It has been around a year to eighteen months when I immersed myself into learning some fundamentals of modern machine learning techniques.  I’ve thrown myself into the standard mooc courses, gone through more advanced materials on neural networks by Hinton, a legend in this field, and some courses on computational neuroscience.

After the N1 test, I feel motivated to really brush up on my grammar vocabulary, rather than simply cram.  A lot of modern Japanese grammar only occur in newspapers and not really in normal daily spoken conversation so one really has to memorise the list and do serious rote learning unfortunately if mastery is the goal.

To those preparing for the JLPT exam, ganbare!

I used to hate javascript back in the day. I found the language ugly and was essentially a hack to make HTML code work in unintended ways, and introduced popup boxes to the internet.

I hacked together a self balancing inverted pendulum machine demo in javascript using p5.js for the graphics and box2d for physics.  Having learned about this stuff ages ago in control systems class, it’s time to relearn principles of PID controllers and see if this will work.  It is also the principle behind the segway carts.