I was pretty sure that reading hadn’t suddenly become the “in” thing to do to impress your peers at high-school. Sure, Harry Potter was very widely read but its essentially an outcast-comes-good story, hardly something the alpha boys and girls are going to go crazy over.

The answer to the mystery lies in that potent combination of technology and laziness. When sending an SMS using predictive text it just so happens that the sequence of key presses to write “cool” is the same to enter “book” (2665). On many phones, “book” is suggested before “cool” so rather than waste energy by pressing another button or two, it’s easier to just send the message and work on redefining the English language. As an added bonus you get to reinforce certain social structures (under 20 vs. over 20) through opaque jargon.

Considering the types of shortcuts used to send quick SMSs (“ok cu l8r 2nite qt”) it makes sense — in a coding theory kind of way — that quirks of predictive text would begin to be exploited like this. You could use similar coincidences as a substitute for offensive language.

Yelling “dual you!” at someone on the street is oddly appropriate.

I came across a similar, technology-driven neologism recently:

Keming. noun. The result of improper kerning.

It’s beautifully self-referential since kerning is a typographical term referring to the spacing between letters. Setting your kerning too small and your ‘r’s and ‘n’s will be set too close together making the combination look suspiciously like the ‘m’ in “keming”.

I really enjoy this playful bending of language through technology. It’s a healthy antidote to the dreariness of the language used in some quarters:

We’ve decided to make some strategic adjustments to the staffing arrangements going forward in relation to current responsibilities.

Not book at all.

Acknowledgements: Image by Cris DeRaud.

Julieanne’s trusty G4 iBook had faithfully served her through the last couple of years of her PhD research, seeing her through the writing of many papers, the wrangling of many citations and the interminable editing and re-editing of “The National Audience”. Two days later the little trooper started making a strange clicking sound before hanging, only to reboot and ominously flash a question mark over a folder.

My (and her) initial panic was assuaged slightly when I realised I had backed-up her machine the day after she printed off the review copy of her thesis. As an added bonus it turned out the iBook had come with a very generous three year warranty. After a quick visit to the local Mac store I was told it would be fixed for free and back to me in a week. Sure enough, I had it back a week later with a new and less clicky hard drive. Better still it didn’t cost me a cent.

Now came the moment of truth. Would the backup I had made before the crash restore the iBook to its former glory?

After a quick skim through the SuperDuper! user’s guide I found a section entitled “Recovering from a disaster” which had a step-by-step guide to restoring a machine from a backup.

The first step was “Start up from the OS X Install disc” which immediately presented two problems: 1) where was my install disk, and 2) how to I get the iBook to bypass booting from the fresh system that was put on the new hard drive? Neither problems were too onerous. The install disk was with all my other computer related crap and a quick search revealed that I should hold the “C” key down while the machine starts up to get it to boot from the DVD drive.

The fresh copy of OS X on the newly refurbished machine posed another problem. Following the SuperDuper! instructions to the letter meant the Disk Utility program attempted to copy the backed-up version of Julieanne’s stuff to a new partition on the hard drive. Since there was only 30GB on it the restore failed.

It turns out that the little checkbox labelled “Erase Destination” needed to be switch to on. Once I did this the restore when seamlessly.

After about half an hour, and with baited breath, I restarted the machine and was very relieved to see Julieanne’s desktop background appear. Relief turned to awe as all her startup items fired up and the mess of desktop icons all appeared in their former places. To top it off, the Finder windows that she had open when the machine died popped up too.

Now that’s a backup!

The full-page ad in question appeared in October 21st edition of the Sun-Herald’s “Sunday Life” magazine

What particularly struck me was the example question that appeared in the ad. To truly appreciate its banality I’ve typed out the question and sample answers below:

Question 3: What is the floral emblem of Australia?
* Waratah
* Banksia
* Wattle

Now, I don’t know about you but I certainly don’t want people calling themselves “Australian” if they cannot even name our floral emblem. Can you imagine how awkward daily life must be for those poor souls who took up citizenship before the test was in place? They must walk past groves of wattle completely oblivious to precisely how symbolically important the yellow fuzzy blossom is to the deeply botanical real Australians around them. So sad.

Seriously though, isn’t that an utterly ridiculous question to have in a citizenship test? Even if it’s just a sample question and doesn’t actually appear in the real test using it as representative of the test as a whole doesn’t really inspire confidence.

To give the whole test the benefit of the doubt I moseyed on over to the citizenship website mentioned in the ad to find out more about it. I few clicks later and I was able to evaluate my Australianness by taking a sample test. Sure enough, question 3 of the sample test does ask “What is the floral emblem of Australia?”. To top it off, the following sample question is

Question 4: Which one of these Australians is famous for playing cricket?
* Rod Laver
* Sir Donald Bradman
* Sir Hubert Opperman

Did Howard have a hand in the sample questions? For a PM that has eschewed the symbolic gesture of saying sorry to indigenous Australian he or his Government seem pretty big on making sure new Australians know what flower represents us.

I’m not completely opposed to the idea of a citizenship test. I’ve been on the fence about the whole idea ever since I heard Bernard Crick give an excellent public lecture about citizenship in Britain and his role in designing their test. Although he was somewhat critical of the final implementation of the test he helped develop he made some good points for tests in principle. At the very least they can be used to convey useful information to future citizens about day-to-day life in their newly chosen country. Making sure people know that if you spill someone’s beer in the pub you should buy them a new one was one of the examples Crick used.

To be fair, the other sample questions did ask relatively useful things like “What is a bill?” and “Which one of these is a responsibility for every Australian citizen?” Some of the resource book has relevant information too. It’s a shame one the sample questions - and the one chosen to represent the test in a major Australian paper - gives the impression that flowers are an equally important part of Australian citizenship.

The move itself at the beginning of August was fairly stressful, even with the help of removalists. J was straight off to work while I pottered around the house with a flu pretending to unpack the multitudinous boxes.

My first impressions of Canberra as a place to live when we got here were, in no particular order: cold, quiet, well planned, thank you to whomever invented central heating, and hooray for dishwashers. Those last two probably have something to do with the very liveable place we found to rent in the midst of a very tight rental market.

I had visited Canberra several times while I lived in Sydney (hi Michael and Emma!) and, as a young twenty-something with a taste for clubbing, found it less than appealing. Needless to say, the idea of moving here then was not something I wasted much thought on.

Funny the difference half a dozen years makes. The more time I spend here the more I come to like it. Everything is about 10-20 minutes away. There are decent bars, restaurants and theatres around town. I can get almost everywhere on a bike - well, at least to the city and to and from work. And on top of the bike riding, the nearby bushland, trees, mountains and lakemake the place feel inherently healthy.

Proximity to Frozen Water

One big advantage Canberra has over Sydney is that it’s a good couple of hours closer to the snow. Something we took advantage of very quickly, booking a last minute weekend staying on-snow at the Stables in Perisher.

The season was much, much better than the last couple of years with all my favourite runs open and very ride-able: Zali’s, Excellerator, Towers, and Rollercoaster.

Between the central heating and snowboarding, I think winters here are not going to be a problem.

Remembrance Drive

For all my raving about Canberra I must admit to having headed back to Sydney several times already in the last few months. Not without reason though. Aside from all the great friends and neighbours we left behind we had several events that drew us back, including: Ant’s birthday, Jesse’s naming day, and my graduation:

J has been back a few more times than me. I’d try to argue she is more of a Sydney-sider than me but one of her trips back was to hand in her own monster of a research project entitled “The National Audience”. I can even report that it’s pretty damn good as I proof-read large chunks of it along with our sometime housemate Mel who is also a Canberra newcomer and fellow ANU-er.

The Jobs

So, to the reason we’re here. As I mentioned In a previous installment, we up and left Sydney because I fortunate to score what looked like a great research position and J got a job in the halls of power. I’m happy to be able to report that, two months in, they are still looking like a great jobs - although with the election just called J’s job just got a lot more “interesting”.

After a bit of time settling in to a new school and a whole lot of new theory my work is also starting to get busy as a roadmap of papers to write starts to become clear. It’s quite a change from research in industry. I enjoy both but I’m really liking the chance I have at the moment to work on some more theoretical stuff. I’m sure I’ll get an itch to do some more code-cutting in due course though.

More Time and Space

One of the most satisfying side effects of the move would have to be the extra time I seem to have now. Memories of an hour or more in the car everyday in Sydney traffic are almost forgotten when I zoom along by the lake on my 15 minute ride to work.

Not only is the incidental exercise a good thing but I’ve managed to read a lot more and catch up on some films. That is, when Facebook is not sucking my time away.

Of course free time, like hard-drive space, is there to be filled and, glutton that I am, I’m already finding ways to spread myself thin (concocting metaphoric cocktails, for instance). Not content with neglecting one website, I’ve set up an academic one as well as a research blog so the three or four regular readers this one has won’t be put of if I start posting incessantly about machine learning.

To top it off, some mail arrived today which might mean I’ll actually nail one of my new years’ resolutions. Although I haven’t put much effort into practising lately that will have to change as I’m all signed up to sit the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December.

Wish me がんばって!

LyX and LateX

For the uninitiated, LyX is a front-end for LaTeX, a command-line driven typesetting system that produces beautiful looking documents. The front-end provided by LyX alleviates some of the more arcane and tedious aspects of working with pure LaTeX. You can use LyX without knowing any LaTeX (although you do have to install it) and still get great results.

The LyX GUI lets you write in a manner similar to a word processor, using buttons, menus or key shortcuts to layout and format your text while giving you a preview of what it looks like. When you’re ready to print or submit your work, LyX translates what is on the screen into LaTeX code and then hands it off to the LaTeX system to do all the heavy typesetting, resulting in a beautifully rendered PDF.

I’ve written an undergraduate thesis and several conference papers in pure LaTeX and a PhD using LyX. For me, LyX wins hands down as many LaTeX annoyances such as forgetting to close environments, including figures, managing citations and dealing with tables become much easier in LyX. This results in more time writing and less time tracking down compile bugs.

For a gentle introduction to LyX, I’d recommend having a look at the Structured Writing with LyX article (even though it’s a little out of date) and the Tutorials section of the excellent LyX wiki.

The Layout File

Much of the presentation of your document that is normally configured through LaTeX commands can be managed through LyX layout files. A layout defines the various styles and blocks (such as titles, headings, author details, code, etc.), how they will appear on screen in LyX and how they are to be translated to LaTeX.

This is not a tutorial on writing LyX layouts but if you are curious about how this stuff works a good place to start is Section 5.2 of the Customization document that can be found in LyX’s Help menu.

To make the UNSW thesis layout file easier to use I embedded the LaTeX mark-up commands into the preamble of the LyX layout file. I realise the “correct” way to do this sort of thing is to write a LaTeX class file (e.g., unswthesis.cls) and create a corresponding layout file (e.g., unswthesis.layout) that references its commands. However, I thought it would be easier for LyX and LaTeX newcomers to only have to deal with a single file and not have to worry about fiddling with their LaTeX configuration too much.

Installing the Layout File

Download the following layout file and save it to the layout section LyX configuration directory. This is usually in Library/Application Support/LyX-1.5/layouts/ relative to your home directory.

• unswthesis.layout - 10KB LyX Layout File

Now open LyX and select LyX > Reconfigure from the menu. LyX will then ask you to restart. Once this is done the thesis layout should be installed and visible in the Document Class field of window opened via the Document > Settings... menu.

For this layout to work correctly, you will also need an image of the UNSW crest. I found a black and white PDF one that works nicely with this layout. You can download it here:

• unswcrest.pdf - 74KB PDF File

This file needs to be in the same folder as the LyX document using the thesis layout.

Using the Layout File

Once you have LyX restarted, open a new document and then go to Document > Settings... and then select “UNSW Thesis” from the document class list and hit OK.

This layout has all of the usual styles found in the Book class. Two of them, Author and Title, are used to control what is displayed on your thesis title page. In your new document, add a title using the Title style and put your name underneath in the Author style.

Save the document in the same directory as the unswcrest.pdf file and then turn it into a PDF document via the View > PDF (pdflatex) menu option. If all goes well you should see something like the following:

Note: As this layout makes use of the graphicx package (found in most LaTeX distributions) and a PDF version of the UNSW crest only the pdflatex view will work.

Templates

It makes sense to split a thesis-sized document into several manageable chunks. This allows you to work on each chunk in isolation, making it easier to zoom around your document and examine the final output without having to build the entire thesis.

I used a separate LyX document for each chapter and appendix and a “main” file to draw them all together when I needed to inspect the entire thesis.

The zip file below has everything you need to get started, including:

• unswthesis.layout - The layout file described above.
• unswcrest.pdf - The UNSW crest described above.
• main.lyx - The main template used to build the whole thesis.
• chapter.lyx - An example chapter that is included by the main.lyx file.
• example.bib - An example BibTeX file that is included by the main template.
• copyright.tex - A LaTeX file that is used by the main.lyx template to add the required copyright statement to the beginning of your thesis.
• originality.tex - Another LaTeX file that is included by main.lyx and required by UNSW.

You can download the lot here:

• unswthesis.zip - 34KB Zip File

Just unzip the directory somewhere convenient and copy the unswthesis.layout file to your LyX directory as described eariler. Then open the main.lyx file with LyX and you should be able to create a PDF from it using View > PDF (pdflatex) straight away. After that, just use the File > New from Template... menu item to open the chapter.lyx document as a template, replace the text with your thesis chapter and save it. To add your chapter to the main.lyx document use the Insert > File > Child Document... menu to add it.

Happy writing!

Caveats

I originally started writing my thesis using LyX 1.3. Since then LyX has gone from strength to strength and is now up to version 1.5. The files here have all been adapted and improved from the LyX 1.3 versions I originally used and tested using LyX 1.5.1.

I’ve also only tried this on the Mac version of LyX 1.5 using teTeX as the LaTeX system under the hood, though there’s no reason things shouldn’t work with something like MacTeX instead. The only thing I’m not too sure about is whether there are any packages that I use in this layout that don’t come with a standard LaTeX distribution. Let me know if you have any problems.

Also, the format of the title page, margins, declarations, and so on met the submission guidelines for UNSW as of July 2006. You may want to check if they’re still valid. If not, a quick poke around in the files and it should be apparent where to make any changes.

Acknowledgements

Most of the code for formatting the thesis title page comes from a LaTeX class file I found on CTAN as does the formatting for the copyright.tex and originality.tex files. Thanks to Stephen Harker for making these available.

The LyX image in this post is thanks to the LyX page at the Linux Guiden wiki.

The main reason we’re going is that Julieanne is about to submit her thesis (she’s diligently correcting chapters as I type) and the job opportunities for her in Canberra are far more plentiful - both in academia and politics - than here in Sydney. The decision was sealed when one of her online job searches was cast a little too wide and she found the post-doctoral position that I’ll now be starting on the 15th of August.

My resignation was announced at work today and now I’m gearing up for the dive back into academic life. I feel like I’ve got a taste of what commercial research has to offer as I was working with some really excellent people. It will be sad to leave but I think my new position at the ANU will give me a sense of what an academic career path might be like - something that was difficult to appreciate while working and writing up my thesis.

I was lucky to meet some of the people I’ll be working with (or at least nearby) at this year’s international conference on machine learning. They’re all solid researchers with strong mathematical backgrounds so I’m looking forward to really getting my teeth into some of the more recent theoretical developments in machine learning. I’m also hoping there will be a chance to do some graduate-level teaching as it’s something I’ve been keen to try for some time now.

The wheels are most definitely in motion and this weekend they’ll be driving us down to Our Nation’s Capital for the first of what will hopefully only be a couple of house-hunting visits. We’ve been making good use of AllHomes to help us search for candidate places. By assiduously squinting at tiny photos of houses we have been able to form a shortlist of places that best photograph on digital cameras built in the early 90’s. We’ll be inspecting them to make sure of the little details: that the rooms are indeed connected to one another and that the warping of the floors are due to the fish-eye lens rather than any inherent structural problems.

To those friends who both live in Sydney and read this blog: consider this a heads up about an imminent farewell party. It’d be best if you kept between now and the end of the month free while we decide on a date for the party.

At the conference dinner the program chair, Zoubin Ghahramani, presented the usual statistics for ICML 2007: the number of papers submitted, the number accepted, the number of reviewers, etc. As a bonus, he also did a analysis showing the most probable keyword given that a paper was accepted and the most probable given it was rejected.

(Update: the presentation is now available from Zoubin’s site as PDF slides. Thanks to Ricardo Silva pointing this out over at hunch.net).

Collection

I can’t remember the exact keywords but I thought the idea was a fun one so the next morning I hacked together a quick ruby script to grab the accepted paper titles for ICML from 1988 to 2006 from the list at DBLP. The titles for 2007 aren’t up there yet so I also had my script scrape titles from the ICML 2007 site.

I then tokenised the titles and applied some stemming and stop-word removal to the 1782 paper titles using a great little stemming library and a list of stop-words I found via Wikipedia. The result is a table with 1640 rows, one per term, with each row containing the number of papers with that term in it for each of the 20 years from 1988 to 2007.

Results

The first thing we can do with this data is see how many papers were accepted into the conference each year. This either gives some idea of the vitality of the field over time or the choosiness of the program committee.

The following graph shows the rise of Bayesian and kernel methods over the last decade. Especially impressive is the tripling of papers mentioning “kernel” over the last six years considering it was unheard of before 1995.

This shift in focus can also be seen when looking at the trends for “theori”, “concept” and “model”. The first two terms are more commonly used to describe symbolic models whereas the latter is favoured by statisticians.

Also interesting is the shift in emphasis from knowledge to data. I guess this can be partially explained by the ever increasing computing power we have available and how inexpensive it is to now store vast amounts of data. Peter Norvig discussed this trend in his seminar he gave a Berkeley late last year.

I’m sure there are plenty more interesting finds to make in the data. If you want to have a dive yourself, you can grab the results as a 75kb comma-separated file here: term_counts.csv. A 32kb file containing the all the raw paper titles can be downloaded here: titles.tar.gz.

Let me know if you find anything interesting.

Scripting and Scraping

As mentioned earlier, all of the data collection and analysis performed here was done using ruby scripts. The ease with which really good libraries such as WWW::Mechanize and stemmer can be installed and quickly put to use is a testament to ruby and worth a final couple of remarks.

For example, have a look at the entire code for the cleaning, stop-word removal and stemming of paper titles:

@terms = title.split(/\W/).collect { |word| word.downcase.strip }
@terms.reject! { |word| word.empty? || STOP_WORDS.include?(word) }
@terms.map! { |word| word.stem }
@terms.uniq!

The only slightly Perl-ish nastiness there is the \W regular expression to split on word boundaries. The rest, in my opinion, is both terse and clear. Hooray for iterators and closures!

The process for getting all of the 1988-2006 paper titles from the DBLP site is as follows:

Navigate to the ICML DBLP site and on each of the links labelled ‘Contents’ see if the link’s target has a 4 digit year in it. If so, create a new conference structure, follow the link and on the resulting page take the text between the ‘:’ and the ‘.’ in each ‘li’ element on the page as the title and add it to the conference.

Thanks to the WWW::Mechanize and hpricot libraries it’s almost longer to write out like that than it is to code:

agent.get(ICML_DBLP).links.text('Contents').each do |link|
  year = /\d{4}/.match(link.href)[0]
  confs << Conference.new(year)

  page = agent.click link
  page.search('//li').each do |li|
    confs.last << $1 if li.inner_text.gsub('\n','') =~ /:([^.]+)\./
  end
end

Once again there’s a bit of ugliness with regular expressions but that’s more or less the price you pay when dealing with text. The rest of the code is there to navigate the DBLP web pages by simulating clicking on links and using XPath-like patterns to find the relevant parts of the resulting HTML documents.

These sort of tools and the level of abstraction languages like ruby and python conceed make me remember why I enjoy programming so much. I can go from a question like, “I wonder what sort of trends there are in ICML titles” to answers in less time than it took me to write this blog post.

My memetic immune system is usually fairly hardy, probably due to prolonged exposure to stupid jokes from books like ”1001 More Jokes for Kids” with their endless variations on the knock-knock joke. However, there’s something particularly insidious about lolcats (and loldogs).

Sure, that’s excruciatingly cute but ultimately easy to resist. There are plenty of silly cute pictures of pets on the internet. It’s when the captions for the cats start borrowing on geek-lore that things get funnier. Observe what happens when a cat meets Street Fighter II or a pug Star Wars:

It just gets stranger. It seems that when a joke like this gains a certain critical mass it starts drawing in and interbreeding with other popular themes. Of course, it doesn’t take long before politics gets involved.Via a great summary of the fad over at Slate magazine I discovered that there are a bunch of people captioning past and present presidents from the US and elsewhere. Fish in a barrel really:

My defences down, I was compelled to add my own parochial riff on this theme making use of a rather disturbing picture I found through Google images.

Poor Big Ted. I wonder which window he had to go through to get himself into this situation? The square one?

Apparently the reviews were some time coming as one of the anonymous reviewers was ill and had only recently recovered. I can happily say that the reviews were worth the 9 month wait as, by and large, they were very positive. The only things I have left to do are: correct 20 small typos, clarify two definitions, use a more relevant citation for one topic, and discuss how my work relates to a method in statistics called “empirical Bayes” - something I had a suspicion was relevant but only really got my head around sometime after I submitted my original draft.

There were a number of other non-essential recommendations in the review which I’ll take into account but I’m pretty confident I can have the important ones knocked over this weekend.

Now, you’ll have to excuse my extreme lack of modesty while I cherry pick some of the very positive feedback I received. I’ve spent a aeon on this one piece of work so I’m going to milk these for all they’re worth:

On the Contributions:

• The thesis is exemplary in the field of ILP since it includes, in lock-step, theory, implementation and experimentation.
• … work that represents significant original contributions to the area of machine learning…
• … the approach provides a firm conceptual basis on which to develop further ideas.
• … the candidate has a clear and deep understanding of the mathematical concepts involved.
• … raises the state of the art in inductive transfer to a new level.
• … the approach and the results presented in this thesis are likely to become reference citations for any further research in this field.

On the Presentation:

• This dissertation is a pleasure to read.
• This thesis extremely well-written. The writing is lucid and yet clear and not over-formalized …
• The overall presentation of the thesis is of a high standard. … The writing is very readable and stands out in comparison with much of the field.
• It has been executed with skill, thoroughness, and completeness which makes this thesis one of the best pieces of graduate work I have seen in the recent years.

One reviewer even noticed the time I spent putting a thesis-long example together to help with the exposition noting that “it’s an excellent and non-trivial presentation tool and the candidate should be lauded for its use” and picked up on the “dash of discrete humour” I scattered through the beast to keep me sane.

Before I put my modesty back in, I’ll just have to finish with a very flattering concluding remark from one review:

To summarize, Mr. Reid’s thesis is an excellent, novel, high quality contribution to Machine Learning. This thesis definitely merits the award of the degree.

Ahhhh, catharsis… the gut-wrenching slog over the last many years is but a dim, dark memory.

Update: I’ve now finished the corrections so, behold: the compleat thesis! (2.3Mb PDF)

Suppose you have a list containing the strings ‘snakes’, ‘eat’, and ‘gems’ and you want to join them together with a spaces between them.

Because I’m familiar with ruby and its the closest reference point I had to python, I expected to join the strings like so:

['snakes', 'eat', 'gems'].join(' ')

This seems natural enough to me since it is the list that is being joined and the space is acting as a modifier of this operation. I was quite surprised when I was told the way to do the same operation in python is:

' '.join(['snakes', 'eat', 'gems'])

A colleague with more snake-wrangling experience than I argued that this is a more natural way to join lists since the join is essentially a string operation and so it’s more natural to think of the list elements as arguments. I was intrigued but sceptical so I decided to see what the good citizens of the web had to say about the matter.

A Temper Flares on Python-Dev

A language cannot live without a community who speak it and it cannot thrive without at least some of those people critically discussing how the language should evolve. Mailing lists are where this sort of discussion usually takes place and, sure enough, Google led me straight to the python-dev mailing list when I searched for a discussion of python’s join method.

Here I found someone called Zack Weinberg asking the same question I had in 2003: “How about seq.join(‘,’) where seq is an instance of a sequence type?” There was even a reply in the same thread:

PLEASE! GET THIS DISCUSSION OFF PYTHON-DEV!

NO MORE COMMENTS ON JOIN()!

—Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

I had read enough about python to know that the author of this response was the inventor of python himself. I nearly fell off my chair! Here was the leader of a large language community shutting down a discussion in all-caps with exclamation marks ending every sentence.

I’ve recently been involved in developing a language and have some appreciation of how many difficult decisions have to be made. Anyone who can develop a language that is as wildly popular as python has my enduring admiration. This is partly the reason I was so shocked to see a response like this.

To be fair, I have no idea what is considered an appropriate topic for python-dev and maybe this question about join was way out of line. Also, after a bit more searching I found a FAQ answer about join that address my and Zack’s question in depth. Asking a question in mailing list that is answered in a FAQ is a definite no-no but so is Guido’s shouting in my opinion.

Arguments and Inverses

I was quite unconvinced by the arguments put forward by the aforementioned FAQ answer in that they basically boiled down to: 1) strings can be Unicode or ASCII and the type of the separator should determine the result of the join, and 2) the split function (the inverse of join) is a method on strings so join should be too.

I find neither of these convincing. The type of the separator can be used to determine the return type of the joined string even if it’s passed in as an argument. Sure, it’s probably easier for the implementers of python to have separate methods on the Unicode and ASCII versions of string than to query the separator’s type when its an argument. The join method will be implemented once but used in thousands of programs. A small bit of ugliness in python’s implementation is surely a small price to pay for a more intuitive interface.

Secondly, inverses should act like inverses. In ruby I can write:

'snakes eat gems'.split(' ').join(' ')
['snakes','eat','gems'].join(' ').split(' ')

and get back the original string or list. In python the equivalent code is:

' '.join('snakes eat gems'.split(' '))
' '.join(['snakes eat gems']).split(' ')

which doesn’t make the inverse relationship between split and join clear at all.

Please keep in mind that the above analysis is based on the very limited experience I’ve had with python so I may be missing some crucial aspect of python that make the defence of ' '.join(list) hold more water. I’d love to hear about it. However, I’m not the only one who thinks join is a wart on a language that is otherwise extremely well thought out.

Developing a language is hard and I don’t think there is a language in existence that gets everything right, mainly because “right” is inherently subjective. My intention in this post was not to come off as a language pedant (even though I may be). I know and use many languages and, depending on the problem being solved, like and dislike them for various reasons. This post came about because I found this little dive into python through the join method and interesting peek into the philosophy and culture of a programming language.

Donald Knuth is one of the giants of computer science, defining both its practice, through books such as his The Art of Computer Programming, and presentation through the typesetting software T_EX. As the name suggests, Selected Papers on Computer Science is a selection of his papers and lectures. The intended audience for this collection is the general scientific or academic community rather than just computer scientists.

The History of Algorithms

The papers I enjoyed the most were historical ones. The earliest paper in the collection is a short note written in 1966 to Communications of the ACM, arguing that the term “algorithm” should be considered as something distinct from “program”. Specifically, a program is an implementation of an algorithm in a particular language. This distinction is important as it defines one of the main objects of study in computer science as something more intrinsic than a program. Although he doesn’t say it explicitly, algorithms are essentially what the Church-Turing thesis attempts to pin down.

In Ancient Babylonian Algorithms Knuth relates some of the work that has been done translating and understanding the early procedures for solving problems of volume and area found on 4000 year-old clay tables from what is now called Iraq. Although the Babylonians didn’t have algebra, their working was presented with specific quantities (in base 60) that epitomised the general procedure.

In Von Neumann’s First Computer Program, Knuth translates and analyses the sorting algorithm Von Neumann wrote for the EDVAC. This behemoth of a machine had 2048 32-bit words of working memory and another 64 words of “high-speed” cache. In a proclamation worthy of Bill Gates (though he denies ever saying “640k should be enough for anyone”), Von Neumann declared that this 8k of memory combined with “the almost unlimited capacity of the magnetic tape … it seems that very few problems would exceed this capacity”.

Twelve years later, at age 19, Knuth fell in love with his first computer. The IBM 650: An Appreciation from the Field is a nostalgic look at the machine to which Knuth dedicated The Art of Computer Programming. Despite the IBM 650 not having much more memory than Von Neumann’s EDVAC, Knuth and his colleagues managed to code the SOAP line of compilers for it.

Theory and Practice

The Theory and Practice series of papers show how much this early, hands-on experience influenced Knuth. Even though his analysis of algorithms - the meat and potatoes of TAOCP - has a strong pure mathematical flavour, he’s not afraid of resorting to clever hacks and approximations to squeeze every last ounce of computation power out of a machine. In his 1989 keynote lecture Theory and Practice, IV, he even urges his audience to get down and dirty with their machines and

make a thorough analysis of everything your computer does during one second of computation.

I’ve spent my fair share of time stepping through code in debuggers and I think it’s good for the computer scientist’s soul, but what Knuth is proposing is seriously hardcore.

What Can Be Automated?

From a philosophical perspective I also enjoyed Knuth’s tribute to George Forsythe, the founder of the Computer Science Division at Standford, pulling in some big names to help him establish the field: Ed Feigenbaum, John McCarthy, Niklaus Wirth, etc.

Importantly, Forsythe managed to beautifully articulate the core question of computer science, arguing

The question “What can be automated?” is one of the most inspiring philosophical and practical questions of contemporary civilization.

I must admit, I experienced one of those heart-stirring moments when that passage leapt from the page and I’ve been rolling around in my mind ever since.

The Verdict

A fascinating personal look at the history and purpose of computer science by one of its pioneers. It’s slightly dry at times but I thoroughly enjoyed it. A must read for anyone who still believes computer science is just a fancy name for programming.

A few years ago, I used to get through around a book or so a fortnight. Most of my reading was done while on public transport or before bed. Last year I was working full-time at a job which I could only get to in a reasonable amount of time by car. (A 90 minute bus ride each way is not reasonable).

On top of that, for the first half of the year, all my time at home was spent finishing my thesis. There’s a lesson in there for all you book-loving PhD students: make sure your thesis is done before taking on full-time work.

As well as those excuses, I think the type of reading I do has also changed quite a lot. When I do have time for reading at home these days I spend much of it reading articles, papers, reference manuals and blogs on the web.

As a result, about the only time I set aside this year to chow through some books was while travelling through Greece, Cornwall and Dublin and when Julieanne and I escaped to the mountains for a weekend to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.

Fiction

I read José Saramago’s Seeing while in Greece and thoroughly enjoyed its satirical portrayal of a city’s non-violent, popular revolution against its paranoid government. Seemingly without any centralised organisation, the citizens of an imaginary Portuguese city strike fear into their overly bureaucratic government by casting blank ballots during an election. The tone of the book becomes dark, political and Kafka-esque when the government flees en-masse and tries to scare the populist into submission by declaring a state of siege and locking down the city.

J. M. Coetzee’s Youth was also quite sombre, following a young and aspiring artist and intellectual escape from his South African home to 1960’s London where he hopes to make his mark as a poet. Instead he finds himself working as a programmer and having unsatisfying affairs, telling himself the whole time that he can only become a “true artist” by first sinking to the depths of despair. For all its depressing content about the trials of growing up an outsider, Youth is beautifully written. I hadn’t read any Coetzee before so had no idea he could write so clearly, simply and insightfully. Highly recommended.

I started Michael Chabon’s Summerland: A Novel while in the Blue Mountains. It didn’t grab me nearly as much as his fabulous Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, maybe because it was a “young adults” novel and focused heavily on baseball and magic. I tried picking up a few more times when I was back at home but ended up giving up on it.

I also had trouble finishing Peter Carey’ Oscar and Lucinda which is surprising because what I read of it was great and I’d really enjoyed many of his earlier works of fiction. I stopped reading this around the same time I was nearing the end of my write up as I could only dip in and out of it. I’ll probably try again when I next have a chance to read for an extended period.

Will Self’s short story collection Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe was more suited to my sporadic reading at that time. I read this at the start of the year and was completely sucked in by it. The collection’s title story pits the psychiatrist Dr. Mukti against his charismatic, successful and manipulative nemesis. Most of the action takes place in Mukti’s increasingly paranoid and over-analytic mind. The story arcs like a train careering off a bridge in slow motion and makes for some of the best black humour I’ve read in a long time.

The rest of the fiction I read last year was of the scientific variety. I polished off Ian Banks’ The Algebraist in two days while holidaying in Crescent Head for the Christmas and New Year break. Like all of his Culture series of books it was a rollicking space opera and great fun but I have trouble distinguishing it from the rest of his work.

In contrast, Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon couldn’t have been more different to Fortress of Solitude, the only other book of his I have read. The latter was a gritty tale of modern day superheros set in 1970’s Brooklyn while Amnesia Moon presents a post-apocalyptic America as a surreal, nightmarish landscape that has fractured into tiny pockets of subculture. The protagonist is known by several names - Moon, Chaos, Everett - depending which town he is passing through during his search to find… something or someone.

Like most dreams, Amnesia Moon doesn’t resolve in any meaningful way, which left me slightly disappointed even though the rest of the ride was compelling. On reflection, however, I can’t see how Lethem might have tied it up without contriving something even less satisfying.

Non-Fiction

My favourite read of 2006 was, surprisingly, a textbook on probability theory. Yes, I realise my fate as a big nerd was sealed with that last sentence but I challenge anyone to find a more fascinating textbook on the subject than Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. In it E. T. Jaynes summarises the Bayesian approach to reasoning with uncertainty, a topic he spent most of his working life investigating. With almost equal parts theory, application, philosophy and opinion, it is eminently rigourous, relevant, rich and readable book. It took me a couple of months to finish which is yet another reason I didn’t get to read as many books as I would have liked.

To go into even half the material covered in this book fully would take several blog post (stay tuned). Briefly though, one of the things that really struck me about Jaynes was his incredibly pragmatic approach to the philosophy of mathematics. When reasoning about infinite series and the like he absolutely requires that the limiting process be clearly articulated in order to avoid many of the strange paradoxes that otherwise arise.

Coming from a computer scientist this made a lot of sense to me. After all, if things aren’t computable what are they? However, my undergrad degree was in pure mathematics so I still have a sweet spot for the reckless throwing about of the infinite that David Foster Wallace writes beautifully about in Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.

With a style all his own and a very large number of footnotes and digressions, Wallace manages to pull together a fascinating history of the infinite that pivots around Georg Cantor’s exposition of he countable and uncountable. Refreshingly, he is able to discuss the subject intelligently without being overly flowery or romantic. Given that he confesses to knowing little about university level mathematics when he started researching the book he does a remarkable job at clearly conveying many of the subtleties of the transfinite.

The other popular science account I read in 2006 was On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. It’s a strange book as it attempts to promote Hawkins’ new ideas while simultaneously popularising them. As Stephen Wolfram proved, this can be a very fraught endeavour. Fortunately, the former Palm CEO manages to discuss his “memory-prediction framework” for intelligence with due deference to other researchers in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. The science was reasonably convincing but the book a little repetitive.

I was keen to read some accessible ethical philosophy last year and so was pointed in the direction of Peter Singer. I was a bit hesitant at first, wasn’t he the guy who wrote Animal Liberation in the 70’s which helped start the group PETA? Expecting polemics, I was surprised to find How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest a very balanced, warm and thoughtful book. Singer’s writing style is engaging and chatty so, after finishing his book, I was left with the sense of having had a friendly discussion about ethics with a wise and friendly scholar.

I received the elegantly designed and comprehensive Warp: Labels Unlimited by Adrian Shaughnessy and editor Rob Young for my birthday and finished it off in no time. If, like me, you like music of the electronic variety then you will have heard of Warp Records, home of Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Autechre, Seefeel, Squarepusher, etc. If not, you should definitely grab a copy of this book and use it to get a better understanding of the history of electronic music coming out of the UK.

One book I was unable to finish was Julian Jaynes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (no relation to E. T. Jaynes as far as I can tell). When I started reading it I was mesmerised by the depth and breadth of Jaynes’ scholarship as he put forward his theory that our consciousness is the vestiges of the gods that used to speak to our ancestors in a kind of schizophrenic mode. Once I had understood his thesis I found the mountains of evidence he provided from ancient literature a bit trying and some of the bows he drew a little too long for my liking.

While also not finished, I’m still working my way through Remembering the Kanji by James W. Heisig as part of my resolution to learn Japanese. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add it to my list of completed books next year. Or maybe the year after.

Credits: Book stack image courtesy of brokenarts on stock.xchng.

I don’t normally make resolutions, let alone post them publicly. This year - the first since submitting my thesis - I thought I’d set myself some tangible tasks to knock off before the start of 2008.

Rather than post all the usual, wishy-washy things I half-heartedly convince myself I will do after my third champagne (“eat better”, “get fit”, “fix my finances”, etc.) I thought I’d try to pin down some measurable, either-I-have-or-haven’t goals for 2007. It’s time to get scientific people!

That’s not to say I’m going to ignore the other types of resolution and become a broke, junk-food eating slob. I just thought it would be fun to also have some things that I can actually finish and draw a big, red tick next to at the close of 2007.

So, there are 52 weekends left in the year, what am I going to do with them?

Blog Regularly

If all goes well, I’d like to post at least 12 substantial blog entries this year. By substantial, I mean something that takes me longer than a couple of hours to organise, research and write.

There are a number of topics I’ve be reading about lately that I’d like to spend time really thinking about. I find writing short pieces for public consumption a good way to pin down ideas that would otherwise bounce around in my head before being muscled out by the next Really Cool Thought. I expect that the more I jot them down the easier it will become. Hopefully, as a result, I’ll be able to make a habit of thinking more clearly about things.

I’ve been enjoying discovering writing for fun again post-thesis so I’m hoping this resolution won’t be too difficult to keep, especially considering I only have to average one a month. I’ll even let myself count this one if the going gets tough towards the end of the year.

Sit the JLPT

Thanks to some free lessons through work my interest in learning japanese was re-ignited last year. I managed to continue learning kanji once the course finished but haven’t really increased my vocabulary any since then.

Things are looking up for this year though since Julieanne’s Christmas present to me was some lessons at UNSW’s Language Institute. Emboldened by this I’ve decided that I’m going to sit the Japanese Language Proficiency Test that is held in December of each year.

Juggle Five Balls

I started juggling about nine years ago. Learning the basic three-ball cascade took all of a few days. I was pretty content with that for many years before discovering the internet juggling database, it’s wiki and the absolutely enormous number of tricks I was missing out on.

Through that site I also found the sydney jugglers club which I attended for a while in 2003/2004. The people there were great and through them I started learning siteswap which let me pick up heaps of new three-ball tricks and got my four-ball juggle pretty solid.

The gap between four- and five-ball juggling, however, is huge. I’ve been trying to get a simple five-ball cascade down pat for the last few years and have only made small amounts of progress.

This year, the plan is to put in some solid practice so I am able to make 30 throws fairly consistently - let’s say within any three attempts. I’ll post a video once I can do it.

Enter the 2007 IF Competition

For the last thirteen years an annual interactive fiction competition has been run by fans of the text adventures of yore (read: the 1980’s). This genre of computer game included commercial and critical hits such as Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy yet all but disappeared with the advent of increasingly powerful graphics cards.

The demise of Infocom and other commercial publishing houses (as told in Nick Montfort’s “Twisty Little Passages”) left behind a discerning yet prolific band of enthusiasts. Over the years they have built a thriving community, some great tools and a few outstanding pieces of work. I’ve played a number of these recently and (perhaps foolhardily) thought, “I could have a crack at that”.

I figured out a basic structure and a few scenes for a story of my own towards the end of last year and started messing around with Inform7. So, modulo my foolhardiness, I hope to enter a short piece in this year’s competition.

Release an Album

One of the hardest things I had to give up during the thesis crunch of 2005/2006 was writing and playing music. Writing music was made even tricker with my switch to a Mac at the end of 2004 and the giving up of my main PC-only tools for composition: ACID Pro and Audiomulch (Please port this Ross!).

Fortunately, I was very lucky to receive a copy of Ableton’s most excellent Live program for my birthday last year. After much playing around with it over the Christmas break I’m completely enamoured of it and have already recorded some short sketches that may have some potential. To make things easier I might even try to get myself a good mic and a cheap MIDI controller later this year.

To ensure I don’t cheat and release a collection of jingles I’m going to ask that my album be at least 8 tracks long and each track be at least 3 minutes long. Oh, and no 4’33” conceptual trickery either!

Overcommitted, moi?

Looking over what I’ve just written I think I’ve set myself up for a busy year. Oh well, ad astra per aspera and all that. At least I won’t be able to complain about being bored!

Particularly fascinating is the section that ranks the search phrases led people to your site. Surprisingly, the phrase “edible turkey” tops the list with similar variants making up the bulk of the rest.

The search engines are directing people this page of my travel blog which Julieanne wrote after sampling some of the wonderful cuisine on offer in Turkey. My guess is that people are using the qualifier “edible” to distinguish the country from the food. Unfortunately for those discerning searchers, Julieanne decided to call her post about the country and its food “Edible Turkey”.

Why Me?

I’ll be brutally honest: my site gets very little traffic. It’s a semi-stagnant personal site in the backwaters of the blogosphere where only my close friends bother to paddle (hi guys!). However, at the time of writing, the page in question appears 8th on Google when searching for that query.

The only explanation I can think of is that “edible turkey” is something like a Googlewhack - a combination of two terms for which there is only a single page indexed by Google. According to Google, searching for “turkey” alone gives about 204 million hits whereas searching for “edible” alone gives about 16 million. Pages containing both number around 1 million.

The only remaining question is why are there so many people searching for turkeys of the edible variety. As I don’t live in the US, it took me a little while to realise that the sudden interest was due to Thanksgiving. To test this theory I thought I’d get myself some more stats.

Turkey Trends

One of the cool search toys that you can find over at Google Labs is their trend visualisation tools. Whack in a search term and you can see how the number of people search for that term has changed over time. If I had thought to use this when I was originally puzzled about the traffic to my site I would have had the mystery solved in seconds.

Observe! The trend for “turkey”:

Even though there is no disambiguation between Turkey-the-country and turkey-the-food in the graph the huge spikes every year around November make it pretty obvious that most searchers want the food. (The labels on the graph are news events Google has correlated with spikes which you can see by clicking on the image).

The smaller spike just before Christmas is most likely also for turkey-the-food. Even when the graph is restricted to searchs from Australia - the land of the 35°C festive season - you can see a growing interest in the bird towards the end of the year:

The large spike shown above around the middle of 2006 was very likely due to the bomb blasts in Turkey towards the end of August. Interestingly, that event barely rates a mention in the first, world-wide graph. A graph of for the US only shows the same lack of interest:

My guess is that the US search results make up the bulk of the world-wide results (it’s hard to tell because those trend graphs have no absolute numbers). Since the interest in turkey-the-food is so large in November it swamps any interest there may have been in the blasts. I’d be surprised if there was a genuine lack of American interest in the Turkey blasts given their sensitivity to terrorism of late.

Recipes for Disaster

I’m a computer scientist by training so I’ve got a rough idea how Google and other search engines rank pages. Enough to know that by writing including many turkey-food related keywords such as “basting”, “carving”, “stuffing”, “cooking”, etc I’m actually probably increasing this site’s search relevance when it comes to that particular cuisine. That in turn may mean that people looking for Thanksgiving recipes may unwittingly find my inane musings on search statistics.

Come to think of it, including the word “turkey” in this post’s title probably doesn’t help the situation much either.

So, for all of you who are genuinely looking for turkey recipes I would like to make amends, especially considering that you’ve read all the way to the end.

I think you may be looking for this.

Sydney University recently won a bid to host a new US Studies Centre that aims to be “Australia’s leading centre for research into American political, economic and cultural issues”. A paranoid opinion piece by Gerard Henderson in today’s Sydney Morning Herald uses some shady rhetoric and statistics to warn that it may be in danger of being overrun by lefties.

Writing opinion pieces on a regular basis must get difficult. Just imagine: the drum you continually beat only plays one political tune and regardless of the topic under discussion you’ve got to ensure you get a few good thumps in. I’m convinced Henderson’s conservative drum is used by the Sydney Morning Herald to rile up left-leaning readers like myself and make sure the letters’ page never runs dry.

To keep my blood pressure low over breakfast I usually ignore his articles but I had to laugh at the following totally unconvincing arguments he put forward to warn us of how “intellectual life in Australia is dominated by the left wing”.

Exhibit A:

As the 2006 Lowy Institute poll showed, 42 per cent of Australians regard the alliance as “very important” to security. Twenty-eight per cent regard it as “fairly important”, with 22 per cent believing it is “somewhat important”.

This leaves just under 10 per cent maintaining that the alliance is “not at all important” - about the vote of the Greens.

Henderson is trying to suggest that the Greens voters are entirely responsible for the “not at all important” responses in the Lowy Institutes’ poll. Those dastardly Greens, why oh why do they hate America so?

Of course, to be convinced by Henderson’s suggestion you must believe the following syllogism “10% of X is A, 10% of X is B, therefore B causes A”. To see through this nonsense you can simply substitute the phrase “about the vote of the Greens” for any other group that makes up around 10% of the population, say left-handed males or female Anglicans.

He goes on to scare us of the potential dangers of losing the new centre to the lefties in Exhibit B:

The evidence suggests opposition to the alliance is significantly higher among academics, artists, commentators and professionals than it is within the general population. Yet it will be from this group the centre will recruit its staff.

Good point, Gerard. To make sure that we do not inadvertently hire applicants for a US Studies Centre from a pool of people with anti-American sentiments we should disallow people from all those groups you just mentioned. We especially don’t want those pesky academics and professionals as staff in a $25 million centre that hosted by a university. Best ensure we only hire unprofessional lay-people instead.

Perhaps that’s the recruitment policy Henderson uses at his own think tank?

My interest in the KLF had been growing again recently thanks to a number of coincidences. I also had to share some of the sheer audacity of some their exploits: some of their most (in)famous being burning £1 million and making a movie of it, firing blanks from an AK-47 over the crowd at their British Music Awards show and latter reworking one of their singles with Tammy Wynette.

Back to Transcentral

At school, I never used to be interested in history very much. I’d scrape through the compulsory subjects at high school and avoided them as soon as I was allowed to select my own electives. By the time I finished my maths degree at university I was fascinated by history. What changed? I simply figured out that history becomes a lot more interesting when you are actually interested in the subject matter. History for history’s sake just doesn’t do it for me.

I learned a lot about mathematics and music during my undergraduate years and the more I learned the more I found myself interested in their histories. In 2001 I bought a book called The Ambient Century which traces prominent groups and ideas that fall loosely under the banner of “ambient music”. It’s a fantastic read and I highly recommend it if you’re interested in the genre. Since 2001, I’ve been periodically diving into it to dig out artists or find out more about those I’ve already listened too.

This round of enthusiasm for the history of the KLF was set off when one of my colleagues said that the KLF’s had planned to make The Black Room, revisiting The White Room with the help of a thrash-metal band. When I turned to Wikipedia to check whether this was the case (yep, it’s true) I found a trove of extremely well-written and well-referenced articles that form the KLF WikiProject.

Here’s a rough overview of some of the more bizarre things “King Boy D” and “Rockman Rock” have done in their many and various guises, heavily cribbed from the project’s articles.

Doctorin’ the Timeline

In 1987, as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAMs) - a name derived from the Illuminatus! books - Drummond and Cauty release What the Fuck is Going On?. This album was one of the first to make heavy use of unauthorised samples from contemporary musicians. Unsurprisingly, this got them in legal trouble, especially with ABBA for their use of Dancing Queen, leading them to burn or throw into the North Sea all the remaining copies of the album.

The first I heard of their work was a year later when they released Doctorin’ the Tardis as the Timelords. You remember this one: “Doctor Whooooo, hey! the tardis, Doctor Whoooo”.

I was an impressionable, newly minted teenager at the time, indiscriminantly taping all the junk I could find from the various Top 40 programs on the radio. I remember being delighted by Doctorin’ the Tardis as I hadn’t (knowingly) heard any other music that deliberately referenced other pop artefacts. Stutter Rap was released the same year but I had no idea who the Beastie Boys were at the time. Damn those “Explicit Lyrics” stickers!

I was in year 11 at high-school when The White Room was released. This album effortlessly shifts from “stadium house” tracks such as 3AM Eternal to the low-key ballad Build a Fire. The former is a rave-inspired rap and pop-dance blend that is backed by samples of cheering crowds lifted from U2’s Rattle and Hum. The latter features chilled pedal steel guitar and wistfully spoken lyrics.

I had tried tracking down The White Room a couple of years ago but had no luck. I couldn’t find it in record stores, online stores or bargain bins anywhere. Why? Because once Drummond and Cauty disbanded the KLF they deleted its entire back-catalogue!

After the Fire

Riding the success of “The White Room”, the KLF did the only logical thing for a band that defies logic: they announced their retirement after their show at the British Music Awards. According to Select Magazine this was

the last grand gesture, the most heroic act of public self destruction in the history of pop. And it’s also Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s final extravagant howl of self disgust, defiance and contempt for a music world gone foul and corrupt

Of course, they didn’t entirely retire. The KLF - now as the K Foundation - appeared again on my radar just before the turn of the millennium (well, in 1999 anyway) with an album and concept entitled ***k the Millennium.

They had been around under this new guise since 1993, wreaking havoc with the art world by setting up their own art prize - The K Foundation Art Award - for the “worst artist of the year”. Humorously, the K Foundation award had exactly the same shortlist as the Turner Prize for best British artist and, to really put the winner of both prizes, Rachel Whiteread, on the spot the K Foundation made their prize worth twice as much as the £20,000 Turner.

Not content to give ungrateful artists large sums of money attached to dubious honours, they tried several other audacious artistic experiments with money. Their most notorious made clear their transition away from the KLF by burning what was left of their proceedings - a total of £1,000,000 - on a small island off the mainland. This bizarre feat also got them in the record book at the time for largest bank withdrawal.

Before it was burnt the million quid had toured at some private exhibitions as art. The first - Nailed To A Wall - was simply 20,000 £50 notes nailed to a wall. Later, the money appeared in bins or laid on tables. They unsuccessfully tried to auction that work and six others involving cash in their Money: A Major Body of Cash collection. The million pound Nailed To had a reserve price of £500,000 and its catalogue entry noted that

Over the years the face value will be eroded by inflation, while the artistic value will rise and rise. The precise point at which the artistic value will overtake the face value is unknown. Deconstruct the work now and you double your money. Hang it on a wall and watch the face value erode, the market value fluctuate, and the artistic value soar. The choice is yours.

Justified or Insane?

I’ve recounted these anecdotes to several friends and relatives. Reactions have been variations on “really?”, “why didn’t they just give it to charity?” and “that’s stupid”. I’ve had the same thoughts myself but I also can’t help pondering these reactions and why people are so surprised or appalled. Sure, it was a lot of money to destroy but why should there be a moral imperative for them to “do something useful with it”?

The manner in which they earned the money was as equally frivolous as how they destroyed it. Why is a large number of people spending $30 on a KLF album a reasonable use of money but using the same money to generate heat, light and controversy not? It was the labour and ideas of Drummond and Cauty that brought the money in and, if money is just fiat for that labour why can’t they choose to effectively waste their own time and energy?

Art or madness? The choice is yours.

To put the strange event in a bit more context, I had just returned home from a great dinner with Julieanne at Blancmange, a new and very tasty restaurant in Petersham. It was still fairly early so I decided to check my email only to find this:

Dear FutureMe,

Happy 30th Birthday!

Here’s hoping you finally got that thesis done. Me (June 2005) is currently having a hard time staying focused and writing this is yet another form of procrastination. Even in the face of all these obstacles I’m placing in my own way, I hope that I/You have completed the damn thing and that, at the very least, the reviewers are reading over it.

If this is the case, I hope life on the other side of the tunnel is fantastic!

I was a little tipsy when I first read it and so had to give it a few more scans before I convinced myself that I really had sent myself a timed email from 2005.

I did this using FutureMe, a free service which allows you to write an email to someone but not have it sent until some time in the future. It’s a really simple idea that obviously appealed to the me of June 2005 and pleasantly surprised the me of October 2006.

Fortunately, I have finished the damn thing and it is currently with the reviewers. I think my reaction would have left me feeling very differently if I was still struggling away at it. Now all I need is some way to tell PastMe that it’s all going to be okay, and that I needn’t worry so much. Life is pretty fantastic out this side of the tunnel.

Oh, and that I’m actually 31, not 30, here in October 2006. If I can’t even get my own future birthday right when I’m 29 what hope do I have now?

Once I’d finished writing the email I though it would make a good blog post so, with a little cutting and pasting, here’s a little trip through my Applications folder…

Aqua and Mercury

Before you do anything else, install Quicksilver and learn how to use it.

No, really, do it now. I’ll wait… Done? Good. You can thank me for it later.

When I started using my Mac I really hated the Dock and the apparent lack of keyboard only control compared to PCs and Linux machines. With Quicksilver I can do more, faster without a mouse on a Mac. If, on the very rare occasion that Quicksilver crashes, I get quite disoriented.

What? Why can’t I start Safari? I’m pressing Ctrl-Space and typing S-A-F… Oh, Quicksilver’s not on. I know, I’ll just hit Ctrl-Space and type Q-U-I… Oh. Damn. How do I open a Finder window again?

To go even more mouse-free you can also set up your keyboard preferences to access any menu item by hitting Ctrl-F2 then typing the name of the menu you want to select. Once you get the hang of it it’s faster than the Window’s way: Alt + … look for the underlined letter… + etc.

Of course, all this pounding of the keyboard means a higher chance of RSI, so you should also get Anti-RSI. It’s a elegant app to make sure you take a break every now and then. My shoulders and wrists are eternally grateful…

It’s Academic

If you do any kind of academic research, your first stop should be BibDesk. This is a free and really, really well-made application for managing your references. It’s written by academics for academics and helps manage that growing collection of papers you might read one day. Possibly my favourite feature is the ability to drop PDF copies of papers onto an reference in BibDesk and have it automagically named and filed away using a directory structure and naming convention of my choosing.

BibDesk is also very extendible. So much so that I even wrote a script that lets it play nice with Aqua LyX which is worth getting too if you need to write anything in LaTeX. This allowed me to select one or more references in BibDesk and have them pushed as citations into my LyX document.

I basically lived in the above two applications in the final days of my PhD write-up. Two other useful applications were the R language and editor for statistical analysis and graph plotting and OmniGraffle for diagrams. Both do high-quality PDF output which works seamlessly with LyX.

Workin’ on the Web

With all my post-thesis free time these days I’ve been playing around with some web design and development and generally trying to write more.

Up until recently, I used to use SubEthaEdit for text editing and programming. However, they no longer release a free version so I decided to shell out and buy TextMate. It’s fantastic. If you asked me a couple of years ago if I’d feel happy paying for a text editor I would have laughed and kept banging away in Emacs.

I believe the writers of TextMate were also big Emacs fans but hated the amount of cruft it had accumulated so wrote their own, aiming for it to be as powerful and extendable but also very simple and Mac-like. They did a great job. It’s got templates, “snippets” (code-completion), project management, syntax highlighting for everything and, to top it all off, it’s scriptable with ruby!

Keeping a web site synchronised between your local development machine and a remote host can be a real pain. In the past I’ve tried rolling my solutions from the command-line with rsync and unison but, well, it’s a pain. Nowadays, I use the formidable Transmit. It’s simple yet powerful, slick yet solid, sexy yet… a piece of software. Ahem.

Tools of the System

No developer’s arsenal is complete without a good terminal program and backup routine.

For the first of these I use iTerm. Tabbed terminals, bookmarks for your favourite commands (think SSH commands), and plenty of configuration options all make it a good, free replacement for the standard Terminal application that comes with OS X.

For backups, I used to use Synk which was great for regular backups of my thesis to my keydrive. However, for larger backups to an external hard drive I use SuperDuper!. (Yes, that exclamation mark is part of its name).

Make Words Not Code

I’ll sometimes take time out from hacking and try to journal a little to reflect a bit. For this sort of writing I’ve found Journler to be a great application. It’s free, integrates well with all the Mac iLife stuff, plays well with the MetaWeblog API (so you can blog from it) and offers tagging, encryption and password protection for your entries.

I’ve also recently had an idea for a piece of interactive fiction I’d like to write. I had planned to try to enter it in this year’s competition but I gravely underestimated just how complicated a task it can be (especially when you’re on holiday). Surprisingly, when it comes to languages to write IF in there’s quite a lot of choice. My favourite at present - mainly due to its excellent documentation and slick development environment - is the Inform 7 IDE.

Music Machine

My latest and greatest addition to my Applications folder is Live. I kinda, sorta, accidently guessed what I was getting for my birthday this year and got this “sound compositing tool” a week before my actual birthday.

The scare quotes in the previous sentence are there because I’m not quite sure how to sum up a piece of software that lets you arrange pieces of music down to the millisecond and then also let you to drop in clips, edit effect parameters and record new tracks over the top. It’s all very exciting.

I’ll probably post more about Live as I figure out how to use it. Expect to see some more tracks appear in my music section at a later date.

Behold! The top ten shell commands by frequency from my last 500 commands in Bash:

mreid@Fuji ~
$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10 
  91 ls
  72 more
  66 cd
  32 yap
  28 twl
  18 see
  14 vi
  13 cp
  12 diff
  11 mysql                                                                                              

The first three are unsurprising: peeking into directories, reading text files and moving around. (The command more is actually an alias to less - easier than retraining muscle memory).

The command yap starts up Yap prolog. The language used to write the majority of the code for my recently submitted PhD thesis. The other unusual one is twl, another alias, this time to ssh into the server that hosts this blog.

The commands see and vi are both text editors. I’m by no means a vi expert but I know enough to make it useful for quick edits of .htaccess files, jotting notes and editing small scripts.

The other editor command invokes SubEthaEdit, a solid Mac-only text editor with all the essentials (syntax highlighting, browser integration, etc) that also allows multiple people to edit a file simultaneously. They recently jacked up the price from $0 to US$35 so I switched to TextMate. If you’re going to pay money for an editor it may as well be a great one. This should mean the command mate will slip into the top ten in the near future.

Finally, the mysql entry belies my recent messing around with web applications and frameworks which require the MySQL database (e.g., ZenPhoto and Ruby on Rails).

I first studied Japanese in junior high school for three years. At the end of that time I could read and write [kana] (hiragana and katakana) and around 40 kanji. Now, 16 years and two trips to Japan later… I’m pretty much at the same level, even though I’ve taken several short courses in the interim. My broader understanding of the language has improved but my speaking, writing and reading are more or less where they were in high school.

As I learn more about the language I’m convinced that Japanese is the English of Asia. Not so much for its ubiquity in the region but rather for its tendency to be a linguistic bower-bird. Like English, Japanese happily assimilates and mutates foreign words with little regard for consistency. This makes it endlessly fascinating but also very difficult.

Fortunately, I’m currently working in Sydney at a Japanese owned company that offers free language classes. Through these classes I met a number of collegues who are also studying Japanese and who have managed to get a lot further with it than I have. One of the best tips they gave me was putting me onto James W. Heisig’s book “Remembering the Kanji”.

Remembering the Kanji

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that the most daunting aspect of learning Japanese is its written form. All Western languages I can think of use a small alphabet of 20 to 30-odd characters that are composed sequentially to indicate how a word is to be pronounced. In constrast, the Japanese use over 2000 ideograms borrowed from Chinese, each representing a different concept. Learning to recognise the concept each of these complicated little pictures (some involving 20 or more strokes) is the key to reading Japanese.

The main “trick” to Heisig’s book “Reviewing the Kanji (Vol. I)” is a simple one: separate the learning of the meaning of the kanji from their pronounciation (which, from my limited understanding, is as bad as English). The meaning of each kanji is remembered through small stories which link the component meanings to the composed. For example, the kanji for “sun” (日) and “eye” (目) are combined to form “risk” (冒) through the story “looking at the sun with the naked eye is a risk”. It’s like the way complicated English words (e.g., “mankind”) derive their meaning from their parts (e.g., “mank” and “ind” - apologies to Steven Wright).

While the stories can get pretty tenuous - a magic wand on top of a sunflower is “eminent” - it’s surprising how rapidily the associations can form in your mind. Using this “build your own etymology” approach I’m picking up more new kanji faster than I thought possible. In the last couple of weeks I’ve probably spent around 3 to 4 hours studying the book and can safely say I’ve (re-)remembered more than 50 kanji.

The book has an immensely useful and beautifully designed sister site called Reviewing the Kanji. Each kanji in the book has a “frame number” which used for cross-referencing. As you learn new kanji you enter their frame number into the site and it creates a virtual flashcard for you. When you’re ready to test yourself the site flashes the meaning of randomly selected cards. Once you think you have written the corresponding kanji correctly you hit the space bar to check your answer. If you get it wrong the card is put aside and you can later add a story to help you remember it better. Correctly remembering a kanji moves it to the next “box” and schedules it for later review in a system that encourages long-term retention. As an extra bonus, the site has a strong community focus, allowing its hundreds of users to share kanji stories and discuss tips in its forums.

Japanese and the Mac

As you may have noticed, I’ve also discovered how to set up computer to accept Japanese input. The “International” part of OS X’s System Preferences comes with a lot of support for non-English languages. To set up my machine for Japanese input I simply went to the Input Menu tab and checked the Hiragana and Katakana boxes under the Kotoeri group as well as the “Show input menu in menu bar” option at the bottom of the window. This last option displays a small icon in the menu bar which, when selected drops down a list of input modes including Hiragana, Katakana and whatever your default language is (in my case, Australian).

Once in Hiragana input mode I simply start writing Japanese words on a standard keyboard in romaji (e.g., “watashi”) and it gets converted as you type into hiragana (e.g., わたし). Words are underlined as you write them and at any point you can press the down arrow to display a list of kanji that are pronounced the same way (e.g., 私). It’s just like predictive text for mobiles but much less annoying. As an extra bonus, pressing “Apple-Space” switches between the last two input modes you’ve used (e.g., Hiragana and Australian).

私の名まえはマークです。日本語べんきょをします。

There’s nothing quite like sliding down a mountain at speed, effortlessly leaning into your toe-side edge and watching the world pull away to the left…

Going to the snow causes people to do extreme things. It might be the fact that it’s seasonal, making a snow trip an annual event. It could be the high cost of renting gear and accomodation on top of petrol and the on-snow premium that pushes you to make the most of it all. The excitement and anticipation of the snow “fix” also contributes to the madness of waking up at 4am on Friday morning, scoffing down breakfast, throwing everything in the car and heading South amidst heavy fog.

Out of the Stables…

One significant difference between this trip and all previous ones is that we stayed on snow this time. Sure, it’s a bit more expensive but being able to wake up in the morning, grab your gear and be in line for the first lifts of the day is fantastic.

We stayed at The Stables in the Perisher village. It was a very comfortable, fully self-contained unit that slept four. Being able to run away from the crowds at lunch and make our own lunch was great. There’s only so much overpriced pizza and kebab one can (afford to) eat. It also beats having to drive up from Jindabyne to catch the Ski Tube each morning as I’ve done in the past.

…And onto the snow

We managed to get on snow at 10:30am, after picking up our rental gear and checking in. We spent most of the first day finding out feet on the runs on Front Valley Perisher. It was a gorgeous blue sky day and there was still some cover from the snowfalls earier in the week.

Once Dave, J and Alex felt a bit more comfortable we headed up to the top of the Front Valley quad chair and did some of the easier runs down from there. The 4am start caught up with us by the end of the day and we slept very well.

We headed over to Blue Cow first thing on Saturday and caught some fantastic runs down “Zali’s”. Unfortunately, a lot of my favourite runs at Blue Cow (“Excelerator”, “Rollercoaster” and “Outer Limits”) were not open since the Ridge chair at Blue Cow was closed.

We eventually headed back over to Perisher by taking the Pleasant Valley Quad up to the top of Blue Cow and traversing over and down into Pretty Valley (who chooses these names? Mr & Mrs. Very Nice People?). We found some very good snow amongst the trees by staying high up on that run.

The Clouds Bringeth and the Wind Taketh Away

We were pretty hopeful about Sunday given the snowfall that started overnight and continued into the morning. Unfortunately, the wind that brought the snow in also blew most of it away, leaving a hard icy base to contend with and many lifts closed.

We were going to give up early but managed to find a couple of good runs amongst the trees again. Mt. Perisher also had some good patches down the Towers run but the at top of the lifts there was bitterly cold. The ice, wind and lack of visibility explained the “No Beginners, No Intermediates” sign at the bottom of the lifts. Dave, Alex and I did a few runs there anyway while J stayed at Front Valley.

At lunch, we decided to call it a day, packed up and headed out. Exhausted, but in a good way.