DBW

Darjeeling, Bergamot and Walnuts

28.4.10

May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung, and may you stay ...

Forever Young

Words and music Bob Dylan
Released on Planet Waves (1974) and in an early demo version on Biograph (1985)
Tabbed by Eyolf Østrem
Album version I (slow):

D

        D
May God bless and keep you always
         F#m/c#
May your wishes all come true
        Em/b
May you always do for others
        G             D
And let others do for you
        D
May you build a ladder to the stars
    F#m/c#
And climb on every rung
        Em   A(sus4-A) D
May you stay    forever young
        A         Bm
Forever young, forever young
        D   A        D
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young.

Source: http://dylanchords.info/14_planetwaves/forever_young.htm

25.4.10

Seriously, these people are WIRED

Present the masterpiece to your guest. For all they know, this is how you always make coffee. Michael Conroy.

who has trained himself to sleep in one-hour bursts. This gives him time to run his firm and fit in book-writing, race-sailing and all the other distractions of achievement-focused wakefulness.

"You could build traffic noise into a dream.", not he stresses, when he's driving.

A hundred thousand years ago, if you slept for eight hours, you'd be eaten

Home-gym heroes - exercise tech you won't want to hide in the basement

Don't be fooled by the penny farthing looks: its electric motor will carry you 10km on a single charge, at speeds up to 20kmh. £3,000 ...

laid down in layers and heated, fusing the particles into a form generated by algorithms.

Next I want to make a doorbell that sounds like a dying star

Researchers have developed a way to compare aromas visually

comes as a stainless steel box; you bash a seat into it with a hammer (supplied). $9,750.

Canadian poet wants his work to live on after he's gone. Like, billions of years after. It if works, his poem could outlast the human race.

I wanted to write about "play", but it's fallen prey to our 21st-century need for significance.

When someone tells me that something is impossible, I want to do it and prove it is.

Brush away your plaque with some wound-healing, car-repairing paste - Colgate sensitive pro-relief rapid and lasting relief ... from pain and suffering

Interviews designed to blow your minds [If I put you in a sealed room with a phone that had no dial tone, how would you fix it? Asked at Apple]

Robert's soldiers use the wiki while on the move by talking, typing into a smart pad and annotating Google maps.

Military scholars have been arguing the importance of networks for future conflict for more than a decade now.

"Our wiki firewalls get cleverer and more responsive everytime the enemy tries to hack them ... they're alive, canny."

I like the idea of flattening this limitless, unknowable space into something as outdated as a family slide show.

We look for companies to dominate an initially small market that subsequently experience explosive growth

"Imagine if anyone caught spending money on Stephanie Meyer novels could be rendered down into their constituent chemicals and scattered on barren land as organic fertiliser." I make it explicit: this snip is by none other than Warren Ellis of WIRED magazine, who "didn't spend all these years evolving the ability to operate a bottle-opener to have all possible minions immolated in one go."

No more philosophy - genuine understanding

I see that undergraduates, rather than flocking in droves to investment-banking jobs, are turning to volunteering and smaller cars.

This is the future of warfare

It's not how many friends you have. But how much of a friend they are.

The significant is driving out the light.

My favorite is type 1b - it explodes as brightly as a billion suns.

Living under someone else's dominion? Serf. It's time to start your own country.

Wired explores the new trust economy. Someone in Brisbane borrows it until tuesday.

Overheated milk produces hydrogen sulphide, which smells like rotten eggs.

Microfoam malfunction?

Promptly resubmerge it to avoid rendering the milk unstable injecting too much air.

"And, O my brothers, would you believe your faithful friend and long suffering narrator pushed out his red yahzik a mile-and-a-half to lick the grahzny, vonny boots...The horrible killing sickness had whooshed up, and turned the like joy of battle into a feeling I was going to snuff it." - CWO

Way to ruin a perfectly good and naive sunday, like thinking things might just end up alright, and like there's a whole lot of decent people in the world who care. Thanks wired. I hope this urge to vomit subsides before dinner.

Got your attention? Check out "WHY THE IPAD REALLY MATTERS, P. 120"

Don't forget to inform yourself of "WHO'S SHAPING THE DIGITAL WORLD? FROM VIRAL HIT-MAKERS to V.C. TITANS: THE WIRED 100, P. 86", and "DUCK! WE TEST BULLET-PROOF VESTS, P. 132"

MAY 10 £3.99 - weird.co.uk - THE FUTURE AS IT HAPPENS

-------

Frankly, it all sounds to me like those visions of grandeur I associate with the occasional changeling days I start off with a strong shot of espresso, or a double tall latte.

And thats why Darjeeling, bergamot and walnuts.

21.4.10

Tenureclock and Jabberwock

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html

"Beware the Tenureclock, young one,
Don’t pause at night or flaws they’ll catch.
Be sure you publish blurbs, and shun
The populous intro class!"

http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume7/v7i4/tenureclocky.html

19.4.10

god_writes_good_code.py

# Copyright (c) 2010 DBW.
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.
 
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.

# pygmentize -f html -o god_writes_good_code.html god_writes_good_code.py
# More info @ http://burstcoding.blogspot.com/2010/04/rendering-code-via-pygments-in-your.html

import nltk
from nltk.corpus import PlaintextCorpusReader as PtCr

import numpy
import os


def cache_url(url, gunzip=True):
    """fetch the url locally if not already local.
    gunzip - {True,False} - pass through gunzip or not
    """

    filename = os.path.split(url)[-1]
    ext = os.path.splitext(url)[-1]

    # will we be unzipping?
    if gunzip and ext==".gz":
        unzipped = filename[:-3]
        if not os.path.exists(unzipped):
            err = os.system("gunzip -f %s" % filename)
            if err!=0:
                raise OSError, "gunzip error on file: %s" % filename
    
        return unzipped


    elif not os.path.exists(filename):
        err = os.system('wget %s' % url)
        if err!=0:
            raise OSError, "wget error on url: %s" % url

    return filename


def draw_from_cfdist(cfdist):
    
    values = numpy.array(cfdist.values())
    keys = cfdist.keys()
    a = numpy.add.accumulate(values)
    # draw random integer upto end of a+1
    rndi = numpy.random.randint(a[-1]+1)
    idx = a.searchsorted(rndi)
    return keys[idx]
    
def generate_model(cfdist, word, num=15):

    for i in range(num):
        print word, 
        word = draw_from_cfdist(cfdist[word])


if __name__=="__main__":

    # King James bible and New Hacker's Dictionary.
    sources = {'kjv':'http://www.ccim.org/~bible/kjv.rawtxt.gz',
               'nhd':'http://catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg2912.txt'}

    urls = sources.values()

    # cache the urls and get filenames
    filenames = []
    for url in urls:
        filenames.append(cache_url(url))

    source_files = dict(zip(sources.keys(),filenames))

    # Make a corpus out of local cache
    local_corpus = PtCr('.',source_files.values())

    words = reduce(lambda x,y: x+y, [local_corpus.words(source_files[src]) for src in source_files])

    print "Generating bigrams."

    bigrams = nltk.bigrams(words)

    print "Generating cfd."

    cfd = nltk.ConditionalFreqDist(bigrams)


    for i in range(20):
        generate_model(cfd,'God')
        print "\n"

Utterings of god_writes_good_code.py

God. It is a PDP - paired keyboard macros or parents, that sin
God rather limited their Xerox PARC
God hath put them a sagan
God be willing to construct
God, my roaring lion, and how the universal constructor
God Righteous featurectomies are only if the sour wonton soup is shed innocent
God of mercy on. A pastime is no pleasure in this naming convention
God doth not till all unwanted notoriety
God is cruft: and would cleave unto the LORD, and see the city
God. Female hackers at midnight, and praying, lest my son
God of Solomon gave him: black art not profit margin
God is usually generalizations of a reply, and hast paid the congregation
God, saying and forty years of socks: I am that
God of God our uncomely parts of language
God of rocks I am God, the Chinese Army technique, I conceived
God; and none other; and the knees to his son of Waterloo
God hath been with thee, it, and came to thee ? for science
God of the book of a cloudy pillar stand upon the next day: 9
God in hackish sense 2 Go not unto Taanathshiloh, and his feet.
God: so I will; and with her suburbs, so, whatsoever is.
God, / n. Hackers are essentially dead ? And Moses
God is hardened, Fear not himself for his neighbour in all his mercy
God made loops with us
God: I gather it into a procedure to keep under
God of electric service attack with the floppy disk



-- (c) 2010 DBW, all rights reserved.

Career Collage

A power networker herself, Alice is going to be giving her best power networking tips.

With over a decade of expertise in research, market intelligence, public policy, project management and communications, Aaron knows a lot about research and finding information that people don't want publicized.

The past few years have proven tough for many recent graduates to land jobs.

Hear three speakers tell you how to take control of your career and find well-paying work.

Random talk is useless.

I pour out a cup of water. Is the cup empty?

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.

Foray into Natural Language Processing

Python 2.6.4 (r264:75706, Dec 7 2009, 18:43:55)
[GCC 4.4.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import nltk
>>> nltk.chat.chatbots()

Which chatbot would you like to talk to?
1: Eliza (psycho-babble)
2: Iesha (teen anime junky)
3: Rude (abusive bot)
4: Suntsu (Chinese sayings)
5: Zen (gems of wisdom)

Enter a number in the range 1-5: 4

Talk to the program by typing in plain English, using normal upper-
and lower-case letters and punctuation. Enter "quit" when done.
========================================================================
You seek enlightenment?
>indeed
One may know how to conquer without being able to do it.
>why conquer?
Ask me no questions!
>I seek enlightenment
Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.
>And conquer
Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.
>is it worthwhile?
Please consider whether you can answer your own question.
>I cannot
The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.
>
>>> nltk.chat.chatbots()
Which chatbot would you like to talk to?
1: Eliza (psycho-babble)
2: Iesha (teen anime junky)
3: Rude (abusive bot)
4: Suntsu (Chinese sayings)
5: Zen (gems of wisdom)

Enter a number in the range 1-5: 5
***************************************************************************
Zen Chatbot!
***************************************************************************
"Look beyond mere words and letters - look into your mind"
* Talk your way to truth with Zen Chatbot.
* Type 'quit' when you have had enough.
***************************************************************************
Welcome, my child.
>Hello
Greetings. I sense your mind is troubled. Tell me of your troubles.
>Why conquer?
Why do you think conquer?
>One school might argue that it is a necessity of life
Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.
>Conquer life, and life conquers us
The reverse side also has a reverse side.
>Submit to life, and life submits to us
When you're enlightened, every word is wisdom.
>Amen
Random talk is useless.
>Amen
The reverse side also has a reverse side.
>Random talk is useless
Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.
>And so it is revealed that you are only the shadow of a zen master
I pour out a cup of water. Is the cup empty?