DIY

I'm either making some homemade limoncello, or I'm making Jarate.

Maps

I was at a thrift store the other day, looking at an old globe, trying to figure out when it was made by the countries that existed on it.

It seemed like a good skill to have, so I researched a little more, and found this list a like minded gentleman had put together!

May 1990: North and South Yemen merge

October 1990: There is only one Germany

December 1991: Soviet Union breaks up

During 1992: Yugoslavia breaks up

January 1993: Czechoslovakia dissolves

April 1994: White rule over and racial homelands are dissolved in South Africa

May 1997: Zaire becomes the Democratic Republic of the Congo

July 2000: Yemen's current border with Saudi Arabia officially agreed upon

May 2002: East Timor becomes independent

June 2006: Montenegro separates from Serbia

February 2008: Kosovo becomes independent (not universally recognized)

http://www.geographictravels.com/2009/06/how-to-tell-when-map-went-out-of-date.html

Fantastic!

Google Ngrams!

Google has a very fun tool out, working through a dataset of all the words from the books they have scanned.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

It's great fun to check on different spellings! (I still prefer connexion, who cares if it pretty much died out in 1860)

And you can search for multiple things. I think this graph says something about the type of books that are out there. 'You' is just like a smoothed out curve of 'I', and 'me' is a slightly smoother 'you', but the proportions stay pretty consistent.

Check it out for yourself, very fun.

Tumbling

While I plan on using this blog more concretely, I've decided I want a more abstract output.

http://alangfiles.tumblr.com/

Watson

I've really enjoyed watching Watson on the IBM sponsored Jeopardy! rounds. I felt like it was an amazing moment in history. (Here's a link if you don't know what I'm talking about)

Chess just seems like a machine's game. It seems like two humans are seeing which of them is the better computer while playing, looking ahead, etc (Although I greatly enjoy the idea of masters playing chess intuitively, making the right moves because they 'feel right'). But to have a computer play a language based game was so exciting. (Language rules being so interesting, especially since we usually go by what 'sounds right').

A lot of people thought of it as man vs. machine, but I saw it more as individual vs. community. It's amazing that so many great minds were able to program an understanding of language into a computer, to me it was beautiful to watch Watson work.

Resolutions

I decided to stop playing minesweeper in 2011.

I really picked it up in late summer of 2010 (I think), and would always play it while listening to lectures or talks or while I was watching video. Around game 500 I started getting pretty good, and brought it up from a win average of ~5% to ~13%. I started seeing minesweeper tiles in my mind, and my brain would play virtual games in my head even when I was away from a computer.