Nelson Minar

I can also be reached by phone.

I have another home page at http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/. It's very simple, but it has the information about my current research.

I graduated in 1994 from Reed College. I recently lived in Santa Fe, working at the Santa Fe Institute. Now I'm in Boston at the MIT Media Lab, working in the Software Agents Group. I took a big roadtrip in the summer of 96 that I liked very much.

My main academic interest is in computer science and the field of complex systems, the study of systems that are too complicated to analyze exactly. It's an interdisciplinary sort of thing, bridging aspects of cognitive psychology, computer science, physics, biology, economics, mathematics, and whatever else seems interesting. The image is from my undergraduate thesis on lattice relaxation systems. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about just what the existence of the Internet implies and makes possible.

At the Santa Fe Institute I worked on the Swarm project, building a general purpose framework for multi-agent simulations.

I'm shamelessly elitist about things which I do and do not like, especially culture - movies, music, restaurants, literature. My page of links contains links to those things on the web I personally think are useful or interesting. There's also some other pictures of me online.

Do your hands hurt when you type?

Some of my things on the Web.

emacs mode for HTML (in beta)

I've written an emacs mode for HTML documents called html-helper-mode. It's nowhere near WYSIWYG, but that might be a feature. It's been in beta way too long: I just need to write some docs for it.

Roadtrip '96

My trip over 3/4 of the US.

Books, movies, and restaurants

I try to record my impressions of books I read and movies I see, and also make some comments about my favourite restaurants. These pages might tell you something about me.

Projects I don't have time to do

I occasionally think up an interesting project that I know I don't have time to work on. Rather than just let them disappear, I decided to write them down.

POV Glyphs

A little graphics project, abstract iconic forms done up in a raytracer.

Notes about the Web

I was overwhelmed by how big the Web is, how fast it grows. I'm still amazed with how useful it is, even given its disorganization.

CU-SeeMe under Linux

CU-SeeMe is the Next Great thing on the net - video conferencing. Between some hacked up software and a $100 camera, you can transmit and receive live video over the net. I wrote up notes about how to make it all work under Linux.

Ergonomic emacs keybindings

I have trouble with my wrists, so I put some work into rebinding the emacs keys to be more friendly.

My PGP keys

I use PGP for protecting the privacy of my email. If you have access to PGP, please use my PGP key for email to me.

Linux on NEC Versa laptops

I'm maintaining a page on running linux on NEC Versa laptops. Also contains information about XFree86 and the ct65545 chipset.

Web pointers

My page of links I use instead of bookmarks or a hotlist.

Notes on online publication

I've been thinking about online publication in the academic world, what it means and how to do it best. I've got a few notes about it online, nothing earth-shattering. It's pretty old now (a whole year! That's forever on the web) and my thinking has changed some.

Swarm

I'm maintaining the Swarm archive: Swarm is the project I'm working on now.

Alife Online

I'm helping out with Alife Online, an online wing of the Artificial Life journal. I haven't put as much time into this as it needs.

GA model of immunity

As an experiment in putting academic papers online, I've made available a paper I wrote on using genetic algorithms as a model of the immune system.

Intro WWW talk (summer 1994)

I gave an introductory talk to the World Wide Web for the Santa Fe Institute which ended up being a good thing, it got some people going. Some of my notes and examples are online.

Raytraced movies

I've created a couple of MPEGs of raytraced 3d Hilbert space-filling curves, an experiment in a medium.