I don’t normally go very far uptown in Central Park, but this time I did. So, I discovered the Strawberry Fields Memorial to John Lennon. Aparently, it often has flowers and candles. This time (July 16th), it also had muffins.

A Frenchman studying Russian could not find a good free audio word-list, so he built one himself. Check it out if you studying French or Russian. And if you are fluent in Russian, consider helping him out (I will try to when I have time). And if the idea of list building for the language learning purposes appeals to you, you could try out the software he built to make the recording task easier.

FreshNotes (currently in alpha) uses basic named entity extraction and maybe information extraction to produce a website that allows to search and navigate relationships between people and/or topics. The interface, but of course it is all pre-baked at the moment. From the CL point of view, I can see that there is very little smarts in the system yet. Only people’s full names are detected, I don’t see any implications of coreference resolution and the relationship is determined by the names proximity and possibly frequency of co-occurrence.

Nice short video about things one could do after (and during) learning Esperanto (via Amuzulo). No surprise to anyone - except Esperanto-bashers - that one can do pretty much anything - travel, read books, make friends, play games, participate in congresses with thousands of people, etc). Any new language is a cross-cutting experience, Esperanto is not an exception. The video finishes with a pointer to www.lernu.net , an Esperanto learning website that I strongly recommend myself.

Scottish Country Dancing is danced everywhere. It is certainly danced in Houston (Texas). The website of the group run by Dianna Shipman looks friendly and inviting. While some links are dead, the explanations of figures are quite interesting and have cute hand-drawn diagrams. Worth a browse.