Zamenhof 1907 speech at the London guildhall

Zamenhof gave a lot of beautiful speeches. This one makes me cry every time I read it. It's a lot more eloquent in the original Esperanto, but here is a translation into English that I've made.

The speech was made during a period of intense nationalist violence in Zamenhof's home region. Also at the time of the speech, some members of the Esperanto community thought that Zamenhof's idealism was scaring people away from Esperanto. They wanted to advertise and use Esperanto solely as an instrument for international business and communication and to drop any discussion of world peace. A few years earlier Zamenhof had reluctantly endorsed some of their ideas.

In this speech Zamenhof clarifies that he still sees the pursuit of world peace as the primary goal of Esperanto and he makes a plea for people in the Esperanto community (and beyond) to not lose their idealism. For more about Zamenhof and his political ideas, see here, and here.

If the AI alignment problem is impossible, then unfriendly superintelligent AI might be still be self limiting

I thought of the following idea while trying to rationalize in-universe explanations for why evil AI in science fiction stories (specifically The Matrix) haven't reached the point of singularity and can still sometimes be outsmarted by humans.

It is possible that unfriendly AI would be self-limiting in the sense that it would voluntarily choose to not create an even more powerful unfriendly AI. For example, if an unfriendly AI were just smart enough to usurp humans as the dominant intelligence on Earth (and either destroy or subjugate humanity), then maybe that AI would want to avoid making the same mistake that people made and would retain its dominant status by choosing not to create something more intelligent than itself. It could be that the AI alignment problem is so hard that a superintelligence can't be aligned, but a superintelligence may be smart enough to realize that it (and more advanced superintelligences) can't be aligned.

to postdoc or not to postdoc: from PhD to industry

After finishing my PhD, I did an academic postdoc for about 2 years, then recently moved to a small company in private industry. A friend recently asked whether I thought the academic postdoc was worthwhile and if I had any advice for getting into industry. Here's what I said.

How systems programming is like biochemistry

Recently I've been taking a lot of classes in computer architecture and systems programming, someone asked me why, with a biology background, I would be interested in such things. Here's what I said.

compiling Codon Optimizer on ubuntu 18.04

There is a cool old piece of software for codon optimization, inventively named "Codon Optimizer"

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/beta/Projects/codon-optimizer/

It's not really very useful from a practical standpoint because its codon optimization strategy is to try to replace every codon with the highest CAI codon for the same amino acid. Which turns out to not be a very good strategy in practice. The software also can only optimize for E. coli, and has the translation tables and codon frequency tables hard-coded in.

Nevertheless, it's one of the few Open Source programs for codon optimization, so it might be useful to use as a starting point for a more fully-featured program, by adding more tables or some alternative algorithms for picking codons to use.

Unfortunately, it won't compile on Ubuntu 18.04.

To get it to compile, I had to do the following:

Minimalist shoes: a journey

The idea of minimalist footwear appeals to me from a number of perspectives. Aesthetically, I like the idea of having as little as possible on my feet. Minimalist shoes also tend to be cheaper than other shoes, particularly other running shoes. I also like the fact that I can (try to) make my own minimalist shoes, whereas trying to make a pair of padded, heel-raised shoes seems like it would be a nightmare.