I've begun playing with Haskell a bit and thought it might be worth while to meet others interested in Haskell and Functional Programming. When searching for a local user group failed to turn anything up, I decided to be proactive. I started a meetup for DenHUG, the Denver Area Haskell Users Group. We'll see how it goes.

FANN, the Fast Artificial Neural Network library, is an open source project from the University of Copenhagen. It is written in C with bindings for C++/Java, Haskell, Python, and other languages. It is well documented and seems to have an active community.

In How the Scots Invented the Modern World Arthur Herman recounts Scots history from the 16th through the 20th centuries. While the Scots didn't create the modern world by themselves, they certainly played a key role. They rapidly transformed their martial feudal/tribal clan society into the first modern literate one.

The Scottish Enlightenment championed the voice of reason and inspired the framers of the Constitution of the United States. Scottish engineers, entrepreneurs, and soldiers powered the expansion of the British Empire. While embracing the world of science and commerce, Scots thinkers were aware of the dangers of forgetting the virtues of war which include courage, honor, loyalty, and perseverance and promoted citizen militias to counter this.

Today Scottish culture is celebrated in festivals and Highland Games around the world. While the Scottish people and culture are popularly considered Celtic, they were also shaped by Scandinavians, Anglo Saxons, and Normans. The surge of Scottish influence had subsided by the mid 20th century, but the effects permeate western civilization.

The Brian Simulator is a Python package for rapid development and testing of large neural network models. It achieves relatively quick execution speed by using NumPy to execute many calculations in each time step. For large models it up to 75% of the speed of a pure C implementation, but smaller ones suffer more from Python's interpretive overhead.

In The Gluten Connection Shari Lieberman surveys the gluten sensitivity issue. Celiac Disease is the most severe form of gluten sensitivity and once thought to be rare, is now known to be rather common with an estimated global occurrence of almost 1% of the population. Celiac is not curable, but symptoms are relieved by avoiding gluten from wheat, barley, and rye.

Less serious sensitivity seems to be more common, but the data is ambiguous. It's been associated with many gastrointestinal and autoimmune ailments and there are many anecdotal accounts of such ailments improving once the sufferer adopted a gluten free diet. Research provides some support for this but looks inconclusive. Still, a gluten free diet may be worth trying for those suffering from chronic ailments which have been associated with gluten.

I recently downloaded the 2009-11-10 version of SLAPP (Swarm Like Agent Protocol in Python) and worked through the examples to see how it's coming along. It's still alpha quality and not organized as a package, but improving. Some file and directory names include spaces which is inconvenient for working on the command line. The code looks like Objective C written in Python. Tutorial 6 is under development but is functional. It converts a schedule.xls file to schedule.txt and fails if you don't have the xlrd module installed. Tutorials 7 and 8 are simply placeholders at this point. I also downloaded the Swarm documentation and Objective C source to help fill in the gaps.

I'm using Tutorial 6 as the starting point for a simple traffic simulation model. This consists of a four way stop intersection with the base case of drivers (agents) following the standard rule of proceeding through the intersection in the order they stop and yielding to the driver on the right when multiple drivers arrive at the intersection at the same time.

I'll massage the code from the tutorial to make it a little more Pythonic, package the core pieces to better support multiple models, and ensure compatibility with both Python 2.6 and 3.1. The tutorial has the beginning of a GUI interface using Tk which I may work on, though I'd like to see OpenGL and browser based interfaces as well.

We celebrated the New Year and my birthday at the McGregor Mountain Lodge. We went showshoeing, watched the birds, elk, and deer that visited the birdfeeders near our cabin, and relaxed.

Wishing everyone peace, prosperity, and freedom in 2010.