Language Computeer

trochee @ 2008-05-18T10:26:00

2008-05-18T08:29:12Z

In Berlin as of last night. Staying at the AO youth hostel with some Edinbourgeoisie. Todaz is an off daz, but there's no free wifi at the hostel so i am tzping on the German kezboard of the hostel terminal fees; 20 min for a Euro.

I remembered mz camera (note the y key isn't where I think it is!) and I'm off to explore Berlin some more todaz!

Tweets for Today

2008-05-13T02:07:41Z

06:51 judging machine translation outputs as part of a workshop #
07:47 downloading and installing MT software #

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2008-05-11T02:07:51Z

11:13 Waiting for 194 to Sea-Tac. Berlin here I come. A little sad to leave @imtboo for so long, but excited to go! #
12:18 Through security already with almost two hours to kill before puddlejump to PDX. Time for a snack! #
14:20 Puddlejump massively delayed. Got switched to later flight that leaves earlier, minor confusion making sure my bag comes too. Looks okay ... #
15:31 In PDX. At gate after running through airport. Looks like I made it: hope my bag did too. Once I get on, no texts until I'm back in the US! #

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Doctor Who ? [it's a high-pitched whistle you can't hear]

2008-05-04T23:10:34Z

I have a new comic, after a month of procrastination and other things to do.

Making this comic taught me a lot about digital comics creation. In particular, the Balloon Tales Layer Method is really cool.

Tweets for Today

2008-05-03T02:09:52Z

10:50 my new supersweet laptop has shipped -- almost a week early. a relief; i'll have it with me on trip to Berlin. #

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nerd core dump

2008-05-03T00:42:41Z

I'm writing a talk about Chinese character encodings. I was investigating whether GBK [one set of encodings] was a superset of Big5 (another encoding). [ETA: looks like it's not.]

So I went to the oracle and I was going to write "is GBK a superset of Big5" but I got this far: "is GB" when Google suggested the following search "is gb bigger than mb" (short answer: yes it is, but somebody asked this on Yahoo Answers).

Wednesday I saw Clay Shirky's video on the Cognitive Surplus (via Warren Ellis). Today, I wonder whether that surplus is worth harvesting....

Bay-area bound

2008-05-01T06:43:20Z

[ETA: Unlocked post now (and specifics removed); please feel free to point your Bay-area friends here!]

It's official as of Monday afternoon: we're going to the Bay Area. imtboo has been admitted to a San Francisco school for her chosen field.

School starts August 21 for her, so we'll be moving out of Seattle and down to the Bay Area in that first week of August, more or less.

I will be finishing up my dissertation at a desk in a research lab in Menlo Park. But D's school is downtown -- right by the Civic Center BART stop. Unfortunately, this means that one of us will be commuting a long way on the CalTrain and/or the BART. At the moment, it looks like it might be her, since at at least for the first semester she'll only have classes two (very full) days a week, while I'll be at ResearchLab five days a week.

Any suggestions or comments, from people who live in the Bay Area (or who have lived there) about places to live -- or to avoid? I think the East Bay is out for us -- the commute to Menlo Park is insane -- but we're considering paying more to live in the city, or paying less to live on the Peninsula. Any recommendations?

Bay Area roll call:
apollinax or bicoastal?
lunacow?
evan?
~~xaosenkosmos~~ -- you've already sent us comments, thanks!
damidnara?
cleverpig?
I'm sure I've missed people in this roll-call. Anybody else?

Tweets for Today

2008-05-01T02:09:47Z

13:16 reminding friends that twitter is not IM #
13:32 hoping not to have offended anybody. working today, should turn off IM. #

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2008-04-29T02:08:48Z

15:47 A tremendous congrats to @imtboo! We all knew you could but now it's official! #

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I do wonder what a 'seismic' button does.

2008-04-25T00:46:44Z

One of my pictures got used as an illustration on Seattlest.

ETA: they did ask permission, which I granted.

they would be reviews if they were longer. or reviewed anything.

2008-04-24T05:42:22Z

twilightsm was looking for post- or peri-apocalyptic books, and also dystopias. imtboo pointed me at zir post, and I wrote the following. So I thought I'd share.

Oo, clever thought: look at the post-apocalyptic LibraryThing tag. That's a good start. Off the top of that list, I would especially recommend Canticle for Leibowitz and Riddley Walker as spectacular.

Also the dystopia tag is pretty good. You must read Handmaid's Tale and Parable of the Sower.

Um, glancing at the books near my desk for a start:

Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan; an SF novel about nanotech
A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen. Non-fiction essays about the ongoing human destruction of the planet.
Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner. Definitely one of those "as the world is ending" peri-apocalyptic books. Also freakishly prescient.
Pretty much anything by James Morrow.
Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Very funny take on the Apocalypse.
Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin: a post-apocalyptic half-novel half-anthropology of a new community after our own.
The Dispossessed, also by Ursula K. Le Guin. A classic pair of dystopian societies in second-wave feminist SF.

Comics and illustrated books:

Baaa by David Macaulay. Also Motel of the Mysteries, by the same. Both satirical with lots of illustrations.
The System, by Peter Kuper. Wordless and beautiful and very very scary. Set in Manhattan, just before the bomb goes off. Written before September 11, also freakishly prescient.
Watchmen by Alan Moore, and Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller; modern classics in their post-apocalyptic re-visionings of the superhero genre. Spoiler: superheroes are the cause and the effects of the apocalypse. (Otherwise stay the heck away from superheroes, as a rule: many of the superhero books thematically deriving from these two have degenerated into thinly veiled snuff and rape porn.)
Give Me Liberty, by Frank Miller. Vaguely Objectivist Dystopian SF. Sequels are not so vague.
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore. The comic is wordier and more subtle but not as pretty as the movie.
DMZ, by Brian Wood; protagonist is a reporter in Manhattan, the DMZ between the Free States (Michigan, Upstate NY) and the New United States Government. Most Manhattanites live in the line of free-fire. Actually, many by Brian Wood: Channel Zero, Couscous Express, The Couriers.
Glacial Period, by Nicolas de Crécy. The Louvre is rediscovered by explorers excavating the Lost Continent of Europa.

phew, that's a lot. Probably more than you need. If this whets your appetite in a particular direction, ask me and I'm happy to go into more detail!

"open source" jackassery

2008-04-23T17:28:28Z

I posted this as a comment to a f-locked post on the jackassery, but I'll repost it here:

my previous opinion of [~~theferret~~] theferrett was that he was a smart but emotionally-stunted male nerd (well, we know lots of those) who used polyamory rhetoric to sleaze on lots of women and pretend that he was enlightened by doing so.
Now... well, that's all still true. It just makes me annoyed that he calls it "open source". What a fuckwit. That's dragging both male allies and the open source movement into the scum, providing the anecdotal evidence that is all most people will ever need to complete their stereotype (male poly = "lech", open source = "men who can't get laid"). And then to declare it as a "movement", as if software or SF cons need *more* herds of men objectifying women.

I'm not poly, nor do I wish I were, but I can respect (most of) the people who are serious about it. But poly rhetoric interacts with sexism and male privilege (um, mormon rape camps? in the news now) and so men (or little boys in grownup bodies) need to check themselves. It's awesome that the internet (poly, mono, straight & queer, men & women) rose up to smack him down. But I wish this kind of rhetoric wasn't associated with sexual liberation or with open source movements.
How did that little weasel choose such an appropriate username?

Some of my favorite responses:

A modest proposal from misia
Nerd culture promotes this from springheel_jack
Meanwhile, now I see the whole "open source" element and it further pisses me off. It fucking pollutes the lovely philosophy of open source. from badgerbag
A lovely roundup at FeministSF.net.

Buh. I don't intend to suggest that I have anything intelligent to add that all these brilliant women (and a few men) haven't already said. But sometimes, the stupid, it burns.

ETA: This made Get Off the Internet, which - though tremendous fun to read even when not on fire like this - has really validated its own existence with this scathing description of the original weaseling.

trochee @ 2008-04-17T12:13:00

2008-04-17T19:14:26Z

crap. I think I am getting sick.

I started sneezing last night and imtboo asked me if it was allergies. It sure felt like it was. But today I can't stop sneezing.

I think I may go home and take a shower and a nap.

trochee @ 2008-04-15T18:45:00

2008-04-16T01:47:17Z

our awesome sysadmin at work just sent an announcement about a new (and as yet unsupported) piece of hardware:

Note that [widget] is not supported by me or [my staff] so please do not send problem reports/questions/etc to us. We won't be able to assist you and then we'll feel bad about it.

I love it.

trochee @ 2008-04-15T13:57:00

2008-04-15T21:04:32Z

marnanel pointed out this story about Alexis Goggins, a little girl who jumped in front of her mom's psycho ex-boyfriend and took six bullets in the head and neck for her mom.

The good news is that she has done incredibly well, and looks to make a full recovery.

What shocks and saddens me are the comments to that story: fully half of them, apparently men and women alike, take that story (yes, the same one I described above) to blame the mom for the whole thing, apparently because it is somehow her fault for dating the conscience-deficient triggerman in the first place. Never mind that he was an ex, never mind that he jumped out of bushes and pushed his way into the car -- it's mom's fault, because she once dated him.

Madonna/whore complex much? how about a side of misogyny with that?

Tweets for Today

2008-04-14T02:04:09Z

18:27 yeah too bad the blondeswedes.com/ have NEVER PRODUCED AN ALBUM. ...sheesh. #

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found poetry

2008-04-10T17:00:48Z

In keeping with my lousy track record of posting, I'm going to include a piece of text somebody else wrote:

...deep in Flowers, she sucked forth stories, stories, stories, they fell off the stamens that weren't stamens and stuck to her legs and she pushed them into pockets and stored them there laughing, in her dreams, in the beautiful and perfect greed of this glorious sucking up of pure experience. Other Flowers beckoned, and soon her legs were packed with precisely configured information to return to the Hive.

Her sisters waited there on the dance platform as she disgorged her food. The Russians were brilliant in color and pattern and taste, but they disdained that, programmed to other needs. Dance this American stuff, they told her, scenting and nonscenting Russian, German, Thai, Japanese. Those are so far away, after all, and do not arise from these our native Flowers.

So Verity danced the Dance of America for them, from deep within the flashing maps. Danced the place of Twain, of a White Whale that was so much more than just a whale, danced a Pacific paradise pushed deep with the American places of both those men so that the rest of America, when they could, had to go and fight for those tropical green jungle dots spattering an unbelievably blue sea. We must die for this, as the Polynesians did before us, spoke her Dance, her thin black legs so much more fluid than mere human twos. Here are the pictures that prove this, I can show you kinetically, as skyscrapers are kinetic, swaying and giving beneath the caress of the wind and here let them grow Flowers because of the pure outbursting of the beauty of Information, of Organization, O let us dance to Life's deep Organization and to the Light within it.

And so she danced some more.

from Queen City Jazz, by Kathleen Ann Goonan.

In San Francisco

2008-04-04T20:20:02Z

yesterday afternoon we landed in SFO for a short visit. I'm in Hayes Valley Green, on my OLPC laptop. This city's vaunted internet access isn't bad but isn't all it's cracked up to be.

apologies to all you bay area people -- we're here but we're busy, and leaving Sunday morning very early. if things go well today, we'll probably be back!

comics recommendations

2008-03-29T21:47:10Z

I've been out for a while (imtboo and I went to La Push last weekend) and I've been very busy with research, and just generally enjoying not being on the internet. So I'm way behind on the live journal; my apologies to you all. writeanya asked me about comics suggestions for a young friend who's just turned "a very young 13". He really likes the Simpsons comics, and she'd like something... else. blackwingedboy has already pointed her at Bone, an excellent choice, and... well, I'm just going to post here and point her here:

Hmm... he likes the Simpsons. I'm guessing he likes the humor and the drama. If he's only about the sarcastic pop-cult jokes, I don't really know where to send you, outside of some stuff that's really *way* too old for him (e.g. The Exterminators is an R+-rated comic that is a sort of Six Feet Under except bug-spray instead of embalming fluid).

If he likes the drama and goofy characters, see if he likes Jeff Smith's Bone, as blackwingedboy suggested, or Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge. (I've even heard Bone described -- by its author! -- as "Uncle Scrooge meets Tolkien").

Bone is accessible at about 8 years old, and I've met some precocious 6-year-olds who could probably handle it. (Bone doesn't talk down to its readers, though: it's really a great story for grownups too). A "young 13" should have no trouble with it. Uncle Scrooge is a bit younger, but not much, with a little more talking-down to readers.

I'd hope that one of those two would allow you to lead him away from the butt jokes. If that's what he wants, then Simpsons is probably the place to stay. But if not:

If he goes for Uncle Scrooge, he might like the more modern adventure stuff, so I'd send him to the Tintin books next. They're all pretty great, but I'd skip "Tintin in the Congo", not that it's easy to find any more -- its racism is really awful (remember: mid-20thc. Belgian writer).

If he goes for Bone, then next to try would be Elfquest, if he likes the fantasy stuff, or perhaps the Akiko graphic novels for SF adventure goofiness, if the goofy is what he likes (Akiko by Mark Crilley: note he's also written a series of Akiko young-readers books, but the graphic novels are *much* more fun, caveat emptor).

Elfquest is a bit more of an "old thirteen" than a young one, and there's no cow-races or goofy Bone cousins, which is the bait Bone offers to drag a Simpsons fan into epic fantasy. (Note: don't bother beyond vol. 4 or so; Elfquest devolves into soap opera).

how's that? If I feel inspired, I may come back and link-ify, but you know how to use Google and Amazon search, right?

Tweets for Today

2008-03-22T02:02:21Z

13:01 @imtboo: thanks sweet! hackity hack hack #

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2008-03-21T02:04:03Z

10:32 @marnanel: is that a flickrbomb (intentional) or does it reflect the tag statistics? #
10:35 @marnanel that belongs in a "hacking flickr" bag-o-tricks -- clever! #
14:34 @blackwingedboy oh lovely, an edit timewar. ;) #
16:23 @jinjurly: This guy lives nearby, want me to go beat him up? tinyurl.com/3cykte #
16:58 you know you work in a computer lab when you find out the weather over twitter. #
17:33 @marnanel: i can only do it when @imtboo is my meteorologist #
18:22 off to go to meditation class. still need to generate experimental results tonight. later, i guess. #

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2008-03-20T02:05:46Z

19:26 broken data formats by people who should otherwise know better... #
19:28 these are not the data you think they are. nothing to see here. move along. #
20:31 Really feeling the call to go sit, but hugely late going home. Bus can't come fast enough for me... #
15:24 lunch #

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2008-03-19T02:03:26Z

12:39 @imtboo: congratulations! yay! #
16:26 double-encoded UTF-8. grah. #
16:27 Linux: making difficult things possible... while easy things moderately difficult #

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2008-03-15T02:02:52Z

21:20 At grocery store after meditation class. Nerves have dropped. #
11:23 inviting people to the poetry slam featuring @imtboo #
16:18 @imtboo: that's great news! yay Freehold! #

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2008-03-14T02:04:39Z

14:20 woo! I have funding for the next year! #
14:22 ... and I got an invitation to travel that conflicts with other plans. :( #
15:10 @streamsandpools: yay! thank you! #

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Language Computeer

trochee @ 2008-05-18T10:26:00

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Doctor Who ? [it's a high-pitched whistle you can't hear]

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nerd core dump

Bay-area bound

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Tweets for Today

I *do* wonder what a 'seismic' button does.

they would be reviews if they were longer. or reviewed anything.

"open source" jackassery

trochee @ 2008-04-17T12:13:00

trochee @ 2008-04-15T18:45:00

trochee @ 2008-04-15T13:57:00

Tweets for Today

found poetry

In San Francisco

comics recommendations

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I do wonder what a 'seismic' button does.