Watching the 21 Accents video (via Neatorama) made me think that different languages/accents seemed to require different mouth positions. Is it possible that some phonemes are only achievable with the mouth wide-stretched in a smile? Then loading a language with such phonemes would be one way to ensure people appear friendly to strangers whatever the real mood of the person. Social engineering through accent shaping, now that is an interesting thought!

While reading weka Data Mining book, I have come across this impressive example of using machine learning to confirm person’s authorship (p. 358). 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.

DOJO has hit 1.0 and changed a lot of things. So the documentation is still all over the place with examples using old syntax. I am migrating to DOJO from jQuery, so just wanted to get basic dojo.query functionality to work. Specifically, I wanted to highlight alternative table rows. Not easy! At least for a newbie. I had to piece together 3 different documents and examples to figure out the easiest syntax.

What could be common between Computational Linguistics and Aerobics? Quite a lot, as it turns out to be. 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).

Since Dave Winer declared Chumby the next breakthrough device, there has been a small flood of people talking about how cool it is and how much they want one. The usual TechMeme effect, I guess. I admit, it is a cute device. I have a black one, which I am hoping will work well as a picture frame for less-technically minded parents. It is certainly worth learning Flash for (Flash Lite actually), a decision I kept putting off.