Found two extraordinary humorous blogs:
1. The world on file cards: http://indexed.blogspot.com/
2. All about Hitler: http://blogs.taz.de/hitlerblog/
Back to the daily scientific work:
1. Can Brains Point the Way?
2. Is Ambiguity Bad?
3. Music and memory: How the songs we heard growing up shape the story of our lives
4. A simple metric to infer personality from facial expression
5. Mirror self-recognition in Magpies
6. The smell of fear
7. Mirror neurons, hubs, and puppet masters
8. Evil and Theodicy, Part 1: Are Happiness and Virtue Linked?
9. Evil and Theodicy, Part 2: Can Happinees and Virtue Be Linked?
10. Evil and Theodicy, Part 3: Kant, Authenticity, and Lament
Tuesday, 26 August 2008
Friday, 15 August 2008
Points of Interest 13. August, 2008
キタ━━━(゜∀゜)━━━!!!!!, (゜どうも，おひさしぶりです!
1. The genetic component to European ethnic groups. You can see a clear distinction between individuals with northern from southern European ancestry. Interestingly, these genetic boundaries often mark linguistic boundaries too: Genetic, Geographic, And Linguistic Structure Of European Populations
2. "Jugemu" is a rakugo, verbal entertainment, which everybody in Japan knows: Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke
3. Are nouns and verbs represented differently in the brain? A typical view is that they are, with nouns relying more on temporal cortices and verbs on frontal regions: Representation of nouns and verbs in the brain
4. Participation in most sports requires agility, impeccable timing and the planning and execution of complex movements, so that actions such as catching a ball or throwing it into a hoop can be performed. Performing well at sports also requires anticipating and accurately predicting the movements of others: The baller's brain (and his pinky)
5. Did the introduction of cooking, have caused a relaxation of selective constraints on diet-related genes: Advent Of Cooking & The Big Cognitive Leap In Human Evolution
6. Totally awesome. I think bionics is the future technology: Robot controlled by "brain" in a culture dish
7. The top thirty 顔文字 (kaomoji/emoticons) used in Japan: Top thirty Japanese emoticons
8. Rap version of LHC from CERN - soon they'll blow up the world: Large Hadron Rap
9. Post about the Japanese pronoun nanji: I want to talk about you
10. The eye tells the brain when to plasticize
11. Mélange
12. England's rock art
13. Dinosaur Supertree
14. Collectie Ver Huell
15. Simulated Linguistic Evolution In The Laboratory
16. Testosterone and aggression, or what Frank's Red Hot Sauce has to do with handgun violence
17. Tone deafness and bad singing may not go hand in hand
18. Do you choke under pressure? Depends on what you're trying to accomplish
19. If you want to persuade a woman, look straight at her
20. 'Beer goggles' are real - it's official
21. US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability'
22. Has porn become mainstream? Not really
23. Did the Baldwin Effect Give Us Language?
24. On Human Nature
1. The genetic component to European ethnic groups. You can see a clear distinction between individuals with northern from southern European ancestry. Interestingly, these genetic boundaries often mark linguistic boundaries too: Genetic, Geographic, And Linguistic Structure Of European Populations
2. "Jugemu" is a rakugo, verbal entertainment, which everybody in Japan knows: Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke
3. Are nouns and verbs represented differently in the brain? A typical view is that they are, with nouns relying more on temporal cortices and verbs on frontal regions: Representation of nouns and verbs in the brain
4. Participation in most sports requires agility, impeccable timing and the planning and execution of complex movements, so that actions such as catching a ball or throwing it into a hoop can be performed. Performing well at sports also requires anticipating and accurately predicting the movements of others: The baller's brain (and his pinky)
5. Did the introduction of cooking, have caused a relaxation of selective constraints on diet-related genes: Advent Of Cooking & The Big Cognitive Leap In Human Evolution
6. Totally awesome. I think bionics is the future technology: Robot controlled by "brain" in a culture dish
7. The top thirty 顔文字 (kaomoji/emoticons) used in Japan: Top thirty Japanese emoticons
8. Rap version of LHC from CERN - soon they'll blow up the world: Large Hadron Rap
9. Post about the Japanese pronoun nanji: I want to talk about you
10. The eye tells the brain when to plasticize
11. Mélange
12. England's rock art
13. Dinosaur Supertree
14. Collectie Ver Huell
15. Simulated Linguistic Evolution In The Laboratory
16. Testosterone and aggression, or what Frank's Red Hot Sauce has to do with handgun violence
17. Tone deafness and bad singing may not go hand in hand
18. Do you choke under pressure? Depends on what you're trying to accomplish
19. If you want to persuade a woman, look straight at her
20. 'Beer goggles' are real - it's official
21. US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability'
22. Has porn become mainstream? Not really
23. Did the Baldwin Effect Give Us Language?
24. On Human Nature
Sunday, 10 August 2008
Resistance is futile
Soon I'll be one of them, i.e. accepted for computational linguistics at Heidelberg - hooray!
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Points of Interest 30. July, 2008
1. It has long been debated whether dinosaurs were part of the ‘Terrestrial Revolution’ that occurred some 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous when birds, mammals, flowering plants, insects and reptiles all underwent a rapid expansion: Dinosaur Supertree
2. Take one part gorgeous ornamental typography and one part diabolical imagery. Combine slowly over a low heat with incidental visual curiosities. Add caprice to taste. Serve haphazardly over a bed of 19th century lithographic stones. For best effect, consume before retiring: Collectie Ver Huell
3. If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future: Where Is Human Evolution Heading?
4. Today's Daily Telegraph contains a fascinating extract from Norman Doidge's new book The Brain That Changes Itself, about a woman who feels that she is constantly falling because she has lost her sense of balance as a result of damage to the vestibular system: Perpetually falling woman learns to balance with her tongue
5. Jump to Comments Language is a product of culture. Or is it? Which came first — language or culture? That’s like asking if the chicken or the egg came first. But cultural behavior has been documented in animals who do not have language systems, like gorillas who have intricate systems of processing plants: Can There Be A Synthesis Between Cultural And Biological Evolution?
6. Could we have evolved speech without evolving morality, or morality without evolving speech: A Biological Revolution
2. Take one part gorgeous ornamental typography and one part diabolical imagery. Combine slowly over a low heat with incidental visual curiosities. Add caprice to taste. Serve haphazardly over a bed of 19th century lithographic stones. For best effect, consume before retiring: Collectie Ver Huell
3. If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future: Where Is Human Evolution Heading?
4. Today's Daily Telegraph contains a fascinating extract from Norman Doidge's new book The Brain That Changes Itself, about a woman who feels that she is constantly falling because she has lost her sense of balance as a result of damage to the vestibular system: Perpetually falling woman learns to balance with her tongue
5. Jump to Comments Language is a product of culture. Or is it? Which came first — language or culture? That’s like asking if the chicken or the egg came first. But cultural behavior has been documented in animals who do not have language systems, like gorillas who have intricate systems of processing plants: Can There Be A Synthesis Between Cultural And Biological Evolution?
6. Could we have evolved speech without evolving morality, or morality without evolving speech: A Biological Revolution
Thursday, 24 July 2008
Issa
Kobayashi Issa (小林一茶) or just Issa (June 15, 1763 - January 5, 1828), by the way also the Arabic name for Jesus, is one of my favourite poets. He is one of the great four Japanese Haiku poets besides Bashô, Buson and Shiki. I like him because I sense his melancholy. His mother died when he was three, his grandmother, who raised him, when he was fourteen. He wandered through Japan. Got back, got a wife. All of his children died soon after birth and finally his wife died too. He wrote one of his most famous haiku at the time when his first daughter died:
In English:
The world of dew --One of my favourite poems of Issa is:
A world of dew it is indeed,
And yet, and yet . . .
夜神楽や焚火の中へちる紅葉
yokagura ya takibi no naka e chiru momiji
Shinto dance at night--It has even more power in German:
red leaves fall
into the bonfires
Ein Tempeltanz nachts:
Es stiebt ins Feuer hinein
Das rote Herbstlaub.
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
LaTeX
If you don't know this picture, you shouldn't study. Okay, that's a hyperbole. Nevertheless, LaTeX (/ˈleɪtɛk/ or /ˈlɑːtɛk/) is an important tool for writing scientific essays. It's not sufficient for a dotoral thesis or any other academic document with more than fifty pages to use Microsoft Word or Open Office. Unfortunately, in Germany many students and even post-graduates don't know LaTeX unless they study computational science, mathematics or physics. In other countries it is the tool for scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and engineers to write a scientific essay. It is most convenient tool to display mathematical formulas as you'll see below.
The high-level markup language allows you to produce ready to print and printer/monitor independent documents with easy numbering, cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout and bibliographies. It takes you one week, at the most, to learn the language and saves you years of blood and tears.
Wikipedia shows a comprehensive example of a LaTeX document, here is the raw script:
This is converted to following document:\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\title{\LaTeX}
\date{}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\LaTeX{} is a document preparation system for the \TeX{}
typesetting program. It offers programmable desktop publishing
features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of
typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and
cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, bibliographies,
and much more. \LaTeX{} was originally written in 1984 by Leslie
Lamport and has become the dominant method for using \TeX; few
people write in plain \TeX{} anymore. The current version is
\LaTeXe.
\newline
% This is a comment, it is not shown in the final output.
% The following shows a little of the typesetting power of LaTeX
\begin{eqnarray}
E &=& mc^2 \\
m &=& \frac{m_0}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
\end{eqnarray}
\end{document}
If you want to learn LaTeX, you can find an excellent Introduction at Wikibooks here. LaTeX is build into Linux operating systems, but you can use proTeXt for Windows as well. If you don't use Linux, you can get LaTeX here.
Monday, 21 July 2008
Points of Interest 22. July, 2008
1. Literary criticism sucks. So true, so true: Impostor
2. Windows into heaven: Notes on the Theology of Icons, Part 4: Reverse Perspective
3. Hilarious flashgame. Create your own disease and kill mankind: Pandemic 2
4. Differences Between Cognition & Memory Of Males And Females Linked To Two Genes
5. Speech's Stabilizing Forces
6. Sorry, Charlie, you and Nemo aren't the only fish that talk
7. UPM School of Computing researchers open up a new road for the computational representation of languages
2. Windows into heaven: Notes on the Theology of Icons, Part 4: Reverse Perspective
3. Hilarious flashgame. Create your own disease and kill mankind: Pandemic 2
4. Differences Between Cognition & Memory Of Males And Females Linked To Two Genes
5. Speech's Stabilizing Forces
6. Sorry, Charlie, you and Nemo aren't the only fish that talk
7. UPM School of Computing researchers open up a new road for the computational representation of languages
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