Xamuel.com

Announcing the newest project: The Romaji Dictionary
Long term readers will recognize this project as one I started almost a year ago. Back then, I had no idea what I was doing. I wrote a giant C program from bare principles to parse the EDict’s XML file– a major case of Reinventing The [...]

A normal graphing calculator, you enter an equation and get a curve. An inverse graphing calculator goes the other way: from curve to equation. The current version accepts curves in the form of English letters. So it can generate equations whose graphs appear to spell things out, like “Hello World”.
The calculator [...]

Mathematically speaking, we’re probably living in a computer simulation, under certain reasonable assumptions. The idea behind the proof is simple. Assuming humans live long enough and continue to advance in technology, eventually we’ll be able to create such fine simulations of the world that the people in those simulations will be conscious. [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about mathematical notation lately and, more precisely, how to subvert it. After all, you don’t really understand something until you can subvert the həll out of it One question I was led to is: why do we use the symbol “+” for addition and “-” [...]

The reason I haven’t been publishing many articles lately is because I’ve been doing my General Examination for candidacy for a PhD. This is basically the hardest test you can take in academia. Four committee members, each posing somewhere from 3 to 6 problems, 2 weeks to do them all (I started Monday), [...]

The thing about comfort zones is, no matter how comfortable they are, we can’t camp out in them forever. When we get complacent, we want to freeze things as they are, but that’s impossible. And that, my friend, is the Illusion of Security: the idea that if you just try hard enough, [...]

One of the most striking things about my childhood is that I skipped almost the entire K-12. I was in public schools for 6th and 7th grade, and a somewhat ghetto private Christian school for 9th grade, and that’s it! For quite a few of those years, my parents made an effort to [...]

I made some major changes to the Lands of Aethar snapshot. Notice the new link from the frontpage to an area-list. This should make exploring the Aethar world considerably easier and less tedious. Also, individual rooms and character pages in the world now have a little box in the upper right-hand corner [...]

I’m very happy to announce the launch of Connections, my first real foray into Web 2.0 territory. Connections is a user-editable website which is broken down into three levels: themes, objects, and connections. A theme is an overarching category. Some examples of possible themes: Outer Space, Countries of the World, [...]

“The Lands of Aethar” was a free online game which ran from 1994 to 2009. It was a text-based virtual world, a MUD (Multi-User-Dimension), one of the precursors to the modern MMORPG. In the early 2000’s, I was the head programmer for Aethar. I spent countless hours fine-tuning the SMAUG engine the [...]