sardonick

If this comment doesn’t capture everything that’s hilariously wrong with the slashdot reader mentality, then i’m a monkey’s uncle…

Adam of BrainySmurf, an expat over in TianJin, China, has pulled together a few insightful articles on China and Taiwan relations:

• Why China won’t attack and occupy Taiwan
• A rebuttal explaining why China will attack Taiwan
• A very well written summary of internal Chinese politics, and how it relates to the whole situation

Just skimmed a wonderful (albet long) interview of Brian Eno. His music isn’t bad, but I had no idea the man was this deep of a thinker:

His thoughts on “image”:

For example, let’s take this pair of designer sunglasses that happen to be on the table in front of me. They’re very styled. They don’t have to be like that. Glasses don’t have to be funny, oval, weird-shaped looking glasses, space-age type glasses. As I put those glasses on, I’m not only keeping sun out of my eyes. I’m also engaging in some kind of game with myself and the rest of the world. What I’m doing is I’m entering into some kind of simulator. I’m saying, “what would it be like to be the kind of person that wears these kinds of glasses?” What I mean by that is, I’m not actually abandoning who I am and becoming somebody else; I’m for a while entering into a game where I suddenly become this person that’s a different person from the person you’ve just been talking to.

With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world. If I decide to cut my hair short and dress like a tank commander, I play with the resonances of kitsch, militaria, dominance, and surrender , and control, and strength and weakness and all those sorts of things — I’m role-playing effectively, when I’m making fashion choices.

Someday I need to port all of the old fractal generation & L-system programs i wrote from Pascal into some modern language. They were what got me interested in computer science, back in the day…

Seeing beauties like this
http://home.comcast.net/~fractalsbykeith/
Really brings me back to those days…

Read an article about a wonderful comedy troupe in the LA Times magazine this weekend .

“This is NCR, National Corporate Radio News: Our News, for You. Coming up next, stay tuned for ‘All Things Condescended,’ the news that makes you feel smarter than your friends who watch TV.”

Coolest. t-shirt. evarrr.

they lied to us
this was supposed to be the future
where is my jetpack,
where is my robotic companion,
where is my dinner in pill form,
where is my hydrogen fueled automobile,
where is my nuclear powered levitating house,
where is my cure for this disease

National newspapers et. al. are one thing, but I must admit it was a little more fun for me to see the Tactical Language project mentioned on LanguageHat.

The coments down below the main article were a grim reminder to the ethical problems that one faces in Computer Science and Linguistics.

It’s funny: I remember way back in high school being happy that I could live a life without having to deal with hard ethical problems like my other friends who were planning on pursuing careers in medicine and law would have to face. What could be more abstract, more removed from the bitter pragmatics of the world, than studying computer science?

Long years pass, I discover natural language processing, and fall in love with it. But I remember the day I realized that machine translation, named entity tagging, text summarization, etc.–all these innocent tools that I’d be creating–all have their more and, err, less ethical uses.

That was a big realization.

At the same time, it is reassuring that at least most of the professors I’ve talked to (including my own advisor), are aware of the ethical ramifications of what we are doing, and have strong moral viewpoints. It’s nice to know I’m not just a tool of Ashcroft and his lackeys…

But… It is nice to see that the fruits of NLP research can be ethically positive as well as negative. Our Arabic teaching project is actually used to train soldiers for peace-keeping… and there’s something heartening about the knowledge that I’ll be helping to wipe out miscommunication problems over there…

It’s much better than some alternative applications of NLP, that’s for sure…

Fría y tormentosa la noche que zarpé de Montevideo.
Al doblar el Cerro,
tiré desde la cubierta más alta
una moneda que brilló y se anegó en las aguas barrosas,
una cosa de luz que arrebataron el tiempo y la tiniebla.
Tuve la sensación de haber cometido un acto irrevocable,
de agregar a la historia del planeta
dos series incesantes, paralelas, quizá infinitas:
mi destino, hecho de zozobra, de amor y de vanas vicisitudes
-y el de aquel disco de metal
que las aguas darían al blando abismo
o a los remotos mares que aún roen
despojos del sajón y del viking.
A cada instante de mi sueño o de mi vigilia
corresponde otro de la ciega moneda.
A veces he sentido remordimiento
y otras envidia,
de ti que estás, como nosotros, en el tiempo y su laberinto
y que no lo sabes.

-Jorge Luis Borges

Hehe… and, just for laughs, here is google’s translation:

To a currency…

Fry and stormy the night that I weighed anchor of Montevideo.
When doubling the hill,
I threw from the high cover but
a currency that shone and flooded in muddy waters,
a light thing that snatched the time and tiniebla.
I had the sensation of to have committed an irrevocable act,
to add to the history of the planet
two incessant, parallel, perhaps infinite series:
my destiny, I throw of sinking, love and vain vicissitudes,
and the one of that metal disc
that the waters darian to the soft abyss
or to the remote seas that still nibble
despoliation of sajón and the Phoenician.
Constantly of my dream or my watch
another one of the blind currency corresponds.
Sometimes I have felt remorse
and others envy,
of you who these, like us, in the time and its labyrinth
and that you do not know it…

Now, let’s try Spanish->English->Spanish->English (just for kicks):

Fry and stormy the night that I weighed the anchor of Montevideo.
When doubling the hill,
I sent of the high cover
but of a modernity that shone and flooded in waters of the fangosas,
a slight thing that snatched the time and tiniebla.
It had the sensation of for to have committed an irrevocable act,
to add to the history of incessant, parallel planet
two, of the perhaps infinite series:
my the useless destiny, shipment to the sink, love and vicissitudes,
and the one that esta’ of that disc of the metal
that the waters darian to the smooth abyss
or to the remote seas that still they
despoliation mordiscan of saj

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

-Another by Louis MacNeice

i love the sense of calm urgency, simultaneous simplicity and utter filledness in this poem…

My PhD project has been getting quite a bit of news coverage lately. Right place at the right time, I guess:

• ISI press release
• ”Tomorrow’s Soldiers” on Slate Magazine
• “Talking Up a Good Game” on ABC News’ FutureTech
• A USC news article
• “Virtual Camp Trains Soldiers in Arabic, and More” on the New York Times