Thank you for visiting www.machine-altaica.com

The capital feature of this website, but the one you probably didn't come for, is a Turkish-to-English translator. At the moment, owing to limitations explained elsewhere, it is set up as a Turkish grammar illustrator: you give it a grammatically correct sentence drawing on a limited vocabulary, and it shows you, in color, what the words mean and then where they must go to add up to an intelligible English sentence. As a tutorial if not a tercüman, I think you'll find it useful, and I believe it does (just) qualify as "Turkish translation software." Please click here to access it. (If nothing happens, your browser may have a popup blocker enabled, so disable it and try the link again.) Should you accidentally close any of the windows, here are direct hyperlinks to each of them: the translator, the sample sentences, and the glossary.

If, on the other hand, you came for information on every state in Brazil, bicycling to Canada, Portugal qua Europe, a botanical expedition in São Tomé e Príncipe, a molecular fossil hunt via Maputo, Slovenia by bicycle, Slovenia on foot, Turkey and its neighbors, Mexico and the Ukraine just barely, or three decades of American bicycle rides, click here.

Coming eventually is a Turkish data-mining program based on the code I wrote for the "translator." Wait a minute, here it is, in barebones prototype form. And already here for some months now are bug reports. Right now, I'd guess that if you're not using IE6, IE8, or FF3, or your screen resolution is less than 1024x768, or there is something about Python execution in Linux that is fatally unlike Python execution in Windows, there might be problems. Known and possibly solved troubles are here.

Coming far later, because I have scarcely begun to invent them, are programs to recognize and perhaps decode almost totally ungrammatical languages. I got the idea while writing the code to translate dependably rules-dominated Turkish, fantasized occasionally about it with regard to the problem of translating extraterrestrial languages (always returning to Earth orbit - space, especially the empty part, just isn't fascinating), but latterly found myself impelled right to it by a close relative's senile dementia and the almost totally ungrammatical things he says. This isn't very much to look at, but I am pleased to tumble it out the door.

The first paragraph used to say "the one you probably came for," but my visitors' log sure gave the lie to that, so I had to change it. Pleased all the same with the labor that went into the translator - a good 95% of the programming was done after work, outdoors on a bench in the garden, with a beer at hand - I decided to make available some of the code, with a difference: these snippets are built for the Turkic languages written in Cyrillic, chiefly Kazakh, but easily adapted to Turkmen and Uzbek, I'd guess. Wildly.

And finally, and with some misgivings, the miscellany - now in two flavors, biochemical and agronomic - I believe one must come to expect from websites. Like to avoid that please-tour-my-brain stuff. On the other hand, I've GOT a domain - even at just $6.95 a month, why should I pay for another?

And finally (OK, Kuiper-Belt-finally, not Pluto-finally), something that doesn't fit anywhere at all in "Machine Altaica:" a matrix math utility. I wrote it in connection with my own recent studies of quantum computing. It may help yours. Anyone who programs computers writes lots of little in-house utilities. I'm kicking this one out the door only because I find surprisingly few such things available online. Over those which I have seen, this one offers a fairly significant advantage: there is no row- or column-number specification. An equally significant shortcoming may be that my machinery fails to provide suitable error feedback. All exceptions are caught - that is not hard to arrange - but whether you are told what you did wrong and how you might put it right are, at the moment, uncertain. My advice to anybody: do everything right the first time. Because in the quantum world, doing anything at all is never forgotten or forgiven. (Unless your commutator is zero. I think you're OK then.)