15 Caliph_Lambda 2026/07/28(Tue) 22:54:11This is going to be long; I gush on the stuff I love a lot.
My name's Omar. I go by different names online (including CodexDerelict, λiber, DrSchnautz, CaliphLambda/Caliph_Lambda), but that's my name in meatspace. I'm 22 years old, Emirati, religiously a Sunni Muslim (no other affiliations). I speak Arabic and English natively, German at a B2 level, and French at a C1 level.
What do I like?
I think my main interest is linguistics. When I was younger, I was far more interested in philology, but that evolved into an interest in linguistics proper. My interest primarily lies in morphology (the organization of words) and syntax (the organization of sentences) and their interplay, including the potential of syntax and morphology to have a far more unified interface than many would assume. My interest lies especially in the generative tradition (the "generative"/"usage-based" split is a strange ossified split in the sociology of linguistics). Unlike Chomsky though, I am of the opinion that the faculty of linguistic competence is beholden to linguistic data, and that it is only through the description of data that any understanding of competence could be reached.
Mathematics (including logic and CS, ALL OF IT IS MATH TO ME) is an extension of my love for linguistics. I got into math through linguistics, and so most of my interest is in places that have some importance to linguistics, which I do pursue on their own without necessarily linking them to linguistics. Therefore, I'm far better at discrete math than continuous math, but I'm still a novice at both and need to learn both. A good example is automata and computation, which I got into because a question and controversy in generative linguistics back in the 1980s is the question of what formal grammar class corresponds to human language. It falls under "mildly context-sensitive", wherein most of the data shows context-freeness (allowing it to be described in terms of recursive trees) while certain parts also show context-sensitivity (e.g. certain constructions in Swiss German and Bambara). Formal logic, as well, is quite important in the field of formal semantics, and nowadays category theory and model theory have some importance in the syntax-semantics interface (categorial grammar, constraint-based grammars, etc). In the modern day with AI research and the use of language models to understand the emergence of language, linear algebra, statistics and information theory are climbing in importance, and I'm interested in finding links between the strangely emergent and continuous elements of human language with the evidently discrete units through which utterances are built (words, phrases, sentences). I think information theory could offer insights into this, there's things like the uniform informational density hypothesis wherein humans distribute information evenly within an utterance; there's evidence for and against, but it's a good example. Category theory has been used as well towards the end of uniting distributional semantics (i.e. the continuous) with compositional semantics (the discrete), but I don't know as much there and want to learn more still.
So, these unite in "computational linguistics", a field which I find to be an ill-defined meme in the modern day. It either refers to "computation" in the abstract Turing-machine sense, or it means "computation" as in neural networks. The latter are more concerned with making machines that create meaningful sentences, the former is more concerned with describing human language in mathematically rigorous terms. The former, in short, has linguistics and little "computation" in the sense of implementation on a computer, the latter has a bunch of computation and no linguistics. Reading a paper of the former, like the stuff posted up on HPSG and LFG proceedings, makes me question where the Hell the implementation is. The latter has papers about how they got syntax mistakes down by 2%, a state-of-the-art result, but I scratch my head about WHICH. It's understandable, but it's evident both sides aren't talking to each other. My interest is in doing both, understanding how language models process language and extracting insights about the discrete nature of human language from their continuous vector embeddings, as well as seeing manners to integrate the discrete nature of human language with them, both to the end of extracting insights on human language.
So, I have a good bit of Python knowledge in syntax and am comfortable coding in it, though I need to up my knowledge of the mathematics of neural networks to implement them, but I'm pursuing a Master's precisely for that reason. To up my knowledge of syntax, semantics and generative grammar and implementing that knowledge, I'm learning Racket, which is very suited to developing programming languages. It's easy to implement syntax trees with it, logical unification is a breeze with both Racklog and miniKanren, and if I'm unsatisfied with how, the whole point of the language is to easily develop new languages on top of it. A lot of the linguistics work is done in Common Lisp, though shifting to Python for the AI capabilities these days, which is a shame; I wrote a CFG-based sentence generator in Python and implementing recursion over a tree is a pain in the ass. I wanted to add unification, but decided doing it in Python would be nothing but a hassle, hence why I'm learning Racket which is built towards fucking around with ASTs and logic. Interop between them given my interest both in neural networks and formal linguistics is not a massive problem, or so I see it, because the code is towards the end of a paper, rather than an "app".
Enough about my academic interests. I love music. I listen to a lot of different things, but my focus is primarily metal, prog and electronic music. In terms of prog, I do like Dream Theater, Rush, Haken, Leprous, Cardiacs and others. As you can see I do like my prog to be heavy, complex, power-chord oriented, that kind of deal, thereby it's an extension of my love for metal; I like ELP, Yes and Camel as well, but mostly their work that's more oriented towards hitting you hard. "Close to the Edge" has that quality which I do love. It puts the "rock" in "progressive rock". I like my prog to be bombastic, complex, hard-hitting (I think it's somewhat evident that I'm not a big Pink Floyd fan). Haken is a band I've been listening to very often recently, they might be my favorite band nowadays.
Their early work is heavy prog/prog metal in vein of Dream Theater with a very strong 70s prog influence and the eclecticism that comes with it, though with stuff the 70s old guard didn't have; there's some jazz influences, big electronic influences in there too on their first 3 albums, and a certain strangeness and compositional experimentation while maintaining a kind of musical maturity and taste, I like that. On those, it's mostly guitarist and keyboardist Richard Henshall who writes the tracks in their entireties before tweaking them with the band. Later on, when other members of the band began to have a stronger say in the composition (from "Affinity" onward), there's a substantially greater electronic influence which I love too. There's more angular riffing inspired by Meshuggah, IDM-ish soundscapes and glitchiness, and more of a tech-death/extreme metal influence. Both eras I love, they experiment eclectically in different ways.
I also love Dream Theater. Awake's my favorite album of theirs. It's probably their darkest album, Kevin Moore builds some really beautiful soundscapes that fit well with Petrucci's guitar. Not to say I don't love Rudess's keyboard work, he's far more forward and technical than Moore. Metropolis Pt. 2 I think shows off where Rudess is better, not in beautiful soundscapes but in compositional audacity and bombast. He's not afraid to write strange melodies, there's that Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman underlying the whole thing, he inherited the more eccentric sensibilities from 70s prog while Kevin's more into ambient and that reflects in his compositional style. I saw them live in January with my dad when they came down here, and they put on one hell of a show.
Aside from this, in terms of metal, I enjoy traditional metal, US power metal, death metal and black metal. In terms of death metal I'm very deathgrind oriented, bands like Carcass ("Symphonies of Sickness" era), General Surgery, The County Medical Examiners, Exhumed and others. Carcass is great, but they've never gotten close to Symphonies of Sickness; no surprise it's one of the most influential deathgrind albums out there. The grumbling bass, the sloppy blast-beats and insane guitar work is something they had locked on. With Necroticism I think they lost the sleaze, it's much cleaner, but their previous album "Reek of Putrefaction" has a production that makes literally everything hard to hear. It's like it's recorded in another room. But I'm a lucky guy: most of the deathgrind bands that took after Carcass took after Symphonies specifically, improving upon it in different ways and adding new and interesting musical ideas, or in the case of bands like The County Medical Examiners, literally just writing music in its style and nothing else.
In terms of death metal aside from that, Death's work, both early (the Scream Bloody Gore era) and late (Sound of Perseverance era) are great; I love my prog, so I think Schuldiner's addition of more proggy songwriting inspired by Watchtower is welcome. I like how he eased it in slowly from Leprosy onward, getting more and more technical, and Chuck was always evolving, and you can hear how every album changes and improves upon the one before and it's great. Symbolic is great, I feel, probably my favorite Death album. The Sound of Perseverance would've been so much better had it been released the way Chuck wanted it, with the late Tim Aymar and his clean vocals.
In terms of electronic music, I do love me some IDM and some happy hardcore though I'm not as deep as I am with metal and prog. Starting with IDM, I love Boards of Canada. The soundscapes spun by the Sandison brothers have always really gotten me; driving around Dubai with Music Has the Right or Geogaddi has always been something to me, the power lines in the desert, the malls surrounded by a barren sea of shrubs and sand, the places I remember from my childhood either changed or absolutely still, the sameness of life was always uplifted by the surreal and nostalgic sound of BoC. I studied in Abu Dhabi, and so in commutes between, I loved turning this stuff up. The city lights of AD reflecting on the open seas of the Persian Gulf, the open road barriered by beautiful green mangroves, and "Dayvan Cowboy" off "The Campfire Headphase"... that's one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had.
My buddy turned me onto Aphex Twin, starting with the SAW works, then I got turned onto the RDJ album; ambient, DnB, the guy does it all and he does it great. RDJ is like 15 musicians in one, and his work, either in 1992 in Cornwall or 2026 in Dubai, seriously does feel timelessly futuristic. He's pretty much the Swiss Army Knife of music, to me; I don't recall a musician as dynamic as him in memory right now, and Haken's later work definitely has his imprint.
Recently, I've been getting into generative music, mostly out of my interest in linguistics; I'm interested in composing using code myself and my own framework based on the formal theories of language. But that aside, I listened to Autechre's "Confield" for the first time today. I'm a composer and so I've wanted to write prog rock/metal with Autechre's philosophy in mind, basically a generative approach to music generation as applied to metal. That's part of why I'm learning Racket; I'd like to make my own DSL for music generation. For example, I could define a set of transformational rules that don't bottom out (i.e. with no terminal symbols), such that the list of symbols at any time just stops after looping through all of them, and each list of symbols could be a melodic sequence. A musical L-system with increasing n values, basically.
Video games. I love me some video games. I'm the only man below retirement age who likes Atari 2600 games. I got into them when I was around 6, they were how I got into retro-gaming. The simplicity of the graphics allows the gameplay to shine into pure distilled challenge. I like how hectic Atari games can get; Turmoil, Communist Mutants from Space (yes), Kaboom. It's the only console I still collect for and keep a CRT for, the games are cheap, many games can't be played on an emulator properly (paddle games). I think I spent the most time with River Raid and Berzerk (the latter especially's mega fun). I do need another 2600 tbh, and a new CRT alongside that. The 2600+ seems like something I could just plug up to my monitor but without proper Harmony cart support I'm not having that.
I like retro FPS games; around the time I got into 2600 games (well, a little bit after), I installed DOSBox and downloaded a bunch of abandonware, including DOOM, Quake, Hexen, Heretic, etc. DOOM 1 is still one of my favorite games of all time (I prefer it over 2, in fact), I play keyboard only with Chocolate Doom or Crispy Doom when I'm playing vanilla or a vanilla compatible WAD. For everything else I swallow and look for whatever ZDoom thing people are using now until the next time some controversy pisses DOOM people off. I play keyb only mainly because I've always played it like that and never felt like changing, not because I'm a believer in purity per se. Playing it on a CRT monitor in Mode 13h is one hell of an experience.
I've wanted to get into retro hardware for a while, learning about recapping, servicing, that kind of deal. I have a certain regret getting into game collecting; I don't have the space right now though, but we're renovating the house so by winter I plan on getting a new table, going to the Sharjah flea market in the winter to buy broken crap and learn to fix it, while also going lower and lower level in my knowledge of computing into bare metal to build stuff of my own with embedded systems and FPGAs. My dad is an audiophile who's a retired neurologist who did some electrical stuff in practice (transcranial DC stimulation) and so I'm going to inherit some of his stuff, and I'd like to take good care of it.
JRPGs are fun too; Chrono Trigger's one of my favorite games of all time, especially with its themes of time travel and apocalypse, the science-fantasy stuff, the different eras, the battle system between real-time and turn-based, the characters, the music, the plot, EVERYTHING about it is a pure 10/10. I'd like to write an article sometime about its themes of writing fate as humans, the meaning of a specific cutscene I don't want to spoil and its ramifications... enough about that. My buddy has pestered me to play Trails in the Sky, and given his preconception of me as the big retro guy, I was told to play the first and I did, and it was pretty good. I don't know about playing the remake, maybe...
In terms of more modern stuff, I like some indies. Cave Story's up there with DOOM 1 and Chrono Trigger as my favorite games of all time, and I've beaten it upwards of 20 times, both the AGTP and Nicalis versions. The fact it's made by one guy and seriously beats so much collaborative efforts is a feat unlike any other. Pixel is a modern polymath. Game engine? LOL. He wrote the game in C++ with SDL. Music? He used the DAW he made himself, PxTone, to write the music. On top of all of this, he did this while maintaining an actual life (according to an old interview he made the game at night, working by day alongside taking care of kids).
I like anime and manga too. Mostly anime, though. There's a good bit of stuff I watched, but what sticks out in my head right now are the works of Satoshi Kon. I haven't seen Millennium Actress nor Paranoia Agent, but I have seen both Perfect Blue and Paprika, two of my favorite films of all time. The switching of perspectives is heavily disorienting.Paprika's the one I prefer; the surrealism is pushed far harder and it's less bleak, which I like. My dad's a neurologist so I grew up around weird brain equipment, so the whole idea of a machine that peers into people's brains as a method of psychoanalysis is relatable somewhat. I've been trying to get him to watch it for a while now. Susumu Hirasawa's soundtrack, while absolutely magnificent, feels like the part that's least impressive about the film. That's how good it is. It's a massive trip.
I like the Leijiverse; my best friend turned me onto it when he told me how cute he found Maetel. One of the first things I saw from him was Galaxy Express 999, which is about a boy who wants to get a mechanical body for virtual immortality, and his maternal caretaker Maetel. They ride on the Galaxy Express 999, stopping from planet to planet in each episode, it's fun stuff. It's funny, beautiful, sad, all at once. One episode, "Mii-kun's Mansion of Life", made me cry. I won't say too much other than the fact that it includes a beautiful woman who's an anthropomorphized version of Leiji Matsumoto's late real life cat, Mii-kun. That's all I'll say. After that, I saw Space Battleship Yamato and then Captain Harlock. Matsumoto's work is beautifully optimistic, a recognition that even in the far-reaches of the cosmos, there is one constant: that which makes man individual and unique does not change. I call my office and PC setup "the Arcadia" for that reason, in fact.
In terms of 21st century stuff, I'll rattle off (there's not much that I like about those that I haven't explained before) Kino's Journey, Madoka Magica, Steins;Gate. Kino's Journey is about a girl who rides from country to country on her motorcycle, meeting strange people along the way and learning their stories. It's a lot like GE999 in that regard while being more grounded on Earth. It has this science fantasy theme which fits with what I love about Chrono Trigger. What I love about Madoka's also what I love about Kon: the surreal designs both of the city of Mitakihara and the labyrinths. Sayaka Miki is my favorite character of all time; tomboyish, fun, energetic, but kind and feminine too. I like that. I've been working on an analysis of it I plan on publishing later (not under my name) so I'll withhold a lot of that here. Steins;Gate is cool too. I saw both shows, the first and Zero. I've been meaning to get to the VN for a while but haven't, alongside the rest of the SciADV things. Backlog's quite big though!
What don't I like?
I don't have much I don't like. I think one thing is a lack of open-mindedness and an obsession with personal and philosophical closure, a desiring of certainty all of the time. This manifests often in politics, identity politics especially, wherein individuals are retrofitted into closed categories that are dictated by their surroundings. I'm an individualist philosophically, and I believe that you are a product of your surroundings to the extent that you respond to them in your own way, and that your responses and everyone's response is what dictates whatever it is that happens to you, if that makes sense. Basically that norms and traditions, the ideas that need "closure" that they obsess over, are precisely a product of individual perception and rationalization aggregated. I don't like it when people close on me based on their own assumptions about me, and I don't want to do the same to anyone else.
Introduction Box
