Month: March 2012

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The subtle difference…

…between superiority and arrogance can be seen in the following sentences appearing as author notes of an otherwise well-written piece of fiction:

Before anyone asks, yes, we’re polyamorous – I am in long-term relationships with three women, all of whom are involved with more than one guy.  Apologies in advance to any 19th-century old fogies who are offended by our more advanced culture.

Either my version of the social protocol is too much continental or it is really not okay to establish yourself at the cost of those fellas that are wired otherwise. I fully understand that there are no rational reasons to force yourself to have exactly one partner, but in my life, there is no place for a whole social network raising my children. Before anyone asks, yes, I have the wish to reproduce somewhere in the future. Apologies in advance to any hipsters who are offended by my speciecism.

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Cards

Being a student in Trondheim means having a lot of cards.

Clockwise, from the upper left corner: Bus card, student card, dancing society membership card, semester card, key card for the washing machines (also serves as a door opener in some houses), sports society membership card.

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Zee Germanz

(This will be a troll post to some extent. Also, sad topics ahead. Proceed at your own risk.)

I was yesterday sitting with some Germans in a cafe and talking about random things. Then, at some point, the conversation switched to the topic “How I want to be buried”. Since it was not the first time I was having this conversation and especially not the first time I was having this conversation in a German company, I drew the conclusion that that might be something German-specific. And if you read some German magazines, you will almost certainly read something death-related in the “Science” block: euthanasia, the climate that kills us, our children will not live better than us (accept it and die, you progress-oriented scum).

WHAT THE FUCK, GUYS? Do you (and the rest of the society) all of a sudden prepare to die in your mid-twenties? How the hell can you care about your death than about your life? I, for one, care more about what I will create in my lifetime. What happens afterwards is (largely) beyond my responsibility, except for things I will have done myself (like raising kids, solving P=NP or the like). And worrying about things I cannot change is just a pure waste of time. Seriously, guys. Research some neuroscience instead. If you do not, you will almost certainly die out and the future generations of other societies will point and laugh at those retards that extinguished themselves voluntarily.

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Say NO to drugs and bad IDEs!

I guess I would be more productive if I spent the time writing this post actually coding for any of the two projects I have going on, but I have to vent or I’ll just go on swearing in real life.

So, one project involves writing generic neural network code and training it on robots. The first part is actually fun (if you can wait long enough and accept that your toy functions need a lot of time to get optimized). The second part is turning into a small nightmare. Why?

  • First, the idea is that the robots are tested in a virtual environment which is run by proprietary (and the bad kind of proprietary: the one developed by small companies with strict licensing policies) software that need to be connected to the license server all the time for no reason other than authenticating your license.
  • Second, the software provides a development environment. Which sounds better than it actually is—it is just an editor with code highlighting and keyword completion. Think Kate or Notepad++. While I have been coding somewhat non-trivial database applications in PHP, like, six years ago with nothing more than an advanced editor with code highlighting, I then was not bound by any kind of deadline or any other obligation—it was a “just for fun” project—and I moved later on to better-suited tools.
  • Third, the lack of any publicly available documentation makes me code by example, which is somewhat acceptable in a small context (as I will just need to plug in the sensors into the ANN and the ANN outputs into the robot driving system), but, generally, it is just impossible, since all the cool libraries (like Qt) are not available and I am left alone with STL and Boost.
  • Fourth, and the most important part: The run/test cycles are completely inadequate for a three-week project. Training an ANN for a robot means running the simulation in real-time and praying that the ANN topology is just right and the stars stand in the positions suited for such shamanic work.

This left me with one exit: I had to code and debug the ANN code separately. Which has its own fun parts since if you have no idea what to expect from a dynamic system, you cannot tell for sure if its behavior is the intended one. But the run/test cycles are here at least less than one minute.

(The current music running in my earphones—Kill Dash Nine by Monzy—reflects my feelings towards the Webots software package as whole and the buddies that come up with such problems)

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Oslo

I have been to Oslo on Saturday. I managed to take a whole lot of pictures, but nevertheless I also want to tell you something that did not quite fit in the camera. Foremost, one of the main problems of Oslo is that you have to look very carefully for a spot to make pictures from — the city is somewhat dense. Another thing that strikes really hard is the contrast between different parts of Oslo. When you are riding to Holmenkollen (where we were heading to) on the tram, you see a lot of cute little, mostly wooden, houses and you might be inclined to think that spending a significant part of your life in Norway does not sound that bad. Near the train station, the city looks more Amsterdam — a lot of building is going on, and there are a lot of semi-skyscrapers (lower than in Frankfurt, but higher than in your average city). Then, if you go further north from the station, you come — very abruptly — into a part of the city that looks very ghetto-like: graffitis, old houses, strange people running around, stuff like that. I was somewhat happy to get out of that neighborhood.

Another thing that is not mentioned in the pictures is the ride to Oslo and back. Norway is a long country, so, the train from Trondheim needs quite a while (about seven hours) to reach Oslo. The most sensible way to travel is to do it overnight, so you can get some sleep and do not lose time in the transit. The ride back was with a bus — similar time schedule, less comfortable, but also a little cheaper.

Yeah, yeah, you are bored and need more pics. Here they come:

One of the impressions from Holmenkollen was that almost every Norwegian there was really drunk — and that even before they won that 50km race. No, really, nearly everyone had a bottle in his or her hands and when the race was over, somebody cried “Swedes go home!” (because the Swedish racers did not perform good).

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Languages

Learning languages is fun. For me, the fun comes from discovering parallels, which really works only inside one family. Having learned six languages (in no particular order: English, Russian, German, Ukrainian, French and Norwegian), it is fun to see how much they actually have in common. It begins with very simple things, like similar words that have similar meanings (like drei (German) — trois (French) — tre (Norwegian) — three — три (Russian / Ukrainian) or the verb “to be” which mostly preserved its inflections or common roots. But the most amazing things are common semantic networks and common connotations, for example “light” as “easy” or the common roots of “understand” and “verstehen”. If you have some spare time, look up the origin of the word “science” 😉

Another thing that is really interesting are the ways different languages try to handle linguistic phenomena: The definiteness/indefiniteness problem was solved in Western European languages by the means of articles (and dude, the usage of articles is really diverse — just look at Norwegian), while the Slavic languages rely on implicit semantics to carry definiteness. And this is only one example, there is a lot more to discover in linguistics, for example the use of prepositions which differs a lot across Europe. Or the different kinds of inflections: German and Icelandic preserved a whole lot of inflection rules (like matching the adjective to the corresponding noun in the correct case), while other languages from the same group did not (English, for example).

The main thing I can take from learning that much languages is that with six languages, you can understand a whole lot of Europe (if you have some imagination, you will be limited only by languages from another language families like Finnish or Hungarian) and the Americas: With Norwegian, you can be understood anywhere in Scandinavia, German and English cover the rest of the Germanic group, French gives enough to understand Italian and a bit of Spanish / Portuguese and with Russian and Ukrainian, it is possible to at least read any other Slavic language. I missed the Baltic languages: they seem like a mix of Slavic and Germanic cores and something else and you have to put more effort into understanding them.

And it is really cool. You can finally read all those Facebook posts in seemingly cryptic languages 😉

This, however, does not save you from the problem of understanding a spoken language: The phonetic characteristics are even more different than the grammatical and lexical ones. For example, you have to train hard to be able to dissect spoken Norwegian into distinct words, if you are used to German or English.

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Spring

So, slowly, spring is coming to Norway. This means that the day temperature is consistently over zero and there is no snow on the streets. This also means that some people are running around in t-shirts (while I decided to remove my scarf and my hat from my daily look). Fun, fun, fun.

Since I came here, I have heard consistent rumors that there exists a bus to Sweden that takes people to a supermarket where everything is (kinda) cheaper. The rumors proved right, and with some hacking, you could misuse the bus to get to Sweden and go from the nearest train station directly to Stockholm. Which might be interesting information for those from TU Dortmund who are going here or to Stockholm next semester.

Speaking about the bus, I was reminded of a rather old Soviet joke from the eighties referring to food distribution problems: “What is long, green and smells of sausages?” — “The train from Moscow to the suburbs”. In this case, the question should be “What is short, white and smells of food and alcohol?”, since even in Sweden, the alcoholic beverages are cheaper than in Norway. There also exist theoretical restrictions on the amount of food and alcohol you can get across the border; in practice, the border is wide open. Kinda hard to enforce import restrictions if you are a a member of the Schengen treaty but outside the EU.

In other news: I finally managed to finish Andreas Eschbach’s “The Jesus Video”. Well. I certainly liked the first two thirds, but the end was somewhat disappointing — the character development is abrupt and very uneven. Next on the list is “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson and as I know him, it will take some time.