I'm in an Iron Blogger "competition" and per the rules I have to update the blog once a week. I've been a bit lax, so I've dug this up from my collection of articles I wrote for my now famously vaporware newsletter (vol 2 will come and the meek shall inherit). Enjoy!

Hanzi Smatter¹ is great, but sometimes you don't want to rely on a random blog to translate your friends' crappy tattoos. Or maybe you wanna know what that anime's title REALLY means. Wonder no more! For a history lesson as well as a lot of information I'm just going to skip that could be important for translating larger texts (such as reading direction), there are links at the bottom of this section. For simplicity's sake I'm going to refer to all these characters as Hanzi² (Kanji³ being the Japanese pronunciation of the same characters). There are also a lot of nuances to the radicals, their ordering, and non-radical elements of these characters that I'm gonna ignore for the same of simplicity.

The key to being able to decipher these characters is understanding how they are constructed. Although some look quite complex and monolithic, all Hanzi are constructed from building blocks called radicals⁴. Each radical consists of a particular number of strokes required to draw it and Chinese dictionaries are usually ordered by the increasing number of strokes (there are several other orderings, including ones based on semantic categorization, a tradition descended from the ancient Chinese dictionary the Erya). Computerized radical-based dictionaries offer significantly faster lookups, because you can drill-down to the characters you mean quite quickly.

1. Go to http://www.cojak.org. There are other Hanzi/Kanji dictionaries out there, but that one's decent and pretty
2. Try and identify a simple "monolithic" structure within the character, and count its number of strokes. Until you become more familiar with the radicals you may miscount, though thankfuly the dictionary's interface lets you just find the radical that looks most similar. The location of the radical within the character varies, it's meant to represent the core "semantic" aspect of the word, but that isn't universally true.
3. Click on that radical!
4. Now you will be presented with choices of embellishments upon that radical, again ordered by number of strokes. Your character should be amongst the list.
5. Now you will see the definition of that character. Below you may see a list of words that begin with that character, but are made up of multiple ones. If the character you are trying to translate is within a longer text, see if the adjacent characters don't match those in the list, because words can be made up of multiple characters
6. Voila! With a little bit of pattern recognition, you've now got the tools to be translating most Hanzi without much difficulty.

Almost underwhelming isn't it? Unfamiliar things can often seem daunting, especially foreign languages and writing systems. Even a little bit of knowledge, however, can go a long way towards demistifying large swathes of territory! One weekend I was waiting for a train at the Mountain View Caltrain station, when an elderly Chinese couple began speaking at me in animated Mandarin and gesturing at the ticket machine. I tried to help them buy tickets, but they waved me away. I don't speak any Chinese, but I am familiar with various cultural elements such as Laozi⁵ (a.k.a Lao-Tzu, etc.) father of Taoism whose name simply means "old master". As the woman spoke to me, I noticed the word "lao" coming up multiple times. I asked "lao?", to which she nodded vigorously and repeated "lao! lao!". So, I helped them get the Senior-priced tickets on the machine and they left happily.

Without resorting to universal hand gestures, the cross-linguistic issues were resolved! The important thing is to always try and apply even tiny bits of pattern recognition, you never know when it will be quite helpful.

Notes & References:
¹ Hanzi Smatter
² Hanzi - Wikipedia
³ Kanji - Wikipedia
⁴ Radical (Chinese Character) - Wikipedia
⁵ Laozi - Wikipedia

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I recently read a comment on a Hacker News post that really struck a chord with me. To summarize, schools try to cram mastery into a particular allotment of time, instead of letting students work as long as they need to until mastery. In a system without this restriction "high aptitude" children would be able to reach advanced subjects without having to do it externally, and receive the support and structure which is the whole point of formal schooling. Simultaneously "low aptitude" children wouldn't be pressured and rushed. Those who have different learning modalities and would otherwise slip through the cracks would have the time to figure this out before being spit out of the school system feeling bad about themselves and not having found their optimal learning methodology.

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If he's still alive, a single teeny tiny tape sent to Al Jazeera would utterly destroy whatever credibility the US maintains in the world's eyes. There is no way the US government would risk such an embarrassment. Thus, I conclude that the kill must be genuine. I wouldn't put it past the US government to fabricate evidence, but in this case there is too much to lose.

Additionally, I think the burial at sea (but with Muslim rites) is just disrespectful enough while not being insulting to Muslims. It also prevents any sort of pilgrimage site from being created. Bin Laden would not become a Shahid.

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Atlas Shrugged, it seems most folks either love it or hate it. Except there's a secret underground of folks who follow a golden middle path. Those who can't stand Ayn Rand will decry you as a heartless bastard who couldn't tell good literature from a boiled sock. While those who love the book see your slightest disdain for either its literary stature or its message as weak-willed bleeding-hearted drivel.

In reality, Atlas Shrugged is a passably written but powerful polemic. Rand could out-write Dan Brown on a good day, and maybe stand up next to James Patterson but even Stephen King is rather far ahead. However, what she wrote has a strong impact on many people and dismissing it as nothing but fodder for egotists is willfully ignorant.

In my youth Atlas Shrugged was helpful in presenting an individualistic alternative that for whatever reason I wasn't exposed to. For many who grow up with ideals such as pulling yourself up by your bootstraps as cliched caricatures the book offers nothing but more of the same. Myself, I've always leaned towards approving of such things but before reading Atlas Shrugged in high school there was never a crystallized idea that this was a path one might follow. That is, although I thought I followed a meritocratic ideal I had always pictured it as a sort of technocracy instead of the more distributed ad-hoc system where your value to others is measured directly by them and not some external agency. Atlas Shrugged really opened my eyes not just to how I could be appreciated but how I should appreciate others--directly, personally, and for the sake of their own labors.

However, I was mature enough to quickly abandon the book's (over-)simplifications, straw men, and other problems. Holding Rand's improbable men of marble in ultimate regard is pretending much of what makes us human doesn't exist. The book's lessons are reacting to a context where the negative extremes it riles against are reality--e.g. the Russia Ayn Rand escaped. Its ideas are not templates for direct realization, for they are just as extreme and unreasonable.

We tend to assume that just because we may not appreicate someone else's endeavors they are somehow willfully blind. Paradoxical as it may seem Atlas Shrugged helped me find a new sort of compassion--most people see themselves as striving towards a personal ideal of some sort, not as corrupt goblins.

Just because you may see Atlas Shrugged as an extreme part of a view you consider prevalent, consider that it may be a shining beacon for those on the other side. It can also be a bible for zealots who take its words literally and can find no flaws in its stilted prose. So, let's not dismiss this important work but nor should we revere it.

(Oh and I saw the trailer for the movie and it was incredibly painful. Megan McArdle compared the movie to Tommy Wiseau's The Room so I guess I'll wait for the Rifftrax!)

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Much of the early optimism about Artificial Intelligence was crushed by what is now called Moravec's Paradox: it turns out that it's often substantially harder to replicate the lower-level sensorimotor skills of humans and animals than higher reasoning tasks. Students of embodied cognition see intelligence arising from a necessary interplay with our senses taking this even further, higher-order theories of consciousness--which I've recently become a fan of--have consciousness as a higher order layering on top of mere intelligence. Thus, we're adding a few more layers to the layer cake of supervenience (similar to what scientists often call "emergence", not used in Philosophy that way because the term has been claimed by a distinct usage).

I would love to see more work on complete end-to-end AI systems that have increasingly deeper levels of feedback. That's the only we'll see better AI. That and neural modelling which is getting reeeal interesting. I think I'll start posting links to some fun papers soon.

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As far as I know Christian Louboutin--maker of the sexiest heels--has never done a reverse heel. I came up with reverse heels totally independently a couple of weeks ago while contemplating crazy things to do to women's shoes. Alas, I found out I was soundly beaten to this concept by others and several versions of it have already been made. Basically, a reverse heel is a heel that juts horizontally towards the back from the front part of the shoe rather than straight down from the heel.

So, I decided to mock up what a Louboutin might look like with a reverse heel, whilst maintaining its original lines, curves, and sexy look. It turned out... ok. I think with some tweaking it could turn out to look quite nicely! In particular I would elongate the support past the heel, while making it thinner and more deadly--Louboutin shoes are famous for looking like dangerous weapons.

Just a random exploration, we'll see what Christian does :>

See the full gallery on Posterous

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If you take public transportation you've indubitably encountered someone playing music using their cellphone as a boom box.

If you're an ethnomusicologist perhaps you're delighted at the developments in treble culture. If you're not, chances are you found it rather annoying, and perhaps the young turk or turkette partaking of the tinny notes seems rather too set in their ways to be berated by you in public.

So, I've come up with a passive-aggressive and mildly vandalistic (yes, vandalistic) method to curb this! Instructional pictograph stickers!

What you're looking at is a prototype for a design. The dimensions are those of a bumper sticker. I'm not perfectly satisfied with the wording, nor with the NO pictograph, but it's getting there. Would appreciate comments and suggestions! Once I've finalized, I will provide these TO THE WORLD!

You'll be able to deploy them at your favorite public transportation venue, or just anywhere else affected by this scourge!

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1. Copy the file away
2. svn revert FILENAME (in case you have local changes)
   
3. svn rm FILENAME
4. svn ci -m "Fixing checksum mismatch"
5. Copy the file back
6. svn add FILENAME
7. svn ci -m "Fixed checksum mismatch"

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Upon opening the envelope you find a paper in standard Letter
dimensions, with what looks like a photocopy of an ad, complete with
the characteristic ink fading and smudging. Several parts of the ads
had the same kind of fake blue pen marked up as if with notes by the
kind sender. Although throughout the short interaction between myself
and the letter I was quite aware it was just advertising, the
anti-branding just drew me in. As far as I can recall, the AT&T logo
was only visible in one place, and even there it was understated and
quite small. Maybe it was just my fascination with the thinking behind
such an ad, but I felt drawn in against my will, my disbelief
suspended just a tad.

We live in a word saturated with brands. Also today, I saw a pack of
Duracell batteries at Safeway that included a horrible plastic
screwdriver shaped like a Duracell battery, clearly with the primary
purpose of adding the brand to your life even though it's obvious
almost no one would actually use the dinky screwdriver; it would lay
discarded somewhere, ready to anchor the brand when you least expect
it.

So, we seem to have developed powerful advertising ignoring skills.
Some studies have shown that advertising we pay less attention to
tends to have even greater effects, but I find this spam masquerading
as a personal letter to be proof that we've gotten too good at
discarding the useless brochures and pointless offers clogging our
mailboxes.

Perhaps once we get good at discarding these, they'll be able to
return to the gaudy spam of old.

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• Is running on Shabbes considered a violation? Or does that count under Pikuach Nefesh?
• How do you circumcise? Drop the least significant bit?
  
• Do you have to switch to a UPS for Yom Kippur?
• Is an MP3 of a Shofar good enough?
• Where should the Tefillin go? The boot sector?
  

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A common problem. I've often seen it mentioned in collections of trivia and cool facts that monkeys and apes open their bananas from the "bottom", often accompanied by a suggestion for us to do the same. Following a recent reminder by a fellow named Mahdroo, I started doing just that! It has proved to be far superior to the traditional human choice.

As you can see on in the image to the left, a banana has the little "tail" on top, and a small nub on the bottom. Commonly one may bend the tail backwards against the banana's natural curvature, until it tears. Then you peel the banana. But sometimes, the banana isn't quite ripe, or just extra hardy. In those cases the skin doesn't tear as easily and you mush up the top of the banana. Here's the solution:

Turn the banana upside down! Use your fingers to squeeze the nub. It should start opening in the middle as you squeeze (careful not to squeeze the flesh of the banana), then just use your other hand to peel the two (or more) sections apart! Voila! You have peeled a banana from the bottom! Feel free to discard the little part that's now at the top of your banana, though I know some folks who enjoy eating that part.

This has been a post from the Newsletter Series
After every newsletter issue I will be slowly posting selected articles from it (often with slight editing) unto my blog. If you want to get these articles in their original rapidly delivered form, sign up below:

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These will be weekly emails that will my writings on all sorts of subjects. You'll get to learn about the coolest things possible, with links to further resources. Also: fabulous how-tos that will teach you various useful skills! Basically a bit like DamnInteresting.com but with a Mike K twist.

Sign up below! Other than the newsletter once a week you will never be spammed, nor will your email address be used for anything else ever, nor sold, given away, etc. It's safe with me!

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As much as I love meat, meat products, meat flavors for health reasons I've been try to cook mostly mostly fish and vegetables.

This also poses an interesting challenge: I happen to be taste averse to a wide variety of vegetables, particularly cruciferous vegetables in their cooked state. I don't mean "I don't like them", I mean "I will vomit if I force myself to eat them". This doesn't mean I want to avoid vegetables I'm averse to entirely, but rather, I will figure out what in their chemical composition I am bothered by, and attempt to minimize it. I'm gonna up the difficulty level a bit more: I can't just drown everything in salt and butter and call it a day, that's the easy way out.

To start out, though, I wanted something relatively easy, thus: Le tourin à l'ail. This is a pretty simple garlic soup common in the south-west of France. It's pretty low in fat and since it contains egg much like egg drop soup, this lets me consume another item to which I'm taste averse.

The recipe I used can be found on Wikibooks, but I'll reproduce it here for convenience, my modifications are in italics:

Ingredients

• 10-12 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon flour
• water — 4 cups (adjust amount as needed - use distilled, filtered or reverse osmosis water)
  • I used a diluted vegetable stock. Seasoning this water properly is the key to making this soup taste delicious.
• salt to taste
• 1 egg, separated
• pepper to taste
• 1 teaspoon vinegar

Serves 2

Procedure

1. In a frying pan, brown the chopped garlic (or optionally, an equal mixture of chopped onions and garlic) in the olive oil.
   • I used a small pot. I would recommend that or a saucepan. Looking up the recipe in French, they tend to use a "faittout", which seems to mean some sort of saucepan.
2. Add the flour.
3. Mix well, then cook for a moment.
4. Add some boiling salted water, and cook for 10 minutes.
5. In a separate dish, mix:
   • egg yolk
   • pepper
   • vinegar
6. Add the egg white to the soup, first tempering in a separate bowl with a whisk, so that no large pieces of egg white form.
   • Make sure to add it very gradually, and to use a fork in the soup itself to spread out the egg whites as you are pouring.
7. Cook another 5 minutes. Remove from heat and add the egg yolk mixture, again tempering to avoid coagulation.
8. Place thin slices of bread in each soup bowl, and pour the soup on top. Serve hot. Bon appétit.

 

It turned out quite well! The garlic which I only browned slightly turned out to have an almost potato-like texture, but without the starchiness. Soft and rich, it complemented the egg whites in provided substance to the texture. The cooked garlic also lacked the sweetness many root vegetables (such as turnips) acquire when cooked. For me, that's a plus. I'm not sure what the vinegary yolk contributed, but I'm sure it helped. The soup was redolent of garlic, but surprisingly mild, the flavor releasing only in your mouth, never overpowering.

I cannot overstate the value of properly seasoning the soup. My vegeterian girlfriend remarked that she would be afraid to order this soup at a restaurant after tasting it, it tasted so much like chicken broth. With no additions of MSG or similar umami-fortifiers, the saltiness is what provided this deepness of flavor. It's a thin boundry between "perfectly seasoned" and "oversalted" andwe must tread and carefully remain on the right side. The cowardly will be rewarded with bland and tasteless soups!

Not sure what I'll make next time! Ratatouille calls out to me, but I can't stand neither zucchinis nor aubergines... which makes me want to figure out a way to prepare it even more!

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Those of you have watched or read The Hunt for Red October would be familiar with the Soviet-built Typhoon, it was the Red October itself. It also has a rather distinctive wide and flat appearance.

In the late 70s and early 80s, the workhorses of the Soviet nuclear sub fleet were earlier iterations of the Delta class (Delta I through III). The world was moving from liquid-fueled to solid-fueled rockets but apparently the latter take up more space that was available on the Deltas. The Americans were designing and putting out bigger subs.

When faced with this dilemma the Soviets thought about it for a while, then put two Delta class hulls next to each other, wrapped them with a shared skin, and called it a day!

P.S. This reminds me of a Soviet joke my Dad used to tell, that I'll translate here into English. It doesn't carry over all too well, but some of you may be amused at the self-deprecation:

The Americans are trying to steal the Russian MiG-29 plans.
The CIA sends a spy who manages to come back with the blueprints.
They build them only to discover they've just built a steam locomotive.
So they send a better spy who comes back with plans that he's sure are the right ones.
They build them, and find they've got another locomotive.
This time they send their best spy, and his orders are to bring back the head engineer.
Back in the US with the engineer they ask him what they were doing wrong. The engineer looks at the plans they've stolen and at the locomotive, and points at some fine print on the plans, "See? you've just forgotten to file it down!"

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I think I got my declensions right.

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Edit: Fix in the comments has been applied, and the whole app is now on BitBucket, so download it from there: http://bitbucket.org/anateus/moviesneak.py

I'm happy to announce the release of version 0.5 of moviesneak.py, script for figuring out what movies come right after each other such that you can go from one to the next on a single ticket.

This version follows an age-old tradition of BASIC programs by prompting you for information step by step. The date, zipcode, movie theater, and movies you actually want to watch. Then it prints out a list of movie pairs (I doubt you're going to sit through more than two).

Currently a tolerance of 15 minutes is hardcoded, fairly straightforward to modify. What this mean is that if one movie starts 15 minutes before another ends, it would still recommend them as a pair, what with previews and whatnot. If the opposite is true, 15 minutes is not too suspicious a time to loiter about :>

The code is distributed under a BSD license. It requires BeautifulSoup which I've included in my distribution, so you just need Python!

Happy sneaking! Don't get caught :)

Download here:

moviesneak-0.5.zip

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In Washington there isn't any plan
With "feeding David" on page sixty-four;
It must be accidental that the milk man
Leaves a bottle at my door.

It must be accidental that the butcher
Has carcasses arriving at his shop
The very place where, when I need some meat,
I accidentally stop.

My life is chaos turned miraculous;
I speak a word and people understand
Although it must be gibberish since words
Are not produced by governmental plan.

Now law and order, on the other hand
The state provides us for the public good;
That's why there's instant justice on demand
And safety in every neighborhood.

David Friedman in The Machinery of Freedom (free full text now available!)

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I don't know the answer to this central problem – the problem of maintaining the real value of religion, as a source of strength and of courage to most men, while, at the same time, not requiring an absolute faith in the metaphysical aspects.

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