AltSci Blog

It's amazing. I actually made it to São Paulo, Brasil. I can't speak Brasilian Portuguese (of course I can't) despite having a ton of confidence before I left. I'll make a lot of progress everyday. What's more interesting is that I am writing this blog hours after arriving. If you recall, I didn't post my first blog in Tokyo, Japan or Berlin, Germany until over 48 hours after. The reason for that is easy access to what a person needs. Information is key to speed sometimes and boy did it work. The taxi stand had a database that took a street name and listed hotels, hostels, and other points of interest. 88 Real got me to the hostel in 45 minutes. Had I been smart I would have taken the bus. I wasn't able to figure out which bus to take so that would have been a bad idea. The hostel was happy to put me up despite having my reservation be for tomorrow. The hostel has 110V power (same as US) and WPA wifi, so it was really easy to get online. After my adventure, I hopped on and posted this. No photos yet but just wait.

Today I got lost. Similar to my adventure in Tokyo and Berlin, I simply walked in one direction until I needed to turn and didn't keep track of where I turned. After a while I found a landmark and followed my way home. For a while though it was a bit difficult to find my way. São Paulo doesn't have long straight streets. That's why a street name can get you a list of hotels and hostels. The street I'm on can't be more than 5 blocks long. I'll post the actual length in another post.

São Paulo is wonderful. There are so many shops in my area that I am in awe. The streets are dangerous and the sidewalks are uneven as possible. The heat is wonderful and the mood is good. There is so much graffiti everywhere that I actually wonder if the graffiti artists have the same values as other cities around the world. Maybe not. The largest building I can see from the 7th story here has graffiti at the top. São Paulo is 2 hours ahead of US Eastern Time (BRST), so this is being posted at 2:20pm rather than 9:20am. The time difference is quite a kick especially since flight was 19 or so hours. I'm pretty sleepy having not been able to sleep on the flight.

I've talked with two Brazilians (Brasiliero) today and both encourage me to visit the Northeast. While my original plan was to just visit São Paulo I am now thinking that I'll find the easiest way to visit as much of the country as I can. Since Brasil is nearly the same size as the continental US, I suspect that there is a lot of diversity among Brasil's many areas. I think I will not plan travel within Brasil until I get there. I currently have bigger things to be concerned about and I have little mind to waste if I want to learn every word I'll need in Brasil.

A look at Brasil's history (Wikipedia is great, isn't it?) today shows just how unstable their country has been since its inception. Though I think that is a good thing, I also think about how short a time the US has been a constitutional democracy. It's really a matter of time before we change dramatically. The industrial revolution that made the US wealthy is changing dramatically and our political system is honestly strained by the inherent weakness of representative democracy. Without strong checks and balances, the systems of governance and justice are as tyrannical as lesser systems of government. What does this have to do with Brasil? Brasil's young democracy has had serious problems in the recent past. Corruption and economic injustice are problems both countries are continuously fighting. As we learn to combat these problems we can improve our societies by sharing our ideas.

Since this is my first post I want to keep it short. I'm learning a ton of Brazilian Portuguese with Busuu and I intend to finish the B2 training before I leave in 1 week. That will make me an intermediate Portuguese speaker in about 3 months of learning over 1 year. The podcasts help and the PDFs should come in handy at some point, but of course the two things that really made learning fun for me was talking to native speakers and the writing exercises which are corrected by native speakers. Amazing really. I enjoy learning but this makes my day every time I go on Busuu someone new is making me work hard for my conversation. Brazilians are so friendly.

May 19, 2010

Now that AltSci is back up and fewer a few serious XSS bugs, I thought I would show you some awesome things that AltSci has given you in the past few years. AltSci Language AI is perhaps the most interesting, with gems like "悪政" and "День Победы", you may learn a lot more than a language or two.

Tonight I hacked on something for work and for humanity. At the same time a person I know worked for me on another project that will not so much advance humanity so much as prove something quite simple. Who did more for the world, who had more fun, and who did the most work are pretty much immaterial but I wished that everyone in the world could enjoy a fraction of the satisfaction that a programmer does when they create a piece of code. A piece of code that can be open sourced and that helps others, even better.

May 12, 2009

Hooray!
The Twitter Language AI is ready to be used! How do you use it? Type a word into the input box, then click "Search". This will search Twitter for that word. It will return the last 15 results and histogram all the words it finds. This is very simple functionality, right? Why would someone want a histogram of words spoken on a topic? For one, market research. If you know the word that people associate with your brand or topic, you can market it using their words. Yowch, that's almost like advertising, isn't it? Yup. The actual original purpose for this was to learn foreign languages by translating the most common words first (similar to my Japanese Language AI). The second interesting thing to do with the Twitter Language AI is to click the "Graph" button. This will take the data in the left and graph it on the right as shown in the image. This is really interesting and useful for scientists who don't want to import the data into a spreadsheet just to graph it. It uses the Google Visualization API and sends no data to Google (just your IP address and HTTP headers) to draw this, which is pretty cool.

Click the image above to use the Twitter Language AI.