Posts from — April 2007

The 25 Best Beers in America according to Men’s Journal. I think I’ve had two of them. Obviously it’s very subjective, but still interesting. I might try to find a couple more at a local store I’ve heard is pretty good.

Predictions from 1900 about the year 2000 from Ladies Home Journal.

It’s an interesting and entertaining read. A lot of them are close, but the vocabulary is way off, for example “Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box.”

I’ve downloaded all of my past LJ entries (since May 2003) to my desktop (you can download yours here). The files total 1.2MB of text. I’m going to do some text analysis with it, just for fun (no laughing!). I wrote up a small python script to parse the files and count words, here are my most common (with counts):
the: 6314
a: 6013
i: 5701
to: 4854
of: 3198
and: 3067
it: 2244
in: 2058
that: 1812
for: 1782
is: 1514
my: 1489

This list is somewhat misleading because I haven’t stripped out HTML yet, so a and i are higher than they should be.

This is just a proof of concept… I’ve got a lot of ideas for more interesting things to do with the data. Any ideas for things to explore? Word bigrams are at the top of my list at the moment, but parsing that well is a bit more complicated than simple word extraction.

Tonight, I was reading some articles on Slate. For some reason, I decided to check out their discussion forum for articles to see what sort of conversations were happening. I figured that Slate is a reasonably erudite publication, so maybe there is some level-headed debate. How wrong I was!

Here are some of my favorite titles from forum posts from this page:
- Hey Jerk, England and UK Are Different
- ever try talking politely for awhile?
- Suicide Bombers Don’t Use Knives, Idiot
- Please pull your head out of your ass
- Hey, Retard, VT was a gun free zone
- Hey, Jerk, he wasn’t a citizen
- You are such an ignorant liar
- You Really Don’t Understand the Law
- Wow, You are Retarded
- You must be a compulsive liar…
- You are So Ignorant
- if i ‘think’ I am a dog, am I one?
- Try some actual facts
- Stop Exhaling Then
- Not surprisingly, you’re wrong
- You are a Blatant Liar and a Phoney
- You would be funny if you weren’t so pathetic
- You are an Illiterate Moron
- And You Know Nothing of Cons. Law
- Apologize for your lies

OK, that’s it. It reminds me of SNL’s Point/Counterpoint or Even Stephen from old Daily Show episodes. It’s relatively hard to find old clips these days, but I did find one of Even Stephen here. If you have more, leave links in comments!

At times like these, I’m glad I don’t have a TV. I can just imagine what the 24-hour news networks are like lately, reporting the same things every 15 minutes with pundits trying to tie Va. Tech shootings into their own crusades (gun control, gun rights, miscellaneous xenophobia, video games, etc). Everyone’s a Monday-morning quarterback and it’s a waste of time.

Yahoo’s going carbon-neutral this year. This will be quite an accomplishment, considering how much power data centers use, hopefully they can do it.

The best quote from the post:

Yahoo! going carbon neutral is equivalent to shutting off the electricity in all San Francisco homes for a month. Or, pulling nearly 25,000 cars off the road for a year.

Items I’m considering purchasing:
- Digital camera. I’m looking for something that can easily fit in my pocket, take good pictures, and record video. My PowerShot 80 was somehow lost last Fall, so I’m without camera. I considered getting a higher-end cell phone to take over my less important camera tasks, but I the cameras on the phones just don’t seem to offer the wide range of features I can get in a separate device. Right now I’m looking at the Panasonic DMC-FX07. A good way to evaluate a camera’s image quality is to look at images on flickr taken with that camera.
- Keyboard (musical, not computer). I’ve been wanting to do something musical lately. I have a couple of leads for bands in the area that might be looking for someone to play clarinet or saxophone, but I haven’t followed up on them yet. A keyboard would let me play on my own time without bothering anyone.

If you have any suggestions for either, let me know.

On Friday, Girts and I went to Yuri’s Night, a party at the nearby NASA base celebrating the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s orbit around the earth. They had science exhibits, food, drinks, music, art, and a lot of stuff that’s rather hard to classify. It was an odd combination of a party, a science fair, and Burning Man. It’s kinda amazing to think of a Soviet accomplishment being celebrated on a NASA base, too.

There were a bunch of people in outlandish costumes, plus some people who I’d think they were wearing a costume if I saw them on the street, but probably just look like that.

Some pictures:


(from LaughingSquid)

(from JasonUnbound)

Yesterday at work, I was walking to another building to pick up some tickets to something. On my way back, I saw a small group of people gathered around a woman who had been biking and hit by a car. I went over to see if there was anything I could do to help, even though it didn’t look like anything was going on at the time. She didn’t have any apparent external injuries (besides some road rash) and seemed coherent when I was there, but we weren’t going to try to move her from the side of the road until medical people arrived. Luckily she was wearing a helmet.. I didn’t see the accident itself, nor did I ask what happened, but I saw that her bike was relatively mangled. It turns out she was running the same errand I was, picking up tickets in the next building over, so I ended up getting the tickets for her and dropping them off elsewhere on campus. I biked for that errand, and luckily irony was kept at a minimum and I wasn’t hit by any cars. It’s a good reminder that the expected value of buying and wearing a helmet is completely worth it particularly if you’re biking near cars. I’m surprised I don’t see these things more often around here, to be honest, considering how many bikers and drivers there are.

This article is a really entertaining criticism of the style of writing in The Da Vinci Code. It’s a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t notice, to be honest, but when pointed out makes a lot of sense. Some of them made me laugh, though I’m not quite sure why. I’m not going to summarize the article or quote it, it’s just worth reading if you like language.