Bayle Shanks's website

Welcome to my website. My email address is . If you're looking for my work website, go here.

About me

I currently live in San Diego.

My professional training and interests are in the areas of cognitive studies, computers, collaboration, mathematics, and finance. See also my old grad school website.

See aboutMe for more about me.

Recommendations of links and things to read/watch

• children's book gift ideas
• webcomics
• books
• web tools:
  • Internet Archive keeps copies of old version of web pages. Often when you hit a dead link (a 404 due to a no-longer-existing webpage), you can find an old copy of it in the Archive!
• web forums:

Thoughts and ideas

• A governance system ("concord democracy") for groups (companies, non-profits, governments) which i feel will be both more efficient, lead to better decision-making, and also be more participatory than traditional frameworks. Mostly finished -- carefully thought out, but not reviewed by others or tested yet, so probably has some bugs.
• Unfairness Resulting From Different Budgets At Trial, a proposal for a procedure that would prevent large companies and rich people from having an unfair advantage at trial

Cognitive studies:

• What is the function of the reciprocal signal from cerebral cortex to thalamus? -- an underappreciated open question in the systems neuroscience of the cerebral cortex
• arc computation

Philosophy:

• Some opinions in philosophy
• Computation is not free (an underappreciated principal with broad consequences)

Misc:

• improvements to English such as not capitalizing various things

Tips and advice

• Everyday advice and tips
  • life advice
  • notes-everyday-mind
• Computer tips
  • i use the Colemak keyboard layout and viperre with emacs (i wrote viperre). I highly recommend each of these because imo they make typing much more efficient.
  • notes-computer-incantations various command-line snippits mostly for GNU/Linux

Tutorials and notes

WARNING: whenever i write notes to myself, i try to keep them on this website (unless there is some reason not to), so there's a zillion webpages in here that are no more than an unreadable 'braindump'!

book notes

math and computer:

• [[notes-computers-programming-programmingLanguagesBook?]] -- lists of various programming language concepts and constructs, and of Turing-equivalent systems, and of sub-Turing systems

See notes for more.

Released software projects

Released and no longer actively developed:

• Parliamentary Procedure Helper: keeps track of what's going on in a meeting governed by Robert's Rules
• Voice Keyboard: virtual keyboard controlled by speech recognition
• WikiGateway: middleware for programmatic interaction with wikis
• EasyLatex: markup software to make writing math more efficient
• autoc, an Octave/MATLAB program to analyze electroneurogram traces of coupled oscillators. This is the program that was used in V3 spinal neurons are required for a robust and balanced motor rhythm during walking movements. Here is the README, which includes installation notes for Windows, for the latest version, 1.0.1.
• An efficient keyboard mapping for emacs viper
• boost-graph wrapper for Python

For more of my software projects, see projects/software.

more

This website has a lot more stuff besides the highlights on this page; see the TableOfContents.

Someday I may have a weblog.

Here are old talk slides. old school website.

Here is my calendar.

Here's a list of all [1] to this web site.

Thanks to Katherine for drawing my icon.

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old stuff

Probably the most useful thing i've done for the world so far is https://github.com/bshanks/viperre[viperre], an emacs mode that has a vi-like modal distinction between editing and movement, with an optimized keyboard layout of the movement commands.

My current main project is my phd thesis, which is an analysis of the anatomy of the cerebral cortex using gene expression data from the Allen Brain Atlas. See our http://bshanks-stevens.nfshost.com/sfn2010_bshanks.pdf[SFN 2010 poster] and http://purl.net/net/bshanks/work/[my work website].

• Wikis to discuss online communities and collaboration: http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatballWiki[MeatballWiki?] and http://communitywiki.org[CommunityWiki?] (Meatball is older, but CommunityWiki? is copyleft)
• (old/extinct) http://www.neurodudes.com[Neurodudes:] a neuroscience blog that i co-founded
• Someday I may have a http://bayleshanks.com/blog[weblog].

Links

• http://archive.org[Internet Archive] keeps copies of old version of web pages. Often when you hit a dead link (a 404 due to a no-longer-existing webpage), you can find an old copy of it in the Archive!