psych0naut

Learn Icelandic online!

2012-04-30T17:10:56Z

My former teacher, Svava Skúladóttir, is now offering Icelandic lessons online at her site Online Icelandic Lessons. I took evening courses from her for several years at University College London, and I can personally attest to the quality of her instruction. This latest undertaking of hers is a fantastic opportunity for those who aren't lucky enough to live near a school that offers Icelandic courses (which is probably most of the world).

Chowder

2012-03-12T11:35:59Z

Dinner last night: smoked mackerel and Nordseekrabben chowder, salad with garlic–chili yogurt dressing, and raspberry–elderflower smoothie.

Grízsmarni

2012-03-09T15:25:01Z

In January I posted about the Kaiserschmarrn we often have for breakfast on weekends. My grandfather saw the post and suggested that we try my grandmother's recipe for grízsmarni, the Hungarian version.

As you can see above, it turned out pretty good, but was a bit drier than the Bavarian recipe we had been using. The Hungarian version distinguishes itself by the use of semolina, which I think gave the dish a less fluffy texture. If anyone's interested in comparing for themselves, here's my grandmother's recipe:

Grízsmarni

Ingredients

125 g flour
125 g semolina, farina, or Cream of Wheat
250 mL milk
2 eggs
25 g sugar
3–4 tbsp cooking oil
pinch of salt
50 g ground almonds or ground walnuts
50 g icing sugar
jam

Directions

Mix the flour and semolina, stir in the milk, and let stand for one hour. Beat the egg yolks with the sugar and salt, and in a separate bowl beat the egg whites until firm. Stir the egg yolk mixture into the batter, then fold in the egg whites. Heat the cooking oil in a large frying pan and pour in the batter. When the bottom becomes light golden brown, turn the pancake over, cut it into pieces, and continue to cook until golden brown all over. Serve with jam, ground almonds or walnuts, and icing sugar.

Serves two.

Word sense disambiguation

2012-03-08T21:41:31Z

My current research involves word sense disambiguation, an open problem in natural language processing concerned with determining which meaning of a word is used in a particular context. For example, in English the word "bank" can mean (among other things) a financial institution, or the edge of a lake or river. When we see or hear the word "bank" in a sentence, which of its meanings is intended is usually made obvious by the context. For example, if I say to you, "I'm going to the bank to get some money", it's obvious to you that I mean "bank" in the financial sense, because you know that money is often obtained from financial institutions, but not so often from bodies of water.

Being able to disambiguate word senses is important not just for understanding texts but for translating them as well. Consider that the different senses of an English word are often translated into entirely different words in a foreign language. To continue with our "bank" example, the "financial institution" and "river edge" senses in Russian are банк and берег, respectively. Therefore it's not possible to correctly translate the word "bank" from English into Russian unless you know what sense it's being used in.

The process of word sense disambiguation is largely unconscious and automatic in humans, but it's quite difficult for computers, which lack the real-world knowledge necessary to make connections between word senses. Why should we care if computers know how to disambiguate word senses? Well, consider the problem of machine translation: if you type the aforementioned sentence into Google Translate and expect it to translate it into Russian, you would hope that it would render the word "bank" as банк and not берег. Unfortunately, Google Translate, like every other state-of-the-art machine translation system, often gets word senses wrong, resulting in comical or nonsensical translations.

One word sense disambiguation algorithm I'm working with was first described by Roberto Navigli and Mirella Lapata in their 2010 paper "An Experimental Study of Graph Connectivity for Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation". This algorithm uses WordNet, which is like a huge computer-readable dictionary of the English language. WordNet lists all the senses for English words, and moreover lists all the semantic relations between word senses, such as when two senses are synonyms or antonyms. Navigli & Lapata's algorithm starts by building a huge graph of WordNet where the vertices represent word senses and the edges represent semantic relations between them. Then, given a sentence to disambiguate, it consults WordNet to find all the possible senses for all the words in the sentence, and then adds the corresponding vertices (but not any edges) to a new "disambiguation" graph. For each of these vertices, it then goes back to the WordNet graph and searches for a path from that sense to any of the other senses; if it finds any then the intermediate vertices and edges are copied from the WordNet graph to the disambiguation graph. Once the search is over, each vertex in the disambiguation graph received a numerical score equal to the number of edges containing it. For each word, the sense with the highest score is chosen as the correct sense.

This week I implemented this algorithm in Java using the JUNG graph library, which it turns out has some nifty visualization features. Below is a video I made of the algorithm disambiguating the sentence "Drink the milk", where the computer knows in advance only that "drink" is a verb and "milk" is a noun. At the beginning of the animation you see the unconnected disambiguation graph of all of the various senses of the verb "drink" and the noun "milk"; these vertices are coloured blue. The path searching then begins, and you can see the algorithm add new edges and vertices (coloured red) connecting the blue vertices together. Once all the paths under a certain length have been found, the algorithm calculates the score of each vertex, and then highlights in green the sense of "drink" and the sense of "milk" with the highest score. As it turns out, in this case it got the correct answer.

Þjófur the Vampire Ferret

2012-03-08T13:40:26Z

Þjófur has biting problems.

One of her favourite things to do is to walk up to innocent, unsuspecting people (like Nadya or myself, but also random houseguests) and sink her teeth into them. Once she's firmly attached (which necessarily requires her sharp little fangs to have fully pierced the skin), she likes to squeeze as hard as she can and shake her head back and forth, as if trying to tear out a chunk of flesh. This is very painful, not to mention very messy, what with all the blood oozing out.

She's not doing this because she's a mean or vicious ferret. She's happy to let herself be picked up and held and petted and cuddled, and loves to play with people in various nonviolent ways. But for some reason, whenever her jaws come within the range of certain body parts (particularly legs, torsos, heads, and faces), they just automatically open and clamp on. It's like she can't help herself.

Months of patient training have failed to correct this behaviour. We've tried telling her "No!" We've tried scruffing her. We've tried putting her alone in her cage for five minutes. We've tried applying bitter-tasting spray to our skin. But no matter what we do, she just comes right back for more biting.

So today I chanced upon someone on eBay selling Frettchenmaulkörbe, or ferret muzzles:

It looks like this would be pretty easy for a dedicated ferret to remove, but maybe it's possible to fit it snugly enough that it can't be slipped off. Maybe we can get her to wear this and let her get used to harmlessly poking her nose and mouth around our faces. I hope it works, because I don't know what else to try.

Berlin photos

2012-03-04T20:03:46Z

At the end of January Nadya and I went to Berlin to submit my passport application. While we were there we did some sightseeing. Nadya took most of the pictures, but following are the ones I took:

Museumsinsel: The Berliner Dom, Ishtar Gate, and Market Gate of Miletus
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp: A Nazi concentration camp for political prisoners; later run by the NKVD
Tierpark: The zoo in East Berlin; unfortunately my camera battery died early on
Treptower_Park: Enormous Soviet war memorial
Miscellaneous: The New Synagogue, Hohenschönhausen prison, Hackesche Höfe, DPRK Embassy, and more

German grades make no sense.

2012-03-02T09:08:14Z

As previously mentioned I've been taking a German language course, Hören – Verstehen – Diskutieren II, at the university here. I had my Klausur (final exam) a few weeks ago and got my final grade today. (Follow the image link to see it at full size.)

That's right, I got a "1,3".

Are you as confused as me? If so, that's because German grades make absolutely no sense.

You'd think that a country which prides itself on early adoption and adherence to the metric system could come up with something just a little less confusing. Like maybe, say, making all grades integers from 0 to 100, where 0 is the worst and 100 is the best. That's how grades were assigned at my high school, and also at my undergraduate university, and also at my graduate university. (At some of the institutions, certain grade ranges were mapped to letter grades A, B, C, etc., though the raw numbers were always given as well so that you could compute an average grade.)

But no… At German universities, they have some weird, decidedly non-orthogonal system where the grades range from 5,0 (the worst) to 1,0 (the best). This seems backwards, but simple enough, right? Unfortunately no: You can't just pick any fraction between 5 and 1 and call it a grade. Between 5,0 and 4,0 there are no subdivisions, but between 4,0 and 1,0 you get steps which alternate in magnitude between three tenths and two fifths! So the complete series goes 5,0, 4,0, 3,7, 3,3, 3,0, 2,7, 2,3, 2,0, 1,7, 1,3, 1,0. So really what we have is some strange eleven-point scale which doesn't particularly lend itself to computing averages, assigning bonus marks, etc.

Amazingly, the grading system is probably the least confusing thing about the educational system here. In my job I'm regularly called upon to translate job postings from German, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that German educational qualification terminology is vast, intricate, and has no appropriate or agreed-upon mapping to English terminology. Part of the reason for this is that the educational systems in German-speaking countries are very different from those found in English-speaking countries; another reason is that governments and translators haven't sat down with each other and agreed upon a consistent translation for the various terms. Ask four translators to translate a job application from German into English and you'll get five different mutually (and often also internally) inconsistent translations.

A couple weeks ago I got a German census form in the mail which asked all sorts of detailed questions about my education. Many of them were multiple choice questions about the type of secondary and post-secondary institutions I attended and the qualifications I received there; there were literally dozens of answers to choose from. Since I was not educated here, it was extremely difficult to decide on the most appropriate answer. For instance, I had to choose between choices like Sonderschule, Hauptschule, Realschule, Oberschule, Gymnasium, Gesamtschule, Berufsfachschule, Berufsaufbauschule, Fachoberschule, berufliches Gymnasium, and so on. There was an annotation on the question which rather unhelpfully explained that people who were educated abroad should simply chose the "most appropriate" German equivalent, as if we foreigners are supposed to be familiar with the subtleties of not only the current German system but also those previously in use here and in the former German Democratic Republic.

Das Vielmädchenproblem

2012-02-27T21:16:13Z

I just received the following e-mail from one Eugen Fischer, who says that three years ago he wrote up a statistical study on the likelihood of finding a suitable romantic partner. He did this ignorant of my 1999 exposition on same (and its 2003 German translation), but as he recently learned of its existence he has supplemented his thesis with an appendix comparing his work to mine (to put it charitably). :)

Nun, vor 3 Jahren habe ich beschlossen auszurechnen, wie viele Frauen in meiner Umgebung wohnen, die für mich passend sind. Von da an habe ich an einer Ausarbeitung mit dem Namen "Das Vielmädchenproblem" gearbeitet, es beinhaltet alles was du jemals wissen wolltest. Vor einiger Zeit habe ich herausgefunden, dass schon jemand das ausgerechnet hat, und das warst du. Ich kannte deine Arbeit nicht. Ich habe mir sie angesehen und beschlossen die Fehler zu zeigen die du gemacht hast. Im Anhang dieser Mail ist unsere Arbeit und auf Seite 50–54 zeigen wir deine Fehler. Auf Seite 53 ist auch ein Vergleich zwischen deiner Arbeit und unserer, da kannst du auch sehen was wir alles berücksichtigt haben. Ich schreibe dir weil ich denke, dass es dich interessieren würde. Sie ist auch auf meiner Homepage www.super-physik.de zu finden

Fischer's thesis is entitled Das Vielmädchenproblem and is available for download on his website. Here is the abstract:

In dieser Arbeit werden Gleichungen hergeleitet, mit denen man die Anzahl der Mädchen / Jungs bestimmen kann, die zu einem passen. Es wird auch anhand eines Beispiels gezeigt, wie man die Gleichungen anwendet und wie man für sich selbst die Werte bestimmen kann – es lässt sich auch bestimmen wie das andere Geschlecht auf dich steht, also jedes wievielte Mädchen / Junge dich attraktiv findet. Es wird geklärt auf was die Mädchen wirklich stehen: Geld, Aussehen, Intelligenz oder doch was anderes und was davon wichtiger ist. Wir klären auch, wer wie viele Sexualpartner hat und wer öfter Fremdgeht, Männer oder Frauen und was das ganze mit der Intelligenz zu tun hat. Zudem wird die optimale Taktik bei der Partnerwahl erläutert und die Onlinedating-Seiten diskutiert. Es gibt noch viele andere spannende Erkenntnisse, welche man hier nicht alle aufzählen kann. In dieser Ausarbeitung wird einfache Schulmathematik verwendet und ist damit für alle verständlich. Viel Spaß.

Rakott krumpli

2012-02-23T20:40:53Z

Rakott krumpli is one of my favourite dishes, and it's so easy to make: just slice some boiled potatoes, smoked paprika sausage, and hard-boiled eggs, put them in alternating layers in an oven-safe bowl or casserole dish, top with sour cream, and bake in a 200°C oven for about 35 minutes.

Zwiebelkuchen

2012-02-03T19:44:04Z

Nadya makes delicious Zwiebelkuchen, a kind of German onion pie. She uses the recipe from Bavarian Kitchen but adds lots of extra cumin for an interesting Mexican note. It's normally got diced bacon, but we recently had some vegetarian folks over for dinner and found that substituting sun-dried tomatoes works well.

Walther der Frauenversteher

2012-01-28T22:24:31Z

We had been living in Darmstadt for almost six months without ever having switched on our television except to watch DVDs and downloaded movies. But at my insistence Nadya has recently started watching an hour or so of television a day in an effort to improve her German. A few weeks ago she discovered a new documentary series on RTL II called Traumfrau Gesucht. It follows four German bachelors to Eastern Europe where they hope to meet the women of their dreams with the help of a matchmaking agency. The show is fascinating in much the same way as a horrible train wreck. The allure is principally thanks to one of the men, Walther, a 50-year-old travel agent from Berlin. Walther fancies himself a consummate Lothario but is in reality the creepiest and most clueless lecher I've ever had the displeasure of seeing.

In the first video below, Walther invites one of the other bachelors, Karsten (44), to tea "to reveal to him the secrets of Russian women". For those who don't speak German, Walther has taken pity on Karsten, whom he sees as shy and awkward, and has decided to impart to him his valuable wisdom on how to seduce a woman. (Never mind the fact that in the first episode, Walther revealed that before engaging the matchmaking service, he had written unsuccessfully to over 500 women on Internet dating sites.) Lesson one: the right gift. Walther explains that Russian women just love to get little trinkets: in Germany you can get some "guardian angel" bauble for just one euro, but as a gift to the economically backwards Russian women it makes "an unbelievably amazing impression". His second gift suggestion is a cheap little butterfly brooch—Walther proudly demonstrates to Karsten how such presents give one the opportunity to cop a cheap feel from your date(!): "See, you put it like this on her blouse or her jacket, and then you've got your hand on her breast, and she can't do anything about it! When you're giving her a gift, she can't pull back! She's thinking only of the butterfly, but there you are with both your hands on her body!"

It only gets worse from there, but there's no need for me to post any further translation, as the video speaks for itself.

Amazingly, despite Walther's unabashed on-camera admission of his intention to commit sexual assault, the producers turn him loose on the unsuspecting women of St. Petersburg. One of Walther's first dates is Natalia, whom he takes on a "romantic" coach ride in front of the Hermitage. He whips out a box of marzipan pralines and starts hand-feeding them to the poor girl. (In a follow-up interview he explains, "I was expecting her to offer one to me as well so that I could nibble her fingers, but unfortunately that didn't happen.") Then he feigns coldness and starts snuggling up to her, pawing at her, and kissing her. "You like to be a princess?" he says as he starts picking the lint off her jacket, probably not coincidentally focussing on the area around her breasts.

With the exception of Karsten, the other bachelors featured are almost as bad. Manfred (42) has an obvious foot fetish: he selects all his dates on the basis of their footwear, constantly compliments them on their feet, and proposes shoe shopping as a first date. Elvis (28) recently gained something like 50 kg, but sent photos of his younger, thinner self to the matchmaking service. He refuses to wear anything other than a dirty black T-shirt and shorts, even when meeting his dates for the first time.

I'm amazed that a show like this got to air without all those involved in it getting sued into oblivion. Until last year it had been over ten years since I'd had a television, so I missed the whole rise of reality shows and pseudo-documentaries which I suppose are still all the rage now. Is Traumfrau Gesucht typical of what's being produced these days?

Kaiserschmarrn

2012-01-17T21:18:05Z

One of our favourite foods for breakfast, or for that matter any other meal, is Kaiserschmarrn. Growing up I knew this by its Hungarian name, grízsmarni, but I don't think my grandparents ever made it quite the same way I've come to know it in German and Austrian restaurants.

Kaiserschmarrn could be described as a very large, very fluffy pancake which is cut into large pieces while cooking and into smaller pieces before serving. The batter contains eggwhites which are beaten stiff, and also usually raisins soaked in rum. The finished product is dusted with powdered sugar and served with any number of sweet toppings, including fruit compote, jam, or syrup. In the photo below you can see all the things we serve it with: from left to right, peach compote, lingonberry sauce, raspberry sauce, and cactus jam. We also like it with golden syrup, but had run out on the day we took the photo.

The recipe we use is from Bavarian Kitchen.

Kutia

2012-01-14T13:07:30Z

I have discovered ambrosia, and its name is kutia.

OK, so I know I already said this yesterday about millet. But Nadya's just made me something which is just as good. Kutia is a sweet groat porridge made from wheatberries and poppy seeds. You all must try it, because it is delicious.

Kutia

Ingredients

200 g wheatberries (a.k.a. wheat groats)
150 g ground poppy seeds
50 g raisins
30 g ground hazelnuts, walnuts, or almonds
½ cup cream
honey, sugar, and vanilla sugar to taste

Directions

Spread the wheatberries on a large flat surface and pick through them carefully to remove any stones or other foreign material.
Wash the wheatberries in a bowl of cold water several times until the water becomes clear. (Or alternatively, put the wheatberries in a sieve and wash under running water.)
Put the wheatberries in a pot, cover with twice as much water, and cook on medium heat until very soft (about two hours), stirring occasionally and replacing any water that evaporates. Then drain and let cool.
While the wheatberries are cooking, cover the poppy seeds with hot water and let them soak until you can easily smear them between your fingers. Then drain.
Pour boiling water over the raisins and let them scald for five minutes, then drain well.
Mix all the ingredients together and serve.

Makes three servings.

The Price of Freedom is $19.95

2012-01-13T14:21:20Z

I was browsing through some old issues of Dragon magazine from the 1980s when I came across the following advertisement for a hilariously awful-looking anti-Soviet role-playing game:

I suppose this game, like the contemporary Red Dawn, was produced to capitalize on the hysteria fostered by Ronald Reagan's anti-détente policies in the Cold War. It makes me wonder whether the Soviet Union likewise produced popular films and games featuring an American invasion.

Magnificent millet

2012-01-13T09:26:31Z

I have discovered ambrosia, and its name is millet.

Millet, for those who don't know, is a cereal grain which is commonly eaten in Africa, Asia, and some parts of Europe, but is almost unknown in North America, except as animal fodder. But as I recently discovered, millet porridge is fantastic; it's by far the most delicious porridge I've ever had. I far prefer it to oatmeal, semolina, farina (Cream of Wheat), steel-cut oats, grits, rice pudding, or any other hot cereal. Nadya was so surprised at my reaction to millet, since it's considered a boring staple breakfast in Russia, but as someone who's never had it before it was such a wonderful surprise for me!

So without further ado, I present Nadya's recipe for millet porridge, pictured above.

Millet porridge

Ingredients

½ cup millet
1 cup cold water
1 cup cold milk
sugar and salt (to taste)

Directions

Wash the millet grains in a bowl of cold water several times until the water becomes clear. (Or alternatively, put the millet in a fine sieve and wash under running water.)
Put the millet and water in a pot, and cook at the highest temperature, stirring constantly, until almost all the water evaporates (about 10 minutes).
Reduce heat to medium-low and add the milk, sugar, and salt. Cook until desired thickness (about 15–20 minutes).
Remove the pot from the stove, cover in a thick towel, and let stand for 10 minutes.
Serve with butter.

Makes two servings.

Max and Mary and Bert Kaempfert

2012-01-12T19:59:17Z

I just wanted to draw everyone's attention to this great animated film we saw this week. It's called Mary and Max and it's about two lonely misfits who strike up an unlikely long-distance friendship. It's really charming and you really must see it!

Besides film's the writing and artwork, which is just superb, I really enjoyed the soundtrack. Over the closing credits plays a really catchy and familiar-sounding instrumental, which turns out to be "Swingin' Safari" by Bert Kaempfert. The tune is in the style of South African street music, adapted for a jazz orchestra. It is now officially my favourite song of the moment. You can hear it as the third song in the following medley of popular Kaempfert melodies. (The first song, which I'm sure many people will also recognize, is "Afrikaan Beat".)

Free online courses from Stanford University

2012-01-10T11:31:39Z

From October to December 2011 I took the free, online machine learning course from Stanford University. Today I got the following certificate of achievement:

The course was very good, and I can definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a very thorough but easy-to-understand introduction to machine learning. The subject matter was particularly important to my current field; in the past fifteen years computational linguistics has seen an explosion in the availability of linguistic data in electronic format, and a corresponding growth in the use of ML techniques to process it. Many of the techniques covered in the class, such as support vector machines, have found particular application in my research subarea of word sense disambiguation.

Stanford is offering another set of free online courses beginning in January and February of this year:

CS 101 by Nick Parlante
Natural Language Processing by Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning
Software Engineering for SAAS by Armando Fox and David Patterson
Human-Computer Interfaces by Scott Klemmer
Game Theory by Matthew Jackson and Yoav Shoham
Probabilistic Graphical Models by Daphne Koller
Machine Learning by Andrew Ng
Cryptography by Dan Boneh
Lean Launchpad by Steve Blank
Technology Entrepreneurship by Chuck Eesley

Registration for the courses is now open, but enrolment is limited. I can't speak for all the courses, but in the case of the ML course, it is presented as a series of video lectures, each about ten minutes long, so they're easy to fit into your schedule. There are mandatory review questions and optional programming assignments. The professor estimates that watching the lectures and doing the assignments will require about eight to ten hours per week; I skipped the programming assignments and ended up spending about two to three hours per week.

Food meme

2012-01-07T10:20:33Z

Bold for the ones I've eaten, italics for the ones I'd like to try:

Venison
Nettle tea
Huevos rancheros
Steak tartare
Crocodile
Black pudding
Cheese fondue
Carp
Borscht
Baba ghanoush
Calamari
Pho
PB&J sandwich
Aloo gobi
Hot dog from a street cart
Epoisses
Black truffle
Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
Steamed pork buns
Pistachio ice cream
Heirloom tomatoes
Fresh wild berries
Foie gras
Rice and beans
Brawn, or head cheese
Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
Dulce de leche
Oysters
Baklava
Bagna cauda
Wasabi peas
Clam chowder
Salted lassi
Sauerkraut
Root beer float
Cognac
Clotted cream tea (for breakfast this morning!)
Vodka jelly/Jell-O shot
Gumbo
Oxtail
Curried goat
Whole insects
Phaal
Goat’s milk
Single malt whisky
Fugu
Chicken tikka masala
Eel
Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
Sea urchin
Prickly pear
Umeboshi
Abalone
Paneer
McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
Spaetzle
Dirty gin martini
Beer above 8% ABV
Poutine
Carob chips
S’mores
Sweetbreads
Kaolin
Currywurst
Durian
Frogs’ legs
Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
Haggis
Fried plantain
Chitterlings, or andouillette
Gazpacho
Caviar and blini
Louche absinthe
Gjetost, or brunost
Roadkill
Baijiu
Hostess Fruit Pie
Snail
Lapsang souchong
Bellini
Tom yum
Eggs Benedict
Pocky
Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
Kobe beef
Hare
Goulash
Flowers
Horse
Criollo
Spam
Soft shell crab
Rose harissa
Catfish
Mole poblano
Bagel and lox
Lobster Thermidor
Polenta
Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee
Snake

What is "signature.asc"?

2011-11-02T11:59:21Z

Occasionally when I send someone an e-mail, they will write back telling me that my message included a mysterious attachment named "signature.asc" which they can't open. At first this confused me, because I never attached a file by that name. Then I realized that these reports were always coming from people using Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Outlook Express which, as it turns out, do not support PGP/MIME. (Just about every other mail user agent on the planet either supports this 16-year-old standard, or has the good sense to gracefully ignore the signature.)

I've therefore written "What is 'signature.asc'?" which explains the matter to a non-technical audience. I'll refer any future enquirers to this page. In case anyone else who routinely signs their messages gets similar reports from their recipients, feel free to refer them to that page, or (if you feel it's too polemic or not polemic enough) adapt my explanation into your own.

Last.fm tools

2011-10-19T10:52:14Z

Today I discovered Last.fm Tools, a set of nifty visualizations you can add to your Last.fm profile. (Last.fm, for those who don't know, is a great free service which automatically keeps track of the music you listen to, and then provides you with Top 100 charts, and can also recommend new music for you based on an analysis of what you already listen to.) Probably the coolest things Last.fm Tools can produce are tag, artist, and album clouds. For example, here's my current album cloud, which shows covers from my most listened-to albums for the last ten years or so:

You can embed these clouds into your Last.fm profile page, and they will automatically update themselves every few weeks.

Many thanks to Philip Washington Sorst for providing such a valuable tool.

German language courses

2011-10-18T14:44:59Z

Lately I'm finding myself having to write a lot of business letters in German (e.g., to my landlord) and while I'm fluent enough to make myself understood, I sometimes overlook small but obvious mistakes, or phrase things unidiomatically. I'm therefore thinking about taking a German course. Some time ago I learned that students and employees at my university are entitled to free language courses, so I visited its Language Centre for a placement test. It turned out to be the simultaneously the simplest and most difficult language test I've ever taken: it consisted of five paragraphs of running text, and each paragraph was missing the second half of twenty words; the task was to fill in the missing halves. It was therefore extremely easy to lose points if you didn't have a good vocabulary, or if you did have a good vocabulary but weren't familiar with the inflections. (I question the value of such a test for analytic languages such as Mandarin Chinese, though I suppose it's appropriate for German.)

Anyway, my score for the test was 65/100, which correctly placed me at the level I already knew myself to be at (namely, C1 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, or CEFR). C1 is the second-highest level, so I guess the test scores don't map linearly to CEFR levels. Anyway, the university follows the CEFR-aligned UNIcert certification scheme, wherein I'm expected to take five 30-hour courses, selected from any two specialist courses plus any three general courses:

Course name (German)	Course name (English)	Course type
Deutsch für Techniker I	Business German I	specialist
Deutsch für Techniker II	Business German II	specialist
Wirtschaftsdeutsch I	Technical German I	specialist
Wirtschaftsdeutsch II	Technical German II	specialist
Projekt Medien	Project Media	general
Grammatik II	Grammar II	general
Intonation II	Intonation II	general
Hören – Verstehen – Diskutieren II	Listening – Understanding – Discussing II	general
Wortschatztraining	Vocabulary Training	general
Fertigkeitentraining	Skills Training	general
Lesen – Verstehen – Diskutieren II	Reading – Understanding – Discussing II	general
Präsentation von Texten	Presentation of Texts	general

Among the courses being offered this semester for which I qualify, only two of them, Wortschatztraining and Hören – Verstehen – Diskutieren II, are offered at a convenient time for me. (Wirtschaftsdeutsch I seems to be what I need most, and it is being offered Mondays from 11:40 to 13:20, but I need to be at work then.) I wonder which one (if either) I should take. Registration is on Friday.

Google Code Search

2011-10-18T09:22:49Z

I read today that Google will be shutting down many of its services, including the source code search engine Google Code Search. This was actually the first I'd heard of Code Search, so I visited the site and whimsically entered a query for "Frettchen". The following was among the top results (follow link to enlarge):

To give some context, Gnowsis was a semantic desktop service environment developed and published by my former research group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. It's since been spun off to an eponymous company headed by my former colleague Leo Sauermann, who is now doing great things with it. It also lives on in Nepomuk, a standardized, conceptual framework for Semantic Desktops, the most well-known implementation of which is for KDE.

While I was at DFKI I had little to no involvement with the Gnowsis/Nepomuk projects and was therefore unaware of this little homage to Frettchen in the code (which may in fact have been added long after I'd left). However, it was heartwarming to discover it many years after the fact. :)

Incidentally, I performed a few vanity searches on myself and have discovered to my surprise that some public domain code of mine has apparently found its way into GNU Octave. I'm also apparently listed in the credits for GNU Coreutils, though for what I don't rightly know or remember…

Þóra og Þjófur

2011-10-08T18:08:23Z

Wiesbaden

2011-10-04T20:19:28Z

Yesterday Nadya and I went to Wiesbaden. Naturally there are photos available, among them the following:

Photos April–September 2011

2011-10-02T21:13:33Z

I've finally got around to posting some albums of photos from the past few months.

Darmstadt, April–September 2011: Five albums, including Darmstadt, Bessungen, the Vivarium, and Hundertwasser's Waldspirale
London, Spring 2011: Walthamstow Village, Westminster, the Tower of London, home cooking and baking, and Nadya's floral arrangements
Windsor, April 2011: A visit to Windsor Castle
Frettchen, April 2011: Some of the last photos of the late Frettchen Rättchen