I’m John Kloosterman, currently a computer science and philosophy student at Calvin College. Among other things, I am an editor and web developer for Calvin’s student paper, the Chimes, and a department editor for the ACM student magazine XRDS. I have some of my code available on github. Here are some of the things you can find on my site:
Projects
Compiler
I have written a compiler for a Pascal-like language in JavaScript, which you can try in your browser.
Internet Connected Pop Machine
Sugar and caffeine are essential to getting coding done on time, so I wrote a web monitor (including Twitter feed) to track the usage of Calvin’s CS department’s pop machine.
Visualization of Textual Variants
As part of my work on Hymnary.org, I developed a novel way to visually group similar hymn texts using Principal Component Analysis.
Articles
Budget Infographic
I wrote the copy for an infographic to help explain how Calvin College got into its financial situation.
Monster
What makes people, including me, enjoy movies and video games that are more violent than we act in real life? Are there moral problems with being entertained by this violence?
Flood
We use technology to interact with people in minimal ways, as if they were their input and output. Why do we like to do that?
Culture
Computers are good at certain “human” activities, like manufacturing and playing chess or Jeopardy!. I do not think, however, that computers of any kind will be more than tools towards human ends. Here’s why.
Absence
I’m all for most new technologies, but not cell phones. Being never absent from your friends means that you do not value their presence when they are actually there.