relay Products and Vendors. (old, out of date).
• Linux Cluster, Parallel & Multi Processing Info. (very old, very out of date).

My Free Software Projects

I've worked on many free software projects. Below are some of my favorites, with a more complete list here. My Ohloh account provides details and statistics for some of my more recent, active projects.

• The OpenCog Project aims to build a free, open-source artificial general intelligence. Tall order. We've barely scratched the surface.
• The CMU Link Grammar Parser is a natural language parser. Its English-language dictionary contains over 70K words, and it is a pretty powerful and robust system. I've fixed a many bugs in it, expanded parse coverage significantly, and even hacked a quickie Lithuanian grammar for it:

  linkparser> Atvažiavom į sodžių.
  Found 1 linkage (1 had no P.P. violations)
    Unique linkage, cost vector = (UNUSED=0 DIS=0 AND=0 LEN=1)
  
       +----LI----+
       |     +-DG-+-Xp-+
       |     |    |    |
  atvažiavom į sodžių  .
  

• RelEx is a semantic relationship extractor for the English language. It is built on top of the CMU Link Grammar Parser, and outputs a semantic feature graph of parsed sentences. I didn't create RelEx, but I extended bits and pieces of it.
• GnoTime, the Gnome Time Tracking Tool. A desktop to-do list utility for tracking how much time you've spent working on a project. Includes a flexible invoice generator for billing clients for time & services.
• ESA/390 Linux Linux on a mainframe? You bet your booties. No, this is not a stupid trick; the Mainframes is the most powerful and advanced CPU architecture on the planet, and it makes sense to put Linux on it. As a practical matter, Linux on the mainframe can bring the cost of computing down to a level below other high-end Unix platforms from Sun, SGI and HP. Of theoretical interest, the extension of some of the principles of VM to Unix systems in general could greatly and fundamentally alter ideas about computer security, partitioning and performance. This is not your father's MVS.
• gcc/egcs -- the mainframe i370 back end for the gcc compiler, used to port the Linux kernel to the mainframe (above).
• binutils -- the mainframe i370 back end for the gas assembler, used to port the Linux kernel to the mainframe (above).
• The GnuCash Personal Finance Manager This is the biggest project I've ever worked on, and you can say I started it. I started by fixing a few bugs in a small piece of software called "X-Accountant", back in '96 or '97. Since then, I've put in thousands of hours of work into this software (yes, that's full time, overtime, evenings and weekends, for many years). Along the way, the name changed to "GnuCash", and its had hundreds of volunteers adding features functions, documentation and translations, turning GnuCash into the leading personal finance management software on Linux today. Its now included in all major Linux distributions, and sees downloads in the tens-of-thousands whenever a new version is released.
• Xbae a free table widget for Motif. Full-featured, quite functional.
• gle The GLE Tubing and Extrusion library. Draws three-dimensional polycylinders, polycones, surfaces of revolution and other shapes, using the OpenGL 3D graphics library.
• MAY -- a distributed processing infrastructure (obsolete). Allows worker processes to be automatically launched on remote computers, data to be parcelled out to them, and the results of the computations to be collected. Used to implement a distributed (3D graphics) ray-tracer, and also a distributed (3D graphics) radiosity algorithm solver.

Technical Ruminations

Miscellaneous technical articles and notes.

• A Better Way to do SETI makes the argument that if extra-terrestrials are trying to send us a radio message, then they will be using broadband spread-spectrum (pseudo-random noise) modulation techniques. Finding such a signal is much, much harder, but when found, it provides a much, much clearer communications channel than any other modulation technique. The ET's know this, and they know that we know this, and will thus use this technique preferentially. Essentially all of the current SETI searches, while being important so as to rule out other methods, are all really looking for the wrong thing.

• Eternity Service is a commentary on the basic ideas behind Napster as viewed through the eyes of David Gelertner. David chooses not to dirty his prognostications with the names of present-day technologies. I do. They are E-Rights, distributed.net, and Eternity Service, all mashed into one.

• A Digression on Artificial Life and Cellular Automata This web page is a very long diary of a set of experiments that were run in the early 90's with a collection of cellular automata. The automata were designed to have a 'genetic code' that was shared between cooperating individuals. By cooperating (or not) individual cells could (and did) self-organize into 'symbiotic' plant-like structures. Lots of interesting stuff was seen. Never attempted to write this up for publication; I should have. Nuts.

Philosophical Ruminations

Sophomoric, half-baked, incoherent, nutty ideas, most of which have probably already been better-expressed in some top-ten selling book. These include, but are not limited to:

• The Origin of Time, Quantum Mechanics, and Free Will A nutty digression that asserts that quantum mechanics is a side-effect of Planck-scale physics, rather than something innate.
• In the Beginning was the Word An unfinished defense of the Platonic Interpretation of Mathematics. Mathematics does not exist solely in the heads of humans, but in and of itself. Indeed, even the almighty God does not have the power to change the value of Pi (which, I believe, is a statement about God, and not about Pi).
• A Digression on the Non-Computability of Thought Something about incoherent, irrational clocks powering parallel Turing machines.
• Free Will and Determinism An very weak (and ultimately failed) attempt to disentangle free will and consciousness from physical (Newtonian) determinism.
• Heidegger's Fundamental Question, some sophomoric notes. Ties together some of the essays above.

My Weblog

This is the output of my new experimental note-taking and publishing and general-diary tool, GnoTime. We'll see how easy, scalable, effective this tool really is. Or, how dis-interested I am in using it ...

The good stuff is in the form of letters:

• Letter from Sofia, Bulgaria, August 1997
• Letter from Sofia, Bulgaria, September 1997
• Letter from Vilnius, Lithuania, August 2004

Employment History, Schooling

References pertaining to the various jobs I've held, and what I did while I worked there. In reverse chronological order. My sort-of current resume is here.

• An Airline Flight Reservation System I founded Teleport Travel, and was bought out by Intransco, where I served as Chief Technology Officer. More work, for less money, at an Internet startup. Developed the prototype entirely by myself. Teleport Travel was the very first on the 'net (Spring/Summer 1995) with an actual functioning airline reservation system, never mind that it worked better, and had a nicer user interface than many/most travel res systems today. An unhappy experience in the end, as this was a dot-com that dot-bombed. I shoulda been a billionaire by now, but it turns out (duhh) that superior technology has no correlation to success. Its all about the management, the CEO, the board of directors. I was unable to control the company, and was bitter about it for a long time -- my baby was taken away from me. Anyway, the actual technology does live on at TravelStoreMaker.com, and some good friends still work there.

• Pioneer 10/11 Silver Anniversary Commemorative Site Dr. John Simpson hired me to work on Pioneer 10/11 Charged Particle Instrument data analysis programs for my first paying computer programming job, twenty years ago. These are now the farthest spacecraft from our solar system. Goodbye Pioneer 10/11!

• Morgan Park Academy Class of `76.

Web Site Mirrors and More Web Site Mirrors

A random assortment of mirrored web sites. I mirrored these because at some point in time I thought their content was interesting, and they seemed to be at risk of disappearing forever... and some of them have ... This is my attempt to archive some of these, for some distant future rainy day.

Vintage Netscape Navigator

Some vintage copies of Netscape Navigator, v1.0n, v1.1 beta 1 and v2.0, for Linux/x86. These are circa 1994-1995. The binaries still run on my machine.

Rowing

A really great photo of me at the 2009 Pumpkinhead 5K head race (7:45AM 31 October 2009). Peter Hoffmann in stroke, we're enroute to the starting line. During the race, we ran the boat aground (into a pollution control barrier), got completely hung up, lost a few minutes trying to get underway again, and still managed to win the race!

Training video, with coach's chase-boat in pursuit.

• May 5, 2011, calm day, easy boat.
• April 2011, double w/ Peter Hoffman; strong headwind & big waves.
• April 2011, double w/ Peter Hoffman; strong tailwind, calm water.
• May 12, 2011, quad w/ Sue Carter, Connie, Sommers, row by pairs.
• Stick figure body prep by Flip Luisi.

Lietuva

Taip, aš kalbu Lietuviškai. Parašykite!

Panevėžys

Taip, tevas iš Panevežio.

Veps

Dabarmėtiniais laikais gyvena apie 6000-12000 kalbėtoju kalbos 'Veps', ant Rusijos-Finlandijos sieno, Karelijoje. Man šove į galvą, ar gali būti, kad, sakykime, prieš 5-10 generacijiu, gal koks žmogus, o gal visa šeima ar giminyste, atvažiavo iš Karelijos, ir apsigyveno Lietuvoje? Nu, Karelija ne taip jau toli nuo Lietuvos. Jeigu taip tikrai iškylo ta keista pavarde 'Vepštas', tai tas primas 'Veps' negalėjo atkeliauti ilgiau negu prieš 10 generaciju (200 metu), nes Vepštai nepaplite po visa Lietuva; bet irgi ne greičiau negu 5 generacijas, nes yra šimtai Vepštu. Tai ... ar galėtu būti?

Finlandijoi randama pavarde 'Vepsalainen'. Dagiau apie Veps.

My Goddess Jewelry

Please buy some of this beautiful jewelry!

SANLight status reports - Novamente status reports - Hanson Robotics Docker containers - Language learning databases