Puttypeg Home Page

Kit's Funeral

Information about the Funeral and Thanksgiving Service for the Life of Kit Widdows can be found at http://www.puttypeg.com/kit.

This is the personal website of Dominic Widdows. It contains a range of music, poetry, science, historical and political ramblings, links to other information that I've found useful, and probably in the fullness of time, much more. Some of the material (papers in particular) was available for a long time on webpages at Stanford's CSLI and MAYA Design, and also on a weblog I tried to maintain for a few years. Papers are also listed on my Google Research Home Page.

Professionally speaking I'm a mathematician / linguist / computer science sort of person, and so I work as a software engineer for Google in Pittsburgh. (It all makes sense, really.) Once upon a time, I thought that "Puttypeg" was a sweet name for an approach to life and learning that tried to grow as flexibly as possible. It's said that "you can't put a square peg in a round hole", and nowadays the challenges in the world are changing so fast, we will need some very adaptible people to fit into whatever gaps need attention. So, don't try and be a square peg or a round peg the whole time, try to learn to be a putty peg and look for ways to make yourself and your skills useful wherever you're needed most. Generally, I still like the idea.

Needless to say, none of the material you'll read on this website represents the official standpoint of Google, MAYA Design, Stanford, Oxford, Khafif, the BBC, the Church of England, Bourbaki, or anyone else with a shred of organizational clout.

Essays

A collection of a few essays on different topics, including healthcare, politics, and religion.

Music

You'll find a couple of songs and some useful guitar chord sheets.

Some musical fun I'm having at the moment is playing the trumpet with Khafif, a terrific Middle Eastern and Balkan music and dance group.

Another collaborator in Pittburgh is Brent Malin, who I've been playing a variety of folk and country with for a couple of years, including a guitar and mandolin duo at Club Cafe.

Science

My main contributions can be found in this reasonably complete list of papers. Unfortunately, not all of them are as readable as I would like. In fact, many people would be perfectly justified in claiming that none of them are readable at all. I try hard to write about most topics in as practical and friendly a fashion as possible, but needless to say, this isn't always possible, and sometimes rubs the reviewers up the wrong way.

Here's a new topic: Contextual Arithmetics. I'm becoming somewhat obsessed by this topic, though in spite of all the pratical, historical and even theoretical arguments in its favour, I suspect the whole thing will either be ignored for several decades or seen as utterly crackpot.

Often I prefer writing about science when I don't need to worry about reviewers and official publication at all. One early example was this animated introduction to the Theory of Relativity, one of the many things I'd love to complete one day. My most important scientific work to date is Geometry and Meaning. For once, I had the chance to please everyone, including myself — many general readers have written to me or reviewed the book saing they enjoyed it thoroughly, while several professionals reviewers praised the book in important journals.

Software

New! Google Sky Map, a free mobile application for the Android platform that uses your phone's sensors to display a map of the stars the phone is pointing at (even if your roof, clouds, or the earth is in the way!).
Google Sky Map was created by a small group of volunteer engineers in Google Pittsburgh (and a designed in New York), thanks to Google's 20% project system.

The main pieces of open source software I've worked on a lot that you can download and install are for learning the meanings of words and documents automatically from free text.

Semantic Vectors package, created in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh. Now mature and prospering, with contributions from several individuals.
Infomap NLP package, created in conjunction with Stanford University.

Arts and Crafts

Software development and academic research are enjoyable in their way, but there is nothing I find more satisfying than working with my hands. We're currently most of the way through restoring the ground floor of our Tudor style house in Squirrel Hill, and have made furniture, curtains, laid wood floor, panelled and finished the rooms. I always mean to take pictures of these projects before and during and after, and mean to post them online. But give me a circular saw to play with and I won't touch a computer all day.

One project I did keep a good record of was when Maryl and I made our wedding rings.

Poetry

Here are a couple of poems.

We've also recently started a Pittsburgh poetry group at work. It evolved accidentally into a collaborative process: the players contribute a topic idea each, and then we go off for a few days and write a poem, somehow including at least three or four of the topics. The challenge of combining other people's ideas into a new poem has brought out some great variety and creativity.

Weblog

I kept up a weblog for a couple of years called Red Wine Wibbles, which you can read at puttypeg.blogspot.com. I might resurrect it one day, though I wonder if I will, since blog spam seems to be growing, and I don't think I ever was a very good blogger anyhow. All my remotely interesting blog articles were more like essays, so I decided I'd be better off just putting the occasional article or essay up here.

Contact

You can contact me with any feedback or suggestions by writing to dwiddows at gmail dot com.
(Please supply the usual symbols instead of the 'at' and 'dot' - the cryptic notation is just a token gesture to avoid getting the address harvested by spam engines.)