Life = Math ? true : false;

Coincidentally (if there is such a thing), I had two web pages about math and life and its meaning (it being deliberately ambiguous here) opened side by side today.

The first one tells the story/urban-legend of  how Igor Tamm, the Nobel Laureate, saved his life by calculating the error when the Taylor series approximation of a function is truncated after n terms.

 http://home.uchicago.edu/~djm2/archives/sent.1998.03/math.bandit 

The other one is a hilarious xkcd comic that most ’scientists’ wont like. http://xkcd.com/435/

So the next time you decide a career or ask someone to do so, keep the stakes in mind

What a Desi Linux Distro Logo Should Look Like

The nick PaindooPenguin got me thinking how it should be…(time.kill())

Using BBCUrdu Font on Ubuntu (Hardy Heron)

1. sudo apt-get install language-pack-ur language-pack-ur-base language-pack-gnome-ur language-pack-gnome-ur-base language-support-ur openoffice.org-l10n-ur-in
2. wget http://www.urdulife.com/font/asunaskh.ttf
3. sudo mv asunaskh.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/
4. Save if necessary and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (restarts X)
5. Pat yourself on the back

I am using SwiftWeasel and it works there too ofcourse.

Microsoft Reader on Ubuntu

I just finished installing MS Reader on Ubuntu (Hardy Heron), here’s how

1. Followed steps given here
2. Downloaded msvcirt.dll and copied it in the directory where MS Reader was installed

It creates a shortcut and desktop which works! Had to enable subpixel smoothing to get the correct cleartype fonts. Drag-drop a lit into reader and it opens. The only problem fornow is that I cant switch to full screen.

Steven Pinker’s Lecture

I just came back from a very interesting lecture by Steven Pinker on The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. A recording of a similar lecture is available on YouTube, minus most of the snickers and laughs from the audience. The YouTube  version seems more like a read-out-the-slides kind of stuff but its a lot more engaging IRL. He must have gone through this lecture so many times, I cant tell any content difference in at least the first 20 minutes or so. Coincidentally, he mentioned one of Groucho’s quotes that I had read just yesterday.

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.

It would interesting to see if the concepts described here can be applied  to other languages (say Urdu) without any changes. For example, an audience question that came up was why do bilingual people react to swearing in their first language more emotionally than their second one. IMHO, it might be a bit subjective. My mind, at least, works the other way around. Also, the audience comment about taking language as a window into humane nature can be viewed as a cyclic problem makes a lot of sense to me. Gives me lots to think about and write perhaps… but that’s for later.

 

P.S. He uses a ThinkPad too!

P.P.S. don’t watch the video if you get offended by swear words.

Speech to Text: Star Trek Style

I was watching an old star trek episode, Assignment: Earth. The episode was aired in 1968 and showed a type writer which had speech to text built in. They used a normal type writer as a prop but it still was interesting to note that it was 10 years before an actual speech recognition system was built. Moral of the story: Science Fiction gives you vision of ‘the shape of things to come’.

Stemming in Urdu and Google

Searching for پاکستانی on Google Search, I realized that Google doesn’t  do any stemming for Urdu. It does however perform some kind of transliteration and brings in those results as well. I was expecting links from BBC though due to their Urdu web site but couldn’t find any at least in the first three result pages. While there has been some work done on Urdu Stemming, I still don’t see it being implemented anywhere. Any takers?