How do you type upside-down on your keyboard? No, the answer is not to turn your laptop over. If you have a Unicode-compatible system, you can use this link. It converts what you type into equivalent upside-down characters, many of them from the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Here’s something fun to leave on your screen for a while. It’s an evolutionary car.
Ouches in 3..2..
The problem here is: what’s the the best wheel (and load) size and position to get a little car across a rugged landscape? Genetic algorithms are good at these kinds of problems. Just release a population of slightly differing individuals into the wild, and let the best performers produce offspring that are sort of like they are. Nifty.
This is very cool. Listen to the first clip. Sounds like twitters and blips.
Then listen to the second clip.
Now go back and listen to the first. It becomes comprehensible once you know what you’re looking for.
This is called ‘sine-wave speech’. When a linguist records your speech using a spectrometer, there are dark patches of high intensity, called formants. Draw the formants using sine waves, and you get the twittery sound that resembles somewhat-but-not-quite speech.
I guess this is yet another example of how perception depends on the knowledge and expectations of the perceiver. Something to remember when I try and understand the voting habits of others.
Another language game: How many of the 100 most common English words can you name in five minutes?
Of course, the actual words in the list will depend largely on the corpus they’re using. Still, it’s an interesting challenge. As a computational linguist, I must have looked at loads of lists like this, but I only got 50 of them. That was more a function of how fast I could type. You have to bang out one every 3 seconds with no mistakes to get them all.
Hmm. How can I get a hold of their language data? I’d like to know what people thought were the most common words.
The Scrabulous lawsuit seems to be going ahead in earnest now:
Scrabulous suspended on Facebook
The developers of the popular Facebook application Scrabulous have suspended the game for some users following legal action by toy maker Hasbro.
The application has been disabled for users in the US and Canada.
Hasbro, the makers of Scrabble, are suing the Calcutta-based founders of Scrabulous, claiming they are infringing its copyright and trademark.
Hasbro had asked Facebook to block access following the launch of its own official version of Scrabble.
A spokeswoman for Facebook told the BBC that the final decision to suspend the game was made by the developers, not the site itself.
If they had to slap a lawsuit on Scrabulous, it was only right that Hasbro should launch its own ‘Scrabble’ Facebook app. I gave it a try this morning (and won). It’s okay, but the tile placement feels sluggish, especially on a timed game when you only have two minutes per turn. Other than that, it seems serviceable.
If you’re blocked from Scrabulous and you don’t like the new Scrabble application, or you just can’t bring yourself to play it on principle, then you have just one question: How am I going to waste time now?
That’s where I come in. Here are my top five games on the Web right now.
5. The Internet Anagram Server
Did you know that if you rearranged the letters in “The Russian Federation”, you get “Oh, unrestrained fiesta”? You didn’t? How about this twofer:
Computational linguistics
I got input, miscalculations
Gulp! I’m uncool statistician.
It shouldn’t be that much fun, but it is. However, it would cheating to use this in online Scrabble.
I think it’s a bad idea for NBC to promote an online version of ‘Deal or No Deal’ because it makes you realise a) it’s essentially chance, and b) it takes about two minutes to play a game, which they then stretch out to an hour or more. But it is useful because you can see what the normal maximum game works out to, which is handy if you ever get on the show. Then you can tell Andrew (or worse, Howie) “Sorry, but I’m going to deal, even though it’s bad television. Going past 100 thou is a sucker’s game. See ya.”
3. Set
Finding a Set means picking cards with shapes whose features are either all the same or all different. Conceptually, it takes some getting used to, and there’s always that last elusive Set that drains all your time. If I can find all six Sets in under a minute, I consider myself to be scorching.
2. Raft Wars
This is basically a variation of Artillery from the Apple ][e all those years ago, except you’re a boat full of kids lobbing tennis balls, rockets, and hand grenades at bad guys who are after your treasure.
It’s surprisingly distressing to see your baby brother get blasted over the edge into the shark-infested waters. Leave him alone, you bastards! He’s two years old! But he is handy with the launcher, so fair’s fair. Watch out for the twist ending.
1. Launchball
Use an assortment of objects to roll, bounce, or blow your ball into the goal. Part of the fun is trying to discover how each item can be used, or which can be used together. A terrific brain game.
And don’t forget the hundreds of games on Orisinal.
What are you into?
Michael Shermer is coming to Perth to give not one, but TWO lectures at UWA’s Octagon on 20 and 21 August.
Shermer’s the author of ‘Why Darwin Matters” and “Why People Believe Weird Things”, and one of the more prominent skeptics around.
Here are some links if you want to know more: Weird Things | Darwin
The “Weird Things” talk appears to be a special school presentation, but the “Darwin” one is more for the public. So you can bet I’ll be soaking it up at the Octagon. Maybe I’ll even get to ask him about the questions I raise in this post, if I don’t take up too much time asking so that they drag me away.
I tell ya, that Google’s useful for all kinds of things.
The operator of a porn web site has been brought to trial for violating ‘community standards’. But who knows what ‘community standards’ are? Well, his lawyer has an interesting answer: check out Google Trends and see what the community’s really up to!
In Florida, it turns out that the search term ‘orgy’ is as American as ‘apple pie’.
Except that ‘apple pie’ hits a spike around Thanksgiving, but ‘orgy’ is popular year-round.
But Perth? Looks like we’re just into surfing. New South Wales is a different story. It’s just about Orgy Season over there. Meanwhile, in Victoria, the worrying fisting trend continues unabated.
The Turing Test is a classic in AI. On one side of the screen is you, and on the other side there’s either a human typing to you, or a computer generating text to you. A computer system passes the Turing Test if you can’t tell the difference between the computer and a human.
But when the human is a religious ranter, it tends to lower the bar a bit.
So here’s your test. One of the following text blocks is a bit of an email I got today from ‘Günter’, a poor soul trapped in two false beliefs: that supernatural beings exist, and that he can write comprehensible English.
The other block of text was made with a simple Markov chain trained on word trigrams from Günter’s email.
Sample number one:
Every thing, Love is a ground-need, without Love no Feelings are working, no human can find anymore satisfaction no matter what he trays to do it, the highest law of God, and no grace. Not even when somebody used your Authority-shyness like always, it is exactly the same. With Love the Apocalypse is running for ten years. {Glasshouse-effect? Global warming ?}.You can easy scientific prove, it is up to you. Jesus said <I came on earth to bring the Love and only where the Love and how to do Love, try it and you have to feel it. John says <even when you are doing what I say {that only is FAITH} and not only when you know about it>.Jesus said: sacrifice your self <you have to like them in any way, only give what you have<Logo>!
Number two:
That’s why Jesus said the End is near. The human where believing that Love is: cooking a meal; mending socks; squeeze a lemon; give Money, Tender; Fondness or even Sexuality. They filling up whole Libraries with books about Love, only in the explanation of the Old Testament {Torah; Koran; Kamathutra ;} or Jesus was never one interested. Jesus tried to teach Love and how to do it, the highest law of God. Out of the old scriptures he explained; proofing and showed in life what he is talking about. God says in the in the Old Testament; Torah; Koran; Kamathutra; <I m the Love and only the Love and only where the Love is can I be.> don’t make a picture or allegory {don’t compare me with nothing or nobody} of me. Never!!
Well, humans, which is the person, and which is the computer?
When Jim Davis retires, they’ll still be able to make Garfield strips with the Garfield Randomiser. But why wait until then? Here are some I created yesterday.
Jon gets stroppy, and Garfield puts him back in his place. Way to go.
Garfield’s been spraying in the spare room, and he’s not sorry.
They can do this all day.
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