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http://www.geographictravels.com/2009/06/how-to-tell-when-map-went-out-of-date.html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

Bibimbap

On being a detective

I'm very much enjoying Doulgas Adam's detective Dirk Gently. Very fun, and funny.

"What was that Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' "

"I reject that entirely," said Dirk sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbably lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbably? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.' "

"The impossible merely supposes that there is something we don't know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The improbable, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality."

- from The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams

Workstation

I'm about to change my workstation, but here it is in all its old glory!