12 June 1996 
 
	Hey there, whoever.  Since I'm on the computer alot, waiting for 
runs to be completed, I'm usually wasting my time on netscape or some 
similar time-sucker.  I thought I'd do something productive/creative.  So 
here's a little thought journal. 
	I don't believe in anything like secure files (even if I encrypted 
them -- but it might take a little more being on the spot), so I'm just 
going to put mundane, conversational stuff here.  Things I'd say to 
anyone.  So hello, if this isn't me.  If I feel like it, I'll put it up on 
the vanity pages I call my web pages. 
 
	So I'm here with Condensed Matter Physics.  I'm doing stuff with 
buckytubes -- carbon nanotubes.  An ongoing problem is their formation.  
The thing I've been simulating is stretching them.  Unfortunately, all the 
movies are made in a very simple manner, so I've been trying to put them 
into some standard format like MPEG.  But the packages out there are 
either huge (much of which I don't need) or opaque.  My kingdom for a good 
tech writer! 
	Anyway, it seems that buckytubes do a real strange thing when 
stretched: like most materials, it eventually "breaks", but it doesn't 
seem to totally separate.  The two parts are connected by a little string 
of beads, which come from the unraveling end of one of the two tubes 
remaining.  hmmmm. 
	But enough about work for now. 
 
	My personal project is working with Hidden Markov Models; Last 
year it seemed I couldn't find anyone working with them except in the 
context of speech recognition.  Now I get on the World Wide Web, do a 
search, and find several papers/articles on HMMs in speech recognition, 
using neural nets & HMMs together, using HMMs to find/identify genes, etc. 
A couple of papers on improved parameter estimation for HMMs.  In any 
case, it seems that everything is about applications of HMMs and minor 
improvements.  I want to study a couple of things like distributions and 
putting metrics on some kind of HMM space. 
	 
	I went to Alumni Day at my high school, North Carolina School of 
Science and Math -- saw people I thought had broken up a while ago are now 
engaged or married.  Whatever.   
 
	That's enough for today. 
 
 
mp