We have been walking around the neighborhood and have discovered Middle Eastern shop with some unusual but recognizable foods and some not-quite-recognizable ones. Our strategy with the later is usually to buy it and then google for its name/recipe. Usually it works quite well.

Not so, with the “Sour Grape Ground”, which looks like brown sand-like stuff with some white flecks. And it is impossible to find on the internet.

The problem of course is that “sour grape” means complaining, and there is a lot of that on the internet.

So, in the end, we just had to go from the general description. We had it in a stew and it was nice, though not outstanding. This probably has more to do with us not knowing the proportions, than with with the sour grapes themselves.

Social engineering through accent shaping, now that is an interesting thought!

In 19th century, there lived a famous rabbinic scholar Ben Ish Chai, who among other writings had two collections of letters. Ben Ish Chai claimed that only one collection was his and that the other one was somebody else’s, found by him. Modern scholars thought both collections were his, but could not prove it conclusively as the style of writing was different.

Machine Learning to the rescue! In 2004, Moshe Koppel and Jonathan Schler have discovered that it may help to look not at the writing style differences (as the style may have been faked), but rather at how deep those differences were. For example, an author could fake a stylistic mismatch by consciously avoiding favorite words, but would still write in long overrun sentences, use more of passive verb forms or display many other measurable behaviours.

So, if the most obvious differences were removed one by one, the speed at which the rest of the features would look identical could be a good indicator. They called this technique unmasking and the mistery of Ben Ish Chai was solved for good.

I think what impressed me here was not the clever math. The whole field of determining authorship is based on clever math. It is rather the fact that the math was looking at hints within the hints of the language - the invisible aspects that become noticeable only after the eye learns to see beyond what the most obvious reality offers. I cannot explain it better, but to me it has a special elegance that just counting the words and sentence lengths does not offer.

Dance descriptions, while not really in English do have a regular structure and can be thought of as a sub-language with full set of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels.

There are basic words of the language (move names), correct ways of putting them in a sentence (a routine) and all the way up to good flowing text (classes that do not hurt the participants).

I was thinking about relationship between dance instructions and computational linguistics in context of Scottish Country Dancing for at least a year. My imagined benefits were that codified dance instructions would allow for automatic dance animations, superior teacher aids and other applications that currently require a lot of sweat and toil. Dance evening programmes that are currently put together manually for each event, could be assisted with automated evaluation pointing out awkward sequences of dances.

Unfortunately, my attempts at explaining the connection made no sense to the people around me. So, I was ecstatic to discover that such a link was already discovered by others before me.

Adam Bull, more than 10 years ago, has tried to apply principles of computational linguistics to Aerobics for his MPhil degree in the paper entitled The formal description of aerobic dance exercise - a corpus-based computational linguistics approach. While, the report is not complete, it puts down many of the same arguments I have tried myself.

Unfortunately, the electronic copy of the document was not available. After some effort, I got in touch with Adam and he send me the copy of the report with the permission to distribute. I have put a copy of it on my own server.

I hope his research will get rediscovered and improved upon. That way when I get some time to apply my own PhD skills to Scottish Country Dancing, there will be more than one person on whose shoulders I would be able to stand.

Looking back at it, I realise that I was right in the thick of Internet development:

• When I just started working with Java, we had to throw out all the printed Javadocs, because jdk1.0b2 was released and a lot of Java API (e.g. FTP and MAIL) from jdk1.0a3 has been hidden under sun’s internal packages
• I did a first (alpha) implementation of standard servlet API for W3C’s Jigsaw server, by porting it from Sun’s Jeeves
• I dabbled in hot 2.5D Apple technology (HotSause), by generating web server’s directory content in MCF format. The format has died, but apparently it turned into RDF. I was developing Semantic Web applications well before the term got popular.
• I contributed to an Open Source project, well before SourceForge’s first appearance
• I was a late-comer to /. and my ID is still below 36000

I am not bragging! I am just musing out loud at how much personal web history can be retrieved with few well placed searches.

The flip side of a coin of course, is that this history will not go away, even if I wanted it to. Which is why I do not link to my Slashdot account (and this is not an invitation for exercise in forensics). One just hopes that the future recruiter will look at timestamps of my various web appearances and makes appropriate adjustments to skills and effort.

My ideal digital picture frame for them would be one sitting in a living room or a bedroom with new photos to delight my parents every so often.

Such a device would have to be:

• Wi-Fi capable - My parents have a wireless router and there is no point for a picture frame to sit next to the computer
• Able to pull content from private online photo account, such as Flickr or PicasaWeb, to which our extended family could push photos
• No ongoing monthly costs - subscription would make it a gift that keeps taking, rather than giving
• Controllable over the internet
• Ideally with speakers and/or some way to show video to be more future proof

I have been on a lookout for such a device for more than a year and had no luck. Obviously, digital picture frames are still a personal purchase rather than a gift one. Or maybe less technical parents is a smaller niche than I imagine.

But I have hope. Yesterday, I have received a small package that contained a Chumby! Chumby is not a digital picture frame. It is quite small (I think the website’s image is real-size). But it has features that make up for its size.

It has Wi-Fi access, including password-protected; it has no monthly costs; it is configured over the internet and comes with speakers. It also has touch sensitive screen, microphone and accelerometer (like in Wii controller).

Notice I did not say anything about pictures or videos. That’s because Chumby is a more generic device. It allows to choose what widgets run on it and a widget is a program written in Flash, the same environment that allows us to watch Flickr slide-shows and youTube videos, listen to internet radio and play casual games. It can also double as alarm clock and iPod music player.

More importantly, because anybody can develop and share a widget, I am not married to any particular way of presenting photos. Flickr widget exists already, but other photo and video service widgets are on the way.

And, if I am still unhappy, I can write my own widgets. Chumby runs Linux under the covers and Flash Lite 3 interface. And, differently from Apple’s position with iPhone, Chumby Industries encourage people to modify their software, hardware and even basic device shape. Already, there are compilation packages for python, perl and even Java (actually JamVM).

Chumby is not yet for public sale, but that should happen any day now. I was on a mailing list, so got a pre-release invite. That is good, as it means I have some time to really play with my Chumby.

And if all goes well, my Chumby will soon have a new friend or two hiding under the Christmas tree overseas.

I did work it out in the end (after a hint). The secret - at least for me - was to concentrate in the bottom-right corner on the feet shadows and force my eyes to track the outer foot’s shadow the way I wanted it to go.

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.

So, I was relieved (if a bit surprised) to find that a competition was held on swearing words and expressions in Esperanto with prizes for top three places and that there were enough candidates offered to need the judges. It took 6 months, but the candidates and the winners are now available. No translation into any other language was provided, but most of the words and expressions are recognizable by anybody who can read Roman alphabet.

This is of course nowhere close to the Russian language, which has a whole shadow language of swearing, but it is probably sufficient for now.

I can see two reasons they could be doing that:

1. They are not doing too well and are getting desperate. They used to offer $25 as a referral fee and remind of it every 6 months or so. Now, it is $50 and they mention it every email they send. To me it means their cost of acquisition has gone up with more and more companies entering the VOIP provider market.
2. They want to look hip and new and differentiated from old-school telcos. It seems to work to some degree, as they already have more than 60 friends and even some comments.

One thing for sure. They now have a public forum, where they had none before. It would be interesting to see how they will handle the first negative comment about their service. If they are really getting into MySpace for community, rather than just for the image, they will learn the lessons from other companies that had to deal with public complaints.