You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September, 2007.
Well, it’s been a long wait, but David Firth has released the eighth installment of the delightfully twisted and demented Salad Fingers series. We meet a new friend, Roger, and welcome back Hubert Cumberdale.
Warning: If you are easily offended or freaked out, then maybe you shouldn’t click that link.
I hate presentations. I hate making them, I hate giving them. Well, sorta. I actually liked making this presentation for my German class. Rather, I liked the end result. I got a decent grade on it, losing points mostly for not having much to say aside from what was on the slides. My problem was that I couldn’t think of anything else to say about him during the presentation. I could have rehearsed it better, but then I hate rehearsing ten times as much as I hate making the presentation. The thought of rehearsing is anathema to me.
So recently I came across Pecha Kucha, which I think is about the best idea to hit presentations since their inception. I wrote about it in an earlier post. To recap, it’s a presentation style invented in Japan by two Western architects. The idea is simple: 20 slides at 20 seconds each. Total running time is 6 minutes 40 seconds. You have to keep the pace going or you’ll fail. You have to plan the presentation properly or you’ll fail. It’s awesome. The primary benefit of course is that your audience doesn’t fall asleep.
Today I saw an article on Presentation Zen comparing the different presentation styles of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. There was another article two years ago that I stumbled on and forgot about until this post reminded me. Basically, Bill Gates gives crappy, average presentations while Jobs is memorable (and for the record, crappy = average for presentations). One particular thing stood out to me: the six key features of sticky messages. Stickiness is the quality of an idea or message sticking in people’s minds. To be sticky, a presentation must have these attributes:
- simplicity
- unexpectedness
- concreteness
- credibility
- emotions
- stories
That’s actually a great blog if you find yourself having to give presentations (as I do).
Currently the features I want Google to add:
- add Google Scholar to search history
- add links for citations included in the paper for each result
- allow the two functions: cites and citedby for searching
Note: This is a very incomplete list, just what’s pressing at the moment.
Regarding (2), currently when you are presented with the papers in the search result, there is a link that looks like
I’d like a link added that shows you results for everything this paper cites, so I don’t have to open the paper and manually search for everything in there. The link would basically say “Cites 13 articles” (or something similar). That’s not so hard, is it?
And for (3), I want to be able to search the papers that cite a particular paper or author and the papers that are cited by a particular paper or author. There are definitely more issues that need to be worked out for this, since it would be a many-to-many explosion in the case of ill-formed queries. Maybe just an option to narrow it down so we’re searching based on a paper that was already turned up in a search.
Update
Added (3) after the original post.
The things Bush says are so awesome sometimes. My new favorite quote is “Childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured.” [source] At first the White House transcriptionists corrected the mistake, but then press secretary Dana Perino instructed them to include the mistake, saying that the integrity of the transcriptions is very important to her. This is good.
Language Log brought this particular juicy quote to my attention and Mark Liberman has an interesting commentary on the nature of the grammatical mistake - one more common to children than adults. He also has a clip you can listen to. He goes on to say that Bush does pause after he says childrens but that there’s no indication he’s just made a planning mistake. I’m not completely sure I agree here. I don’t think he necessarily did, but it’s possible. I’m curious whether he was reading from a teleprompter or piece of paper and misread it as children’s and then seeing the rest of the quote, paused because it didn’t parse at first and then plunged on ahead because he’s a public speaker and it’s better to just keep going than stop and visibly appear to be lost.
Anyhow, the interesting part of Liberman’s post is the reference to chilluns, which he attributes to some possibly fictional southern dialect. It’s not fictional. It’s called Gullah and it’s from around the Charleston area in South Carolina. Interestingly, I have also heard some people use a similar form in the country around the midlands of South Carolina. I’m not really sure how to transcribe it, but it’s sort of like chillren. Unlike chilluns it’s usually not plural (at least not that I recall). When I first heard it, I thought the speaker was joking and using covert nonsense speech, like many of the words my wife and I use together. For example, Kek kek kek = Connecticut, Pennsyltucky = Pennsylvania (especially when referring to the more rural parts), and South Kakalakee = South Carolina. (We didn’t make all those up, but they are parts of our private conversations.)
But you can actually find a lot of occurrences of chillren on Google, so it’s not all that uncommon. It seems to appear in a lot of slave narratives (judging by the Google results), so it probably had its origins in the pre-Civil War era and has survived in some areas.
I came across this dog costume on the Green Man. I think Daedalus would look hilarious in it. Last Christmas, we dressed him as Daedal the red-nosed reindog. Just need to find some stuffed animals and someone who knows how to sew…
Came across this funny little video asking the simple question, where was Rudy? Rudy Giuliani had “scheduling issues” and so couldn’t make it to the Republican Debate discussing issues pertaining to “Black America.” The video explains exactly what he was doing.
- Morning press conference announcing Pete Wilson supports him (more on Pete Wilson below the jump)
- Evening fund raiser featuring Bo Derrick and Dennis Miller where he raised $100k.
The video leaves you with the question: “Where are his priorities?” Well, obviously not with Black America. And Republicans never really have bothered very much with Black America, so why start now. For a party that supposedly opposes abortion, they do very little to help the segment of the population who is forced into having the most of them. Black teens historically have twice as many abortions as hispanics and nearly three times as many as non-Hispanic whites. Of course, that doesn’t matter to Rudy either.
I sure hope this joker doesn’t get elected.
I read The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper a few years ago at the insistence of my ex-brother-in-law. It was one of his favorite books from his childhood and I believe he put it near the level of The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings (but not quite). I figured that was bloody high praise, but waited a while before I got around to it. I’m not above reading kids books and seeing kids movies. Especially when they promise to be dark. I love dark fantasy. So anyhow, I enjoyed the book, though there were parts that were a little slow.
And now of course, there is a movie coming out next Friday. I’m curious how well they will pull it off. I never read the whole series, but in the first book there was a lot of mystery about the back story. Hopefully they won’t destroy that feeling.
In a recent press release, kannuu is claiming to have revolutionized text entry. They claim that you can now perform text entry with just your thumb at the same speed of a regular keyboard. Too good to be true? Here is their method, complete with Hype™.
“Advancing text entry exponentially, kannuu’s powerful and precise Partial Word Completion® technology enables users with a fail-safe text entry solution. The kannuu application appears on device, as a four-point diamond shape, comprised of the most popular letters in the database it is indexing, with the center kannuu logo leading to the next set of choices.”
They registered a trademark on the phrase “partial word completion”?? Blerg. Not only do they have an über lame web 2.0 name in lowercase, they gotta stop people from marketing a similar technology under their oh-so-not-original name. Why does this make me so angry? Anyhow, I’m running off sideways on a rant that is pretty insignificant.
The real point here is the potential for coolness. So here is the technology: you enter a letter, it presents you with a “diamond” shape and the most common letters or group of letters that follow the letter(s) you just entered. In this way, most of your everyday phrases will be right up at the top of the list of things you’re presented so you could potentially be entering words with fewer keystrokes and all with very little thumb movement. This could really revolutionize key input and maybe bring pocket computers to reality [source].
So here is what I think the technology is based on. A very common technique in language technologies is the use of n-grams. So they use a character-based n-gram model to predict the most common letter or letters that you would type next based on some corpus. This isn’t anything new. Cell phones already have a T9 input method that guesses the most common word based on the single letters you choose. This isn’t all that different. If they have done the interface well, that could be a serious improvement.
If you’re interested in character-based n-gram models, I go into them in more depth after the jump.
Language Log brought up the usage of the phrase another thing coming today. This is the only way I’ve ever heard it or seen it used. But it turns out, the original is another think coming. The thing version is winning out on the interwebs, but the post on Language Log indicates that the two phrases may have been warring since their (mutual?) inceptions. It’s no surprise to me that thing would replace think in this case, for simple phonological reasons. The [k] in think is preceded by a voiced nasal sound (the vocal cords are vibrating) and then followed by a unvoiced velar stop (aka plosive, but essentially another [k] sound). The phenomenon of assimilation occurs when a phoneme changes to reflect the surrounding phoneme(s). In this case, the [k] probably originally became voiced, which would make it a [g] sound. The [k] and [g] sounds are essentially the same, it’s just a difference in whether your vocal cords are vibrating. So, assimilation generated thing instead of think in regular speech and since that is a well known word, people interpreted it as thing instead of think when they were first exposed to it. From there it has been gaining steam.
Another interesting example of a similar nature is home in on versus the original hone in on.
NASA’s image of the day is the Dawn spacecraft launching via a Delta II rocket. It’s heading to two asteroids: Ceres (actually a dwarf planet) and Vesta. The journey will take several years. In March 2009, Dawn will slingshot around Mars to arrive at Vesta in September of 2011, where it will stay for about seven months. After that it will head to the dwarf planet Ceres, a journey of three more years, arriving in February of 2015. Five months later, the primary mission will end.
The Dawn spacecraft will be using an ion propulsion system. This allows the spacecraft to travel with much less weight. An electrical charge is used to accelerate Xenon atoms at rates 10 times faster than chemical fuels. Because the force it takes to accelerate something depends on its mass (F = ma), the lighter (less massive) a spacecraft is, the less it takes to move it. Petroleum is heavy, so using it for a spacecraft really doesn’t work very well, but it is used for launch vehicles like the Delta II rocket. The petroleum used is known as RP-1 (Refined Petroleum) and is mixed with liquid oxygen. The ion propulsion drive is fuel efficient but not exactly speedy. No one is going to brag about 0 to 60 mph in 4 days. The bonus is, the spacecraft only uses 10 ounces of fuel per day at full burn. At that rate, Dawn can go about 1500 days, but it won’t need to be at full burn every day.
Israeli startup Zlango is taking a different approach to mobile messaging and emoticons. Rather than using words that often are absolutely meaningless and incomprehensible to people unfamiliar with the orthographic conventions of texting (e.g. “idk”, “myob”), they have created an icon-based language that would theoretically be comprehensible to anyone. So here’s an experiment. Without looking at the Zlango site, what do you think this sentence says?
Keep in mind there is not a one-to-one correspondence from icon to word (that is, there may be more than one word per icon or more than one icon per word, and words or icons may be dropped). Of course, Zlango only has about 200 icons, so you are really limited on what you can say. However, it appears they are going to be adding a feature to create your own icon. If people start to use this and add their own icons, we could see a wiki-like explosion in the number of things that can be expressed.
In the news: Scientific American blog, Wired.
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| (Credit: Tungsten Chew/The Tech) |
Some MIT students have tricked out the statue of John Harvard (aka the Statue of Three Lies) to look like Master Chief from Halo 3. Apparently, this statue is the target of many pranks. Go geeks! Read more about it here. Here’s the before shot:
This appears to be the policy of Blackwater USA, a security contracting firm providing services in Iraq to the State Department. The New York Times reported yesterday that the firm is under investigation in both Iraq and in Washington for a shooting on September 16th in which at least 11 Iraqis were killed. State department officials report that the incidence of violence by Blackwater personnel was at least double the rate of the other two security firms. The State department did go on to say that of the 1800+ missions that Blackwater personnel have been on, a very small percentage resulted in violence. While not quoting numbers, the department rep said there “dozens” of incidences. DynCorp, another security firm, reported 32 cases out of 3200 convoy missions, a rate of 1%. Blackwater’s rate is at least double that, so there were a minimum of 36 episodes.
So looking at the real numbers, you might think: “big deal.” The problem is that this could be representative of a culture at Blackwater that encourages a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mentality. Now, I am actually sympathetic of these guys. I can’t imagine the incredible stress you must be under as a security professional in Iraq. Every corner, every roadside bump, every window could be hiding the bomb or person that kills you. If I were there, I probably would have shot someone by accident a hundred times just from stress. Hell, when I play multiplayer war games I’m constantly shooting my teammates when they run around a corner or jump up in front of me. The situation has to be insane.
The reason I’m even talking about this is that I think this is a good example for what war does to people. The Blackwater people may be like me and get jumpy and shoot first rather than restraining themselves and waiting for cooler heads to prevail. Or they could be giving in to the power that a nearly lawless warzone enables. In either case, not only are more people dying, but these security personnel are suffering emotional damage. Losing your humanity to bloodlust or becoming more and more neurotic due to constant fear — either way it’s a losing prospect for these people. Also, if they are killing twice as many people and there is no significant increase in the danger factor for their missions, they could very well be killing innocent people. The regulation of contractors is attracting attention from the top brass, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is sending a team to Iraq to discuss the situation with General Petraeus. (It just struck me what an imperial-sounding name that is.)
So, bring these guys home and the soldiers who are suffering just as much or more. Vote for Dennis Kucinich.
According to a report by Discovery Channel News on a new study, the personality of the dog shapes the human-dog relationship far more than the person’s personality. It turns out that the key to a good human-dog relationship is that the dog be generally agreeable and open to new things. Maybe this is why I love Daedalus so much. He’s always up for any adventure and will let you do anything to him (though he may squirbble a bit if he doesn’t like it). My nephew Dillon used to pull on his ears and skin when he was a bit younger (Dillon is just over a year old, fyi) and Daedalus tolerated it perfectly. He’s such a good dog.
I really don’t know just what to make of this guy. He recently gave a speech at Columbia University, as I’m sure everyone knows by now who follows such things (and for those that don’t, he’s the president of Iran). On the one hand, he talks a good game about peace and the dangers of scientists blindly pursuing technologies that are blatantly harmful to human existence. When this happens, he says, the scientists are being misused by oppressors. Scientists who are under the thumb of these oppressors (or are themselves oppressors) are withholding knowledge, as well. So far so good. It’s mildly paranoid, but seems like a reasonable opinion (perhaps because I am fairly paranoid myself?).
There was also a lot of stuff about the Koran’s version of the Garden of Eden story and a ridiculous number of religious platitudes and declarations of gratefulness and fidelity to Allah. This was all very boring and made it hard for me to want to keep going. Persevere I did.
Update and note: Be sure to check out the comments. It turns out that while the MacArthur site does not list Paul Rothemund as a computer scientist, he actually is. So there is indeed at least one CS genius for 2007.
Well the 2007 MacArthur fellows were announced and it looks like no computer scientists made it onto the roles this year. The last time there were no computer scientists on the list was 2001. This is probably just a blip, but if the trend continues, it might be a warning sign that computer science is producing fewer visionaries. In a time when the intertubes are booming with social networking activity, this seems odd. Perhaps the problem is that there are too many players and no one stands out, even though as a whole the products are changing the world. At least two of the geniuses are doing some work that appears to draw a lot on computer science but deals more with computational applications of DNA. That is, the DNA is the computer. Maybe this isn’t such a bad sign for CS, but a sign that CS by itself is diminishing and interdisciplinary applications of CS are on the rise. I know I’m not the first person to say that, so if you have a quote or a reference, please leave a comment.
My picks for top geniuses are:
- Paul Rothemund - Caltech - DNA computation and nanotechnology. Awesome stuff. He has used
algorithmic self assembly methods with DNAscaffolded DNA origami to construct images like a map of the western hemisphere (see picture). - Saul Griffith - Squid Labs - One of his inventions could bring cheap eyeglasses to poor communities throughout the world. Another was a handheld human powered generator. He’s also into nanotech, so we could see some cool stuff there.
- Michael Elowitz - Caltech - More algorithmic coolness with DNA and DNA circuits.
My wife Donna found another great bumper sticker the other day and snapped the pic below:
“When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies’, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”
That seems pretty clear to me.
This past spring I worked on a morphological analyzer for Old English verbs. To my knowledge, this has never been done using finite state transducers. As part of my search to find the current state of the art for this language, I emailed Professor Richard Hogg at the University of Manchester. He wrote the section of the Cambridge History of the English Language on Old English morphology. A lot of times, you’ll email a professor and it could take days for them to get back to you, especially if they are at a different university. Sometimes they don’t respond at all. But, Dr. Hogg was a very polite and helpful guy, saying my work sounded interesting and pointing me to the Stella group at the University of Glasgow. His section on morphology in the Cambridge History was also very helpful, so I felt quite grateful to the guy. I wish I could have known him better.
Read his extensive obituary in the Guardian.
After some surfing through the tubes, I came across an ad for a new razor from Norelco. At first the ad seemed innocuous and I was slightly intrigued because it looks weird and I sorta need a new razor (though I’ve been doing without for a while now). Then the flash animation changed and I was looking at the picture below. I was struck by the somewhat sexual nature of the image. It’s almost as if the robot is the object of sexual desire in this ad. If you don’t agree, substitute a naked human female in its place.
Robert Scoble posted a link to Thomas Hawk’s blog post on photowalking. The premise is simple: make your camera a part of you. I find this very difficult, because I feel like cameras offend people in most situations, annoy them in others and are just generally touristy otherwise. A camera phone on the other hand doesn’t give me quite the same feeling, though I do struggle sometimes. I need to get over this.
The principles of photowalking are simple. Hawk goes into much more detail and his post is worth reading. To summarize, the rules are as follows:
- The camera goes with you everywhere
- Take pictures everyday
- Share your work and join a community
- Be engaged in photography social networks
- Never hesitate (in taking a shot)
- Shoot in RAW and photoshop it
- Know your rights: where it’s ok to shoot and where it’s not
- Art is more important than rules
- Money spent on gear is always worth it
- Back up your photos
- Learn to shoot in manual mode
- Shoot with a group of people (it’s safer)
- Get used to using a macro lens
So now some of these are way more technical than I ever get, especially since a 2 megapixel cell phone camera is my current primary camera. Obviously not sufficient for a serious photographer. If only I had more money to devote to this hobby, it’s something I’ve always wanted to spend more time doing. Maybe after I get my Ph.D.
So the Peruvian scientists who examined the controversial meteorite have declared it is indeed a meteorite and it caused the illnesses reported by local residents [source]. The meteor hit an underground source of water that was contaminated with arsenic. On impact, it ejected a blast of steam that affected locals who inhaled it. Whether this will dispel conspiracy theories about this actually being an off-course Scud missile crash site, or fuel them, remains to be seen.
Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) is a new open-access journal in computational linguistics. The journal will focus on techniques that bring linguistics back into language technologies (LT). LT currently focus a lot on statistical techniques and sometimes can ignore linguistic insight altogether, but the field is beginning to swing around from the purely statistical approach to one that takes linguistic insight into account and merges it with statistical methods.
Curious about what sort of credibility this journal would have, I browsed the editorial staff and found some pretty big hitters. Following are some of the names that stood out to me. Christopher Manning of Stanford wrote the textbook
I mentioned TGs in a previous post. To refresh your memory, they are the school of computer science’s big departmental parties (actually thrown by the student organization, Dec/5). The name has been generalized to any party thrown in the department. Today’s was the Smiley TG, celebrating the birthday of the smiley, invented by Scott Fahlman, a professor in my department. Planned as well as all things are, today is also the annual picnic for my department! So I went to the TG, where I was almost completely without friends. So I drank a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA and left. But not before grabbing some swag and snapping a pic of the pandemonium.
Well, the Northwest Passage is opening up as the northern polar ice cap melts away to oblivion (photo credits ESA). The Northwest Passage is the yellow line. All the trouble so many people went through back in the 19th Century and earlier to find a way through. So many dead. All they had to do was wait, it turns out. Scientists are expecting ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean sometime around 2030. This summer, the total ice is over 1 million square miles less than the average ice cover.
I wonder what Sir John Franklin would say if he could see this. Probably something like, “Full steam ahead!” I have an odd taste for folk music dealing with the sea, especially when it deals with stuff from the 19th century or earlier. This probably is derived from a certain nostalgia I have for when the world of science was young and the future was brighter and less scary. I suspect this is part of the reason I love steampunk so much. Anyhow, one song I like in particular, by Stan Rogers is “Northwest Passage”:
“Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea
Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage
And make a northwest passage to the sea.”
I came across a story on NPR today about why women read more than men. They quote from Louann Brizendine who wrote the book The Female Brain. The issue of gender differences and the brain always starts fights. Men have larger brains and more gray matter, which handles information processing. Women have more white matter and thus more interconnectivity between parts of the brain. The prefrontal lobe in women is more densely packed with neurons, and that is the area responsible for judgment, planning and language. Here is a quote from the article:
“Girls have an easier time with reading or written work, and it’s not a stretch to extrapolate [that] to adult life,” Brizendine says. Indeed, adult women talk more in social settings and use more words than men, she says.
Woah nelly! Brizendine hasn’t been doing her reading, because tons of contrary evidence to this crap has been out for a while. And trying to find that link, I discovered that Language Log has already done a pretty extensive commentary on this article. When it comes to matters of language, it’s hard to scoop them. The long and the short of the Language Log commentary is that the so-called gap in fiction sales could be accounted for entirely by sales of romance books.
Wednesday night I had the rare opportunity to go out to a bar and try some Bell’s beer. There was a special event run by the distributor where they gave away a shaker, a coaster and a pin if you bought their beer. The shaker unfortunately featured the Oberon, my least favorite Bell’s, but I’ll take what I can get. The bar was a pretty cool little place call Fat Heads Saloon. They had a bunch of decent stuff on tap and I got to try the Lagunitas Sonoma Farmhouse Hop Stoopid, which was a massively floral hop monster. Fat Heads also has a custom Belgian Trippel made for them by some Belgian brewery I didn’t recognize. It was decent, but I’m always a little underwhelmed by Trippels.
A meteor crashed in southern Peru last weekend and over 200 locals have been claiming illness. Symptoms include headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems. They claim this was caused by the gas emanating from the crash site, which has been confirmed as actually having been caused by a meteor. Scientists are currently examining the site and composition of the meteor, which was probably iron since it survived entry all the way to the surface. Scientists were quick to dismiss claims by locals. That makes sense since people from uneducated corners of the world often spew some pretty fantastical stories. Is it just good skepticism or does it also display a little bit of prejudice against the uneducated? Doctors are currently thinking that the loud, terrible noise a meteor makes when entering the atmosphere may have frightened these Peruvian villagers, inducing psychosomatic manifestations [source].
I’m not suggesting we just take every crackpot at their word, but to me real skepticism means withholding judgment until evidence begins to accumulate and point in one direction or another. At that point, your confidence in a particular hypothesis increases, but absolute certainty must be withheld forever, because some bit of evidence may present itself. Granted these scientists weren’t claiming that it was not a meteor, but they were quick to dismiss it and come down on the side of no-meteor-and-crazy-bush-people.
Personally, I’m holding out for evidence that the illnesses are caused by an alien viral infection that will soon begin to convert the locals into their mindless slaves, sparking a movement that will sweep the globe. Which reminds me, I want to see The Invasion.
Update
Bad Astronomy just posted an interesting take on this. Rather than being a meteor impact crater, perhaps this was a Peruvian scud missile gone awry. Also, as pointed out on this post, there is no record in the history of meteorites where people have gotten sick by being near the crater and much of the reports from the scene did not sound like the event was caused by a meteorite, which probably explains the fact that scientists were coming down so hard against the meteorite possibility initially. It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.
Update 2
Pravda online, a Russian tabloid, is reporting that the meteorite was actually a US spy satellite that the Air Force itself shot down. This is by far the best (read: most hilarious) explanation I’ve seen yet.
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It is a sad, sad day. James Rigney, aka Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time fantasy series passed away on September 16, 2007. He had been battling with amyloidosis for a while now and the publisher announced he died of “complications from primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy.” He was working on the final book in the Wheel of Time series.
Robert Jordan was the first fantasy author I read and really enjoyed. He is the reason I started reading fantasy at all. He influenced the entire genre over the past couple decades, helping authors like George R. R. Martin get a start by providing a cover quote for his first Song of Ice and Fire book, A Game of Thrones. He also provided many of the ideas for Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, though Goodkind denies it vehemently. All you have to do is read the books (that’s not a suggestion, by the way, Goodkind is a talentless hack) to see the similarities and ideas that were pulled right out of Jordan’s pages.
The last news I had heard from Jordan was a while back since I don’t check the Dragonmount website frequently. At the time, it seemed he was beating the disease with promising news from the Mayo clinic where he was getting treatment. When I read about this today on George R. R. Martin’s Not a blog, I was blown out of the water. We should all go light a pipe for this once physics major turn fantasy writer who survived hurricanes and Vietnam, but was no match for the ravages of time.
Language Log has a nice salute to Talk Like a Pirate Day, where I found this clip:
I used to have a pretty good pirate accent, but lately it’s been turning into an Irish leprechaun accent. Avast ye scurvy laddy, come look at me pot o’ gold. I’ll have to practice. Oddly enough, my irish accent degenerates into a pseudo-pirate imitation. My current best is ze Frenchman and my Scottish brogue. Be sure to check out that Language Log post for the pirate ergonomic keyboard.
Suppose you have an array of floating point numbers with each index into the array being an id number corresponding to some external data structure. You want to sort this array, but in doing so you would destroy the references to the id numbers, since the indexes of the array would no longer correspond to the correct id numbers in the external data structure. For example, let’s say we are dealing with customers of a store and each value in the array is their current balance.
balances = {25.61, 13.45, 89.75, 21.2, 96.50}
Each index in the balances array corresponds to an index in some other array, say:
names = {"Marjory Stewart-Baxter", "Hubert Cumberdale", "Barbara Logan-Price", "Jeremy Fisher", "Mable"}
A professor in my department (primarily affiliated with the LTI and the CSD, but also the MLD and HCII) invented the smiley 25 years ago on a bboard here at CMU. The fateful message that spawned the smiley is reproduced below [source]:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to markthings that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
In honor of the 25th birthday of the smiley, the CS department is holding a TG where Scott will inaugurate an annual Smiley Prize. I’m probably not going to be able to make that, though, on account of other engagements.
As someone who has been getting the New York Times headlines by email everyday since 9/11, the announcement to get rid of their archaic pay-to-view Times Select service is great news. Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch thinks this will herald the end of an age when content wasn’t free (aka Web 1.0). The Wall Street Journal was recently acquired by News Corp, so speculation has been running high that the owners of MySpace will wise up to the new world order of the intertubes and kill their pay for content service too.
While this would be a good thing, it really won’t impact me all that much since I would only have read the occasional story locked behind the Times‘ barricade. I don’t read the WSJ at all (possibly because it’s pay-to-view), so that won’t affect me either. What I want to see lose their pay-to-view statuses are science magazines like Scientific American and New Scientist. These guys are still clutching onto this old model like a drowning man on a life preserver. As Duncan pointed out, you can still make money without imposing these draconian restrictions.
As I mentioned before, I spent last weekend with my wife’s family in Dover, Pennsylvania (which is right outside of York). We had a cookout and went to the fair. Rather than posting a horde of pictures, I made this little montage. The highlight of the fair was seeing an American buffalo calf being fed (row 2, column 4). The thing was incredibly rambunctious — the farmer clearly had a hard time keeping it settled for the dozens of hyper kids to come up and pet. There were also some alpacas, sheep, goats, and — of course — pigs.
My friend Israel is trying to raise $2000 to buy laptops for young people in Tanzania. Tanzania is a country of over 35 million people, but only 15,000 graduated high school in 2004. Of course giving money would help him out, but another way to help him would be by voting for this cause on Facebook via the Razoo Speedgranting Campaign. This gives you a free way of helping them raise money and it only takes a minute of your time.
This weekend we visited Donna’s family in York, Pennsylvania. Mainly it was a chance to see family and friends and we also went to the York Interstate Fair. Pictures from that will be posted when I get a chance, but here is a video I took of Willow from my phone.
The National Resources Defense Council is reporting on a study that looked at ten eastern US cities are found they are going to see more red alert days during the summer for air quality. They found that rising temperatures due to global warming will lead to a decrease in the number of good air days (as defined by the EPA). Two of the cities I have lived in were included in the study: Columbus, Ohio and Greenville, South Carolina. Another city included was Asheville, NC where Donna and I have spent several anniversaries. Greenville and Asheville are both very beautiful cities, so it’s really a shame to see that things will be going downhill. The same will be true everywhere, of course. By the middle of the century, the study reports, 50 eastern US cities will see:
- A doubling of the number of unhealthy ‘red alert’ days
- A 68 percent (5.5 day) increase in the average number of days exceeding the current 8-hour ozone standard established by the EPA
- A 15 percent drop in the number of summer days with “good” air quality based on EPA criteria because of global warming