Pandora.com has just added classical music to their already huge collection. It made my day.

I like classical music, but never took enough time to actually figure out my exact preferences or composers. I just recognise familiar or mood pieces when they are played and enjoy them.

So now I can put the name of the piece I do remember into Pandora and let it find that or other items with the same feel. I have  already rediscovered and found out names for some of my semi-forgotten favourites. And with bookmarks only two clicks away, I actually have a chance to slowly identify all those pieces. That has a value all of its own beyond just Pandora.

This may not be for the people who enjoy snobby experts on the radio playing something so obscure that it requires 20 minutes explanation of why exactly it is good. Pandora’s interface is still a little bit too-pop oriented with no composer information on the name card.

But for me, it is manna from heaven.

Ed Foster has discovered that it is very difficult to sign out from big companies’ websites. Yes, it is true when staying within the website’s rules. But it is dead easy otherwise.

The important thing to remember is that your identity is most of the times stored in the browser cookies. So, if you kill cookies, the session will go away and your identity will go away.

The easiest (but most destructive way) is to delete all cookies. With Firefox, this is the menu item Tools/Clear Private Data (Control-Shift-Del); on Internet Explorer 6, it is Tools/Internet Options/General/Delete Cookies.

The problem of course is that it all your login information for all the websites. Of course, if you were shopping on a public computer, that’s the best course of action anyway.

With Firefox, there is a much more precise way to delete the cookies. It comes with the Web Developer Extension - and cookie management is just one of that extension’s invaluable options. Once the extension is installed, it shows up as a toolbar. Cookies is a submenu on the left with a whole host of different options.

Using the extension, the easiest way to delete cookies is then to go Cookies/Delete Domain Cookies while on the target (Amazon, eBay, etc) website. This will delete all cookies set by that site and on the page refresh you will be a totally anonymous customer.

Advanced user’s notes

The above works in nearly all cases. Some websites get a bit sneaky and set Flash cookies instead. This is mostly done by websites such as YouTube, but for some reason images.amazon.com sets one as well. Deleting those can be done via Adobe’s Flash Player Settings Manager, which is actually a web page with specialised Flash application that shows cookies and allows to clear them.

Finally, deleting the cookie does not mean the website cannot track you otherwise. Google for example, will apparently use your IP address to correlate searches even across multiple sessions. It is not the same issue as keeping you logged-in, so I am only mentioning it in the wider privacy context.

As part of doing a PhD in Computational Linguistics, I need to understand both computers and linguistics. I am fine with computers, but linguistics is not my strong point. Unfortunately, many of the linguistics books and resources are quite dry.

So, I was really happy to discover an audio course Story of Human Language from The Teaching Company taught by John McWhorter. It is quite long a covers a lot of material, but - apart from some overly long parts on universal language - it is really interesting and Professor McWhorter is a great presenter.

I actually had a chance to listen to both an audio version of the course and to see some of it on DVD. Personally, I prefer just audio for several reason.

Firstly, I can listen to the course on my MP3 player when I am walking or doing chores. Video version requires allocating dedicated time, which for such a long course would be difficult.

Secondly, I actually found visual part of the presentation quite boring - for the most part professor is just standing behind the lectern and talks from his notes. In fact, I found the visual part distracted me from the really great and expressive rhetorics.

There was a number of great section in the course, but I found the one explaining language structure of Arabic and Chinese particularly interesting. He talked about Arabic first and I was all keen to learn that language. Then, he switched over to Chinese and I found it even more fascinating. And then, there were comparisons of languages and his cat. This has to be heard to be believed.

The course is obviously available for purchase, but it is also found in quite a few libraries. If you do borrow it from the library, try requesting all volumes at once. I only requested one volume and it was quite annoying to then have to wait a long time for the rest of the course arrive. This is another way I knew for myself that the course was enjoyable, as I had plenty of other audio material to listen to otherwise.

Two books, two views - no agreement, but certainly a lot of sparks. Is the Internet full of junk and by killing off the conventional media we are loosing all our good information sources? That is a point of view of Andrew Keen, author of the book Cult of the Amateur. On the other hand Weinberger, with his own book Everything is Miscellaneous, agrees that there is a lot of bad stuff on the Internet, but argues that there is a lot of good stuff too. More importantly, new mechanisms are being developed that would allow us to find good stuff faster and ignore bad stuff easier. In fact the Internet may make good stuff easier to find than currently possible outside of the internet.

Both authors have argued their points separately and against other people. But now they have squared-off against each other and the sparks are flying. The full text of one of such debates has been published by the Wall Street Journal. Earlier, they also argued at the Supernova conference and the video recording of that debate has been published.

For myself, Weinberger’s argument makes much more sense. I don’t really care about sports, popular music or so called ‘Entertainment’ industry, so most of the content produced by the off-Internet media is of no value to me and often is actually annoying. On the other hand, Internet allows me to track and participate more fully in topics that are actually of interest to me, my work and my research.

Still, even with my alliances so clear, it was fascinating and educational to read and watch both debates. They certainly make you think.

(Update: August 17)

David Weinberger has written a great and  very well thought out follow-up article on the issue. I agree with it completely and just wish I could argue the topics as well as he does.

I have tried Tamarind before as an ingredient in dishes, but I have never actually seen the real fruit. I wasn’t even sure it was edible uncooked. So, when I saw it sold in the shop, I had to try it. It turned out to be a very educational experience. The fruit is layered with multiple inedible seeds covered by sweet and sour pulp, inside a little cage in the hard-shell pod. The fruit variety I have is from Thailand, so it is more sweet than sour.

Following are the pictures of the closed pod, the pod half peeled and the seeds left over.

Apart from eating Tamarinds out of the box, it is possible to make a drink with them. I might try that next.