Contemno tuam superstitionem stultam.

Obscure Languages: Akkadian

Monday, June 22nd, 2009 | Obscure Languages | 5 Comments

Akkadian is the earliest known Semitic language and the only known one in the North-Eastern Semitic classification. It was spoken in Iraq from about 2800BCE until it was supplanted by Aramaic and Greek around 100CE. Akkadian itself was supplanting Sumerian. In the south of Mesopotamia, Babylonian was the dialect spoken, and in the north, Assyrian was spoken.

Akkadian has what’s called a consonantal root system, or triconsonantism, common among Semitic languages. Most words consist of three consonants, called the “root” (an individual consonant in the root is called a radix, the plural of which is radices). These consonants usually remain unchanged through all inflection. They can be turned into syllables by adding affixes.

All the words that have the same root will be related in meaning in some way. For example, the infinitive paräsum “to decide” and the noun purussûm “decision” share the root prs.

There are “strong” and “weak” verbs. The classification of these depends on the strength of the radices in the root. A weak verb is considered a verb which has at least one weak consonant such as n, which may undergo phonetic modification in certain combinations. Strong verbs are fairly regular.

Akkadian was written in the famous cuneiform script, originally designed for Sumerian. The cuneiform they used was a logophonetic system, meaning each symbol stands for either a morpheme or a syllable.

Yep.

Update.

Monday, June 1st, 2009 | Misc. | 8 Comments

It’s been a rough week.

I started my online class, Data Analysis. The only reason I’m taking it now is that it conflicts with one of my csci classes this fall, and that conflicts with my graduating on time. The real hitch with this class is that everything is dependent on some crappy stats software called Arc, which in turn relies on Xlisp-stat. If you use Windows, you’re fine. Otherwise, you’re almost screwed. It’s supposedly linux compatible if you compile it yourself, which I started doing on Ubuntu. Meanwhile, I started updating to Jaunty Jackalope. Bad idea.

End result: My linux partition is now a complete waste of hard drive. I then went to try to compile it on Mac, but evidently Apple does not see fit to give you a C compiler by default (wtf?), and does not let you download one off Fink (WTF?) Instead they packaged these “developer tools” on a separate DVD, which, you know, I didn’t install. I eventually found where to download them from, and ended up getting 1GB of random crap.

Meh, at least it worked. Now I get to enjoy this piece of crap outdated software where scrollbars can’t scroll up~ And I stayed up until 5 in the morning frantically doing 5 chapter’s worth of homework and quizzes.

Desert Botanical Garden

Sunday, May 24th, 2009 | Atheism, Misc. | 9 Comments

Current temperature: 95°F.

Yes, I went there. I don’t know how they made such a large garden out of it, since there isn’t a huge amount of variety in the desert. Here’s some highlights, but if you want to see all the pictures, go to my Flickr.

There’s some glass art exhibit going on there, so there would be sights like this:

And I finally got some cactus pictures. I had figured saguaros were like big-as-a-person kind of huge, but man… they’re huge. Tasnia featured as point of reference.

Most “wildflowers” were shriveled and tiny and uninteresting. Here’s a kinda neato one. I can’t remember the name… something brush?

I figured I wouldn’t see any flowering cacti since they just do that when it rains or whatever, but this kind had flowers.

There were little lizards running about too! There were some darker ones that were too quick for me (although I did get a sorta meh picture of one), but this kind was super friendly. They’d come right up to people.

I could see the Hole-in-the-Rock from here, but didn’t get any shots of it. Here’s a different giant rock, though. Close enough, right?

And here is a Madagascan palm tree, which looks like some sort of cactus/palm tree hybrid.

And finally, some adorable rodents.

Nighttime.

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 | Misc. | 7 Comments

Current temperature: 97°F (it IS nighttime, afterall)

I spent a large part of the day doing work. Bob gave me a lecture on name entity recognition and then I played with Link Grammar a little. Then I read a couple papers, the former about adapting Link Grammar for the biomedical domain and the latter about BioInfer, which is a biomedical annotated corpus resource (fancy words for a body of text that’s been hand-labeled), which could be used for testing and training information extraction methods. And to conclude it all, I played with Weka, which is data mining software. It’s pretty neat.

As for non-research-related stuff, I didn’t do much today. I made another long trek to Target, just because I forgot to buy a bath sponge the other day. Downtown Phoenix sucks at having useful stores nearby. I have a 25 minute train ride each way to get a box of cereal, but if I wanted to buy clothes, I’d only have to walk a block.

Anyway. Last night saw some bad weather, for a brief moment. There was some rain and some pretty intense wind. This poor tree will never get to see another storm like it:

I didn’t take any photos during the day, but I went out after dark to get a few pictures of glowy lights. Collin has been really skeptical that I’m actually in downtown Phoenix, so I had to get a shot of some tall buildings for him. I’m pretty sure he’ll just complain that they’re not tall enough.

On the path I take to the light rail station, there’s mosaic art of the word “water” written in various languages. I don’t understand why. There’s certainly no water in this area.

I’ve saved the best for last. This thing looks awesome during the day, but as I just discovered, it looks even more awesome at night.

If you know what this thing is, do let me know.

This day was 10% productive.

Monday, May 18th, 2009 | Misc. | 3 Comments

Current temperature: 103°F

I spent a lot of time outside today. It “rained” for about two minutes, which was almost refreshing. I hung around the Arizona Center a lot, and discovered that it has a very nice garden/park thing.

There’s plenty of fountains around, too, though they seem somewhat wasteful. I wonder at what rate that water evaporates.

I don’t recognise any of the birds here except for pigeons, but they’re all fairly tame. Some of the pigeons were flattening themselves against the ground, with wings spread out. In the direct sunlight. It doesn’t seem like a very efficient way to get cool. I was really wondering why more birds weren’t doing this instead, because I know I wanted to:

I didn’t find any cacti to take pictures of, sadly. There are lots of these cool green trees though.

And then I met with Bob, one of the PhD students here. Basically, there isn’t much yet to say about the research I’ll be doing. It’s probably going to have something to do with deep sentence parsing, but nothing is decided. Oh, here’s where I’ll be working:

So, that’s mostly it. I’m still suffering from sucky internet (Basically, nothing but html, css, and php will load. Applets and desktop applications can’t find the internet.), and I expect that maybe, maybe they’ll fix it in a few weeks. If I scream at them enough. And sacrifice cacti to the Internet Gods. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, with these people.

(For other random pictures not included on this page: Here!)

Arrival.

Sunday, May 17th, 2009 | Misc. | 25 Comments

Current temperature: 105°F

As I was landing, the stewardness announced “Welcome to Phoenix. It’s a beautiful day — hot, dry, and dusty.” If those are what constitute a beautiful day, I really don’t want to know what an ugly day is.

After landing, I wandered around the airport until I found a shuttle to the light rail station. The light rail itself was pretty cool. It was packed and I didn’t get a seat, but at least it was clean and air conditioned and the ride was smooth. Here’s the view while waiting for the train:

Then I met a homeless man. Oh, what a day! He jingled some random change in his hand and said that he only needed a quarter to afford a ride. I really didn’t believe him, but I gave him a quarter anyway, and my belief was confirmed once he disappeared after that. Is there homeless etiquette that I need to learn now? I know that some homeless people just end up buying drugs or booze or whatever, so you’re essentially supporting their addiction, but isn’t sparing a quarter better than completely ignoring them?

I had to walk a bit to get to Taylor Place, but I made it. The dorm itself is pretty awesome. It feels more like a maximum-security hotel than student housing. It’s a palace compared to Morris’ residential halls. My room itself is fully-furnished, and has its own bathroom. I’m by myself for now, but later in the week, Tasnia, the other DREU student, will come live here too.

The biggest fault I can see is that there’s no kitchen facility. There’s the cafeteria, but I don’t have a meal plan, and I really don’t want to buy their overpriced meals. It’d be cheaper for me to eat out twice a day (140 meals @ $6 = $840) than to buy a plan (125 meals @ 7.98 = 997.50), so maybe that’s what I’ll end up doing. Supplementing with PB&J as necessary.

Whilst wandering my floor, I did find this:

If you can’t tell, it’s an outdoor terrace on the second floor. What you can’t see is the ground-floor terrace that it’s overlooking. Everything here is outdoors. That would never fly in Morris. And here’s the view from my room:

So, pretty cool. I start doing actual work tomorrow; I’ll update with how that goes. I forgot to bring my camera with me when I went out walking earlier today, but I’ll try to get some pictures of downtown Phoenix tomorrow. They have cacti, you know.

BOO YEAH

Monday, March 16th, 2009 | Misc. | 5 Comments

Dear Skatje Myers,

We are delighted to inform you that you have been selected to participate in the CDC/CRA-W Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) for this summer. We are in the process of finalizing the matches, and we will inform you which mentor you have been placed with as soon as possible.

We had a tremendous number of applications this year (approximately 500) and you are one of the approximately 80 students who has been selected for this years program. Congratulations on this honor!

This wasn’t in the illustrated kids’ version…

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | Misc. | 12 Comments

While perusing the Biblical Archaeology Review, I found an interesting article about, well, penises. It mentioned a story in 1 Samuel 19:

22. Then Saul ordered his attendants: “Speak to David privately and say, ‘Look, the king is pleased with you, and his attendants all like you; now become his son-in-law.’ ”

23. They repeated these words to David. But David said, “Do you think it is a small matter to become the king’s son-in-law? I’m only a poor man and little known.”

24. When Saul’s servants told him what David had said, 25. Saul replied, “Say to David, ‘The king wants no other price for the bride than a hundred Philistine foreskins, to take revenge on his enemies.’ ” Saul’s plan was to have David fall by the hands of the Philistines.

26. When the attendants told David these things, he was pleased to become the king’s son-in-law. So before the allotted time elapsed, 27. David and his men went out and killed two hundred Philistines. He brought their foreskins and presented the full number to the king so that he might become the king’s son-in-law. Then Saul gave him his daughter Michal in marriage.

Gross. D:

Humans-Robots

Thursday, December 11th, 2008 | Misc. | 3 Comments

I just found out that Google’s N-gram data is freely available. In my pursuit of shiny things to use N-grams for, I came across this page, using bigram data to generate pretty-looking spectrums.

It’s brilliant. And beautiful. I need a giant poster of some of these.