| New California Roadtrip Game |
[Apr. 20th, 2009|11:03 pm] |
"Punch Mission"
Similar to the infamous "Punch Buggy" game, in which one punches one's sister (or alternative) in the arm when one sees a Volkswagen Bug and says "Punch Buggy Blue" (or other appropriate color), in the "Punch Mission" game one punches one's girlfriend (or boyfriend) in the arm and says "Punch Mission San Fernando" (or, of course, as appropriate). Debate continues over whether you have to actually see the Mission in question, or whether those brown tourist signs are an adequate substitute. |
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| Thesis Wordle |
[Oct. 6th, 2008|04:26 pm] |
I'm happy to see 'evaluation' and 'HCI' and 'design' and 'work' and 'experience-focused'. A bit surprised epistemology and epistemological aren't any bigger. And only a bit embarrassed to see how much I use 'approach' and 'approaches', and, to a lesser extent, 'However'. But that's how you know it's a dissertation, right? But it's not a bad keyword summary. |
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| Beer Swing |
[Jul. 27th, 2008|01:53 pm] |
Some of you were wondering when I was going to put up an Instructable for the beer swing. I was too lame to actually do a full instructable, but here's a slide show with comments so you too can replicate beer swing awesomeness in your own back yard.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Beer-Swing/ |
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| Ten Ireland Tips |
[Jul. 23rd, 2008|12:14 pm] |
My friend Caitlin is currently travelling around Ireland. Because of this, I felt I should give her some advice on how to behave, and I thought that other readers might find this useful.
Ireland is becoming an increasingly common location for Americans to visit on holidays. Ireland is a land seeped in culture, and as such it's important to be aware of social norms as so not to offend. The following advice should improve the experience of any American visiting Ireland.
1. It is seen as very rude not to greet people you meet in the street before noon with "Top o' the morning to you!" It's also polite to tip your hat to people at the same time, or, if not wearing one, to gently pat your forehead as a substitute.
2. It is also very rude to leave a social gathering, such as being in a pub, without explaining why you're going. It is also appropriate to invite others to leave for the same reason at the same time. Of course, it's also important to use the right terms. The following are all acceptable reasons:
- Going for a nap, or "wank"
- Going out for a snack, or "a shag"
- Going for some fresh air, or "a snog"
So for example, you might say "Well, I'm going to pop around the corner for a shag. Back in five minutes. Anyone want to join me?"
3. The term "leprechaun" has come to mean "a real, true Irishman". As in "So you were born and bred in Dublin? You're a real leprechaun, eh?"
4. Ireland's nickname, "The Emerald Isle", is because of the large number of emeralds that are found in mountains and in streams across the land. It's perfectly acceptable and shows respect for Ireland's heritage to stop by any body of water and "look for emeralds", even briefly.
5. Ireland's growing economy became known as "The Celtic Tiger". To show your enthusiasm for Ireland's economy, you should respond "Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!" whenever anyone says that phrase.
6. Dubliners like to think of their city as being small and intimate, despite its size. They will appreciate you pointing out its village-like nature, and the way that, unlike other capital cities, it has a rustic charm without being contaminated by a sense of being international and cosmopolitan.
7. If travelling around the country, you will encounter several different local stouts, including Beamish in Galway and Murphy's in Cork. Needless to say, these are imitations of the Dublin-based Guinness, and the highest compliment you can give, upon tasting one of these beers, is to exclaim that it "Tastes just like Guinness!"
8. When being served a pint of Guinness (or any of the aforementioned local stouts), it will often be covered with a white cap of foam. That foam is taking the place of beer that you've paid for! To show that you're no ignorant tourist, just blow said foam off onto the bar counter, and then ask the bartender to top up your pint. They'll be happy to do so now that you've shown you know what's what.
9. The "Irish Car Bomb", a shot of Jamesons in a pint of Guinness, is the national drink of Ireland, and should be ordered frequently to show your appreciation for your host country.
10. It's always good form to use local phrases to show that you've being paying attention to people around you. For example, you might say that something is "Good like Bono!", who is a national hero, or, if surprised, exclaim "Fuck the pope!" |
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| Nokia |
[Jul. 2nd, 2008|04:49 pm] |
Just to let you all know that I'll be joining Nokia Research Palo Alto as a Member of Research Staff starting November 17th. Woooo!
Now back to your regularly scheduled finishing-writing-my-dissertation. |
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| I do improv with nobel laurate |
[May. 25th, 2008|01:05 pm] |
http://www.flickr.com/photos/meganhalpern/2518839416/in/set-72157605226238634/
I did a gig a week or two ago with Red Shift productions, who do some great science/theater work. We did an opening performance for a life sciences conference with Nobel Laurate Roald Hoffman. He gave the opening keynote, supposedly a talk about molecular behaviour under high-pressure, and his laptop "didn't work"... so myself and two other actors came up and performed the slides for him, a la classic improv format "Family Vacation". Lots of fun. |
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| Biometric Demon concept video |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|09:57 am] |
This is a great concept video by Pam Briggs & Patrick Olivier about 'Biometric Demons', which I first saw when they presented it at alt.chi. It's an excellent example of concept work specifying function without pinning down form. Lovely.
Their blurb:
The Biometric Daemon describes a kind of electronic pet that thrives on the biometric properties of its user and which can be used for authentication and identity management. It is based on the novels of Philip Pullman.
The concept was developed by Pam Briggs (Northumbria University - PaCT Lab) and Patrick Olivier (Newcastle University - Culture Lab) - with a PDF link to the scientific paper here:
http://www.usenix.org/event/upsec08/tech/full_papers/briggs/briggs.pdf |
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| Stupid pasting! |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|12:48 pm] |
Does anybody know how I can paste something from Acrobat into Word without it taking every new line as a hard CR? IE, I want to paste this from an Acrobat document
Moving from inspiration, or glimpses of particular lives as
possibilities in a design space, to information that seeks to
pinpoint exact requirements or needs of general
communities is symptomatic of different stances on the
ultimate goal of interpretation, in particular whether it
should be open or closed. The former approach sees
interpretation as opening up a variety of possibilities [52].
The latter sees interpretation as a process of negotiation
toward one single, correct, and unambiguous
understanding; the need to establish a single interpretation
then leads to a proliferation of methods to support a
narrowing of and verification of the potential design space.
but make it look like this:
Moving from inspiration, or glimpses of particular lives as possibilities in a design space, to information that seeks to pinpoint exact requirements or needs of general communities is symptomatic of different stances on the ultimate goal of interpretation, in particular whether it should be open or closed. The former approach sees interpretation as opening up a variety of possibilities [52]. The latter sees interpretation as a process of negotiation toward one single, correct, and unambiguous understanding; the need to establish a single interpretation then leads to a proliferation of methods to support a narrowing of and verification of the potential design space.
Should not be the rocket science, no? But I can't figure out how to make it do it in any way other than just deleting that CR/LF (or whatever it is) at the end of each line.
I'm not sure whether it's Acrobat sucking or Word sucking here. It does strike me that it should be possible to fix it in Word, though, and I can't figure out how. Right now if I want to do it I'm pasting it into TextPad, selecting it and Ctrl-J reformatting as a single line, then cut-and-pasting back out. Which works but is clearly ridiculous. |
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| Bringing structure to my life. Or at least to my music playing. |
[Mar. 11th, 2008|10:28 pm] |
In January Perlick challenged me to make my New Year's resolution doing something structured, as I'm generally very improvisational by nature. Now, I'm a pretty good musician, but I have a poor sense of rhythm, which I find frustrating, so I figured that would be a good thing to work at.
After failing to get Jess to buy Rock Band for the house, I decided to get a metronome and use that. Caitlin couldn't find hers, so I decided an excellent thing to do would be to build one. Naturally, in an Altoids box, as anything that could fit inside an Altoids box is always cooler when one has done so. So one 555 chip and a few hours in the basement later, I'm happy to announce success. A relaxing alternative to thesing.
( Images and witty commentary about circuits behind the cut )
Thanks to Caitlin for her help in solderin' and buildin' and all.
I really should get around to writing this up on Instructables so that Christy doesn't tell me off here, but I always forget to document as I'm going along. Ah well, maybe I'll go and recreate at some point over spring break. |
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| Posted using TxtLJ |
[Mar. 10th, 2008|01:32 am] |
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I'm reading 'Course of empire'. The LoC publication data reads "1. Human-alien encounters - Fiction". It's nice to know someone at the LoC believes, y'know? |
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| Who are songs written about? Answer: Jesus, John, Joe, Dan, Johnny, Billy and only then Mary |
[Feb. 22nd, 2008|02:22 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | 50 years of rock'n'roll | ] |
Inspired by some graphs ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dr_tectonic produced which showed graphical representations of individual songs, I got distracted this morning and started thinking about who songs are written about.
As it happens, I have a (gendered) list of names on my computer from previous research, and I also have a dump of OLGA (the OnLine Guitar Archive, now defunct due to pressure from the MPA and NMPA) for my own personal, educational and research use. That's about 10,000 songs from about 1,100 artists; it's worth noting the list is biased towards English-language popular music with guitars in it that can be represented with chords or tab (i.e. rock/blues/pop) from the last fifty or so years.
There are a few things that make this problem difficult. First, identifying names is hard. I've assumed that they're capitalized words in songs that appear on the name list. That does cause some problems: there's a lot of names that are common words ('Will', 'Hope', 'Van', etc). Second, there's no XML here: it's all just flat text files, in directories by first eight characters of the band name. Third, identifying gender of names is a whole problem unto itself. Fourth, I'm assuming that anonymous transcribers of songs are scrupulous about capitalization -- no "layla! i get down on my knees". Fifth, I don't want this to be more biased than necessary by the names of the artists: I want to know who they're writing about, not who's doing the writing. And sixth, I'm count each name each time it shows up, not once-per-song, so the name 'Layla' gets nine hits, despite the fact it's probably one song. Makes you wonder why I even bother trying. So the code has a lot of hedging to try and get around those problems[1], *and* I have to manually go into the result and decide what I think are and are not names.
But, in conclusion, out of 1,255,417 lines in 10,296 songs, the following names are mentioned more than 50 times:
will 464 #likely not a name most of the time
jesus 199
john 163
joe 144
america 147 #wierd name list
dan 108
johnny 108
billy 108
mary 102 #first female name
paul 78
van 72 #mainly due to a lot of non-english songs, not mr. morrison
james 69
peter 69
jack 66
tom 66
sally 63
jimmy 62
santa 59
ray 59
polly 55
willie 51
Aren't you glad you didn't ask?
J
[1]: I skip the first five lines of the file, I skip any lines with 'by' or 'artist' in them, I skip lines which are All In Title Case, I skip lines that have the name of the directory in them [ie some approximation of the artist], and I skip the words ["you", "love", "come", "song", "into", "set","straight", "christmas","lady","round","york","melody","young"] which are in the names list but seem unlikely in this context to be informative.
For more detail, you might want to check out the
complete output of names and frequencies here.
You could, but it's unlikely, want to check out the
code here or
the [gendered] namelist here. |
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