People before principles
Robert Randall (A note on similar…): Let's tweak the software so it can tell what other artists paint like me.
Dave Lewis (A note on similar…): I submitted some paragraphs from a whitepaper I helped write on the use of supervised learning in leg…
MAtt (Update): Well, if you didn't get it, others won't, and I don't necessarily need to start another round of wack…
Axel (Update): That explains the earlier posts., Sorry to spoil the joke.
Matt (Update): Neither. It's a joke. I did not make any relevant childhood promise in real life.
There is a famou…
Axel (Update): Was that a promise made to you or by you? I am curious.
Again Mella returned to the tripod and lantern. There were faint clinkings. Maybe she was cooking up a stir-fry in the wok. That wasn't really a very amusing thought; I was getting bored fast. I was tempted to turn around and see what was going on, but I'd been told quite explicitly not to do that, so I didn't. That moment was when I first noticed, what, a shimmer? a disturbance? in the forest in front of me.
I was saddened to hear that my favourite anime director, Satoshi Kon, died last week. The link is to a goodbye letter he left behind.
I got sick over the weekend, probably from all the stress, so for the past few days I've been working from home, and not working very hard. I've also been playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress. This has involved a steady stream of exclamations along the lines of "Goddammit what kind of mother carries her baby into the extremely dangerous aquifer layer?" and "Caution. Siege engine practice area." After one fort got wiped out by goblins (the goblins only killed a few dwarfs, but then the others were so upset they flipped out and started killing each other) I decided that the next one would have a proper military, and that turned out to involve a unit called the "Royal Dwarven Kilted Axemen." So, naturally, I had to share the below.
Late on Saturday afternoon I was lying on a soft, mossy slope in the sun, looking up at the clouds and thinking of not much of anything. I had gotten so far into the whole thing of moving no muscles except my eyes, that I didn't even turn my head to look when someone came and lay down on the ground next to me, even though it was so close that I could feel all the moss along that side of my body depress slightly with the weight. When she spoke I recognized the voice as Taylor's. "What are you doing?"
I've reached agreement in principle with people at the University of Manitoba for me to go there as a postdoctoral researcher. Details are still to be worked out, but it looks like that'll be my next career step. At least until I learn enough Japanese to pass the entrance exams for TouDai, thereby fulfilling a childhood promise.
Far too early and far too loud, Taylor was hip-checking me in my sleeping bag and saying "Wake up, sleepyhead! It's morning!" I pried my eyelids open and indeed it was. I didn't feel like I had been asleep more than ten minutes or so. She, of course, looked perfectly rested and satisfied. I should have requested lodging in a "non morning people" tent, or better yet convinced the others to help me tie her to the cold steel frame of the telescope support for the night as a sacrifice to the mosquitoes. Make her beg for a place in the tent, and behave herself when and if it was granted. I bet Jeff and Rick weren't awake yet.
I stood on a bared mound of rock watching the yellow Sun sinking into the trees. It almost lined up with a straight row of hills, and I wondered if it would line up with them perfectly on some special day, like a solstice or equinox. I wondered if I would get to see the green flash. I've read that during sunrise and sunset there's a moment where the angle is exactly right for atmospheric refraction to bend the green part of the spectrum down to ground level, but you can only see it when the observing conditions are perfect, and I never have.
So, you have a new laptop computer. You install the latest and greatest Slackware Linux on it, and it naturally comes with a newer version of KDE than what's on your desktop machine. You open the "konsole" terminal emulator as usual, work for a while, and then when you're ears-deep in /etc/acpi/events or somewhere, you open another tab and Whoa! you aren't in your home directory as you expected, your new tab is ears-deep in /etc/acpi/events or some such Godforsaken place.
Well, the first time you figure you just made a weird mistake and typed cd /etc/acpi/events/or/some/such/Godforsaken/place without realizing it (and then, fnord-like, didn't see the command in the terminal window), and you automatically type cd again to go where you meant to be and you carry on. But then it happens again.
So you resolve to lay off the crack pipe for a few days, grit your teeth and type "cd" again, and so it is only on the third time it happens that you finally decide maybe it's not just you, and you make appropriate experiments and discover the horrible truth: the KDE developers inflicted this on you as a deliberate feature! When you open a new tab it will pry into your bash process, figure out where you are, and put the new tab there to prevent your escape. Heaven help you if you weren't using bash.
That ought to be the end of the story, since they at least had the decency to put a check box for it on the "Edit profile" configuration dialog. Below the fold, what happens if you uncheck that box...
Rick winced in pain as he eased into a kitchen chair, and Mella was immediately all over him. She tore the bandage from his leg and gazed alertly at his cut. Looking up at him, wide-eyed, from where she knelt on the floor, she said, "You're hurt! Let me heal you." "Well, I -" he began, clearly uncomfortable, but the witch wasn't listening. "I will make for you a poultice of wolf dock," she said with odd formality, "and covet my neighbour. Don't move." She stood, and dashed into the hall; before I could follow, she was back with a thick worn paperback book in one hand and a root in the other.
Late afternoon we started looking for a place to camp. We had hoped to reach the summit, but we'd made slower progress than we had expected, and it looked more reasonable to camp about halfway up and go for top in the morning. This was not consistent with my experience of walking all the way to the top and back in one day when I had been alone; I guess the heavy packs were slowing us down a fair bit more than we'd thought. Fortunately, the other side of carrying heavy packs was that we had plenty of supplies and could easily stay the whole three-day weekend; even if we ran over a little, none of us would really get in much trouble if we missed half a work day on Monday.
Hi! I'm a scientific researcher. I have a PhD in computer science. My doctoral dissertation is mostly about the mathematical background of "similarity search." That means looking at things to find other things they are similar to. I've travelled the world to present my work on similarity search at scientific conferences - and some very smart people with very limited funds chose to use those funds to pay for me to do that.
Argument from authority has its limitations, but I would like to make very clear: I am an expert in the specific area of how computers can answer questions of the form "Which thing does this thing most resemble?" Gee, why would I mention this right now?
When I started going to Scouts, it was the first year that they let girls join. I could tell you a few stories about that, to be sure, but they wouldn't be as interesting as you imagine. Despite what everybody says, sex really doesn't make that much difference to kids. At four in the morning under three layers of sopping wet nylon and a tarp in the middle of the forest far away from Mom, after a dinner of hamburgers that your patrol leader didn't really cook properly, you have other things to think about than the fact that there might be an actual member of the opposite gender in the next tent over. Lord Baden-Powell said that every Scout ought to sleep with the windows wide open, and he said that in England, too, where the climate is no laughing matter. Maybe he figured it would keep the kiddies "continent" if they were chilled into suspended animation, but more likely he was just nuts.
I just got back from a week in Sweden at ACL 2010. It went pretty well. I presented my paper, which you can read online as a PDF; I didn't get a lot of response or questions right at the presentation, but I said what I wanted to say and at least they didn't throw things, and I'm told there was a lot of interest in it offline. In one of the workshops I actually found several people who wanted to talk to me about my dissertation research, and it'd be really cool if I could somehow redeem some of the years of work I put into that, so that's good. I took photos and some may end up posted here eventually.
One of the many things I hate about direct marketing is the way marketers share their lists. If you get on one mailing list, then pretty soon you're on two, then four, and in just a short time, you're on all the lists. If you have a name that people commonly misspell, you may even end up on all the lists more than once. In my however many years as a programmer, I'm proud to say that I've never been in the direct mail industry, paper or electronic. You'd think that the Universe ought to be extra nice to me for that, and maybe I ought to be exempt from some of the advertising junk. Things don't work that way, though; the only times I get what I deserve are when it's something bad.
I'm off to a conference for the next week, and probably won't be logging in much, but there's a new Bonobo Conspiracy.