The Vending Machine

It is hot in Germany right now, too hot.

I had just had two oral examinations in a stifling hot room with the sweat pouring down my back. I passed a vending machine and remembered that I had forgotten my own water bottle. They had water (terribly expensive BonAqua, but still: water), I tried to puzzle out the price. It looked like 1,25 Euro, which is a scandal. At my school they take 1,05 WITH deposit for water, the same size and brand.

I dug through my coins, I had 1,30 in small change. Okay, dumped it all in, pushed the button. Nothing happens. I push harder, nada. The display shows 1,30. Fine, that's what I put in. Then I spot the sign: all drinks 1,50. 1,50! That is highway robbery, I'm not paying that, I'll stick my head under a faucet or go thirsty for prices like this.

I look for the button to return my change. Nothing. I press all of the buttons, first gently, then hard. Nothing. It just looks at me. I press everything even remotely resembling a button, but still nothing. I root through my coins for a 20, but the smallest coin I have is a 50 cent piece.

Okay, bitter about this hold-up I put the 50 cent piece in. It now blinks 1,80 at me, I press the water button, and it obligingly dispenses the bottle. It blinks 0,30, and then returns something to me - 20 cents. I want to kick the machine, I press all the buttons again, but it keeps my 10 cents. So I end up paying 1,60 for the privledge of cooling off. Well, at least it is cold.

As I open the bottle (examination papers underneath my arm) the carbonation in the bottle causes a fountain of water to erupt. I really didn't need a shower, but now I have one, an expensive one. The examination papers get a little damp, oh well, I'll put that down to the candidate sweating. And I resolve to boycott Coca-Cola products.

Semantic Web - Reinventing the Wheel

Since computer scientists don't bother with history and can't stomach looking through all the stuff that has been published in the field over the last 50 years or so, we constantly have situations where people are actually reinventing the wheel, so to speak. Some examples:

• Parsing was dead as a doornail. Compiler construction was being removed from curricula all over the world. Then XML shows up as a great way to transfer data between applications because the data is tagged to suggest semantics. I am greatly amused at the feeble efforts some start to try and parse these rather well-formed terms. People tend to be very surprised that there is acutally mathematics behind this (going back to the '50s!) that tell us how to parse, for example, things that can be expressed with a context-free grammar.
• We've known how to set up good file systems with Unix for years. But Windows keeps making up new systems that are broken. Ditto for graphical systems, databases, operating systems, you name it. People just seem to start from scratch without looking at best practices.
• The Semantic Web takes the cake, in my opinion. I am violently in disagreement with the opinion that one can set up a hierarchy of key words ("Ontology") for describing all of something. I have worked too long in library systems to believe this. If only people would look at how libraries look for materials, we would all be better off.
  Then they go about trying to "match" things. They use extremely primitive methods of matching, often using string matchers. There is an entire body of knowledge on the topic of string matching alone , of which many authors about the Semantic Web seem to be entirely ignorant. They completely ignore most of the work done in mechanical verification about term rewriting (a great book by Tobias Nipkow is "Term Rewriting and all That") and unification, both great mathematical tools for finding things that would be the same if we could force this bit to match that bit.
  Yes, I know. There is a lot of scary mathematics in there. Live with it!

How can we get our colleagues to really look at what has been done before before they start doing stuff? We seem to need to have a web of all the materials already published in computing, and then a semantic web to help us find stuff......

What attracts us?

Survived end-of-term. Just barely....

One of the projects that was presented was a system for matching people, that is, finding people on the system who have similar interests.

I started wondering if this is, indeed, what we really want. Are we looking for syncophats when we are looking for new friends? Of course, we like to share one or two interests with our friends, but not all of them! And it is not clear that I like all other people who are interested in, say, soccer or computers.

I had just seen a great quote the day before when I was looking for a new quote for my home page and found this on Wikiquote: "It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

This I find to be so true - I learn so much more from friends who have other interests than I learn from being around people who are just the same as me. I asked one of the project members for the matching project if he could name one or two things that he and his best friends sitting next to him actually have in common, besides the same thing they are studying. They are all quite different people with quite different interests, yet they are best friends. He could not really find tags that would be unifiable in order to match these three if they had not known each other, but were all entered with all of their interests into the database.

Then Tagesspiegel had this article (which is now not online anymore, but Neon has a similar one, in German) about how women who take the pill tend to choose wrong men because their sense of smell is changed by the pill. Women with babies react to the smell of food, women without are attracted to men who are opposites because this widens the gene pool, so to speak. Women who take the pill simulate a pregnancy, so they are attracted to men for different reasons than they would without, and will not favor dissimilar men.

The old sage "Opposites attract" seems to be not only true for those seeking to procreate, but also for people looking for friends. So maybe matching services should include a little bit of "matches on this, opposite on this other" in their algorithms.

All that remains

It is over, the soccer World Cup. Berlin is returning to normal. The flags have been hauled in, the tattoos are fading, we start having to cope with the realities of higher taxes and a very bad reform of the failing German health system.

What remains of the party? Well, just like during the Wrapped Reichstag in 1995, Berliners have shown that they can be mellow and enjoy a great party. What escapes me is why they can't be like that more often.

Germans are resourceful, as demonstrated in this picture. Here we have a nice café garden with a new tent roof in white and black with a little screen (Neuhochdeutsch: Public viewing area). A rather wobbly table holds a little stand (grandly wrapped in a white linen cloth, Friedenau has style), a TV tuner, and antenna, and a beamer. Since all this equipment produces a lot of heat, and it is beastly hot out, a smaller table holds a fan that has had a collar taped around it to focus the air to the machines. I wonder what the TÜV (German technical overseeing board, they tend not to be amused) thinks of this...

What else remains? Well, we didn't get the subway that was promised us. But the S-train still announces the airport now in English as well as German. The grass will grow back in the parks near the fan mile, but only after they survive the Love Parade and Christopher Street Day, coming up the next two weekends.

And we proved to ourselves that we can still organize some stuff - although the little things still go maddeningly wrong, such as the soccer fields around town being closed over school vacation (so where are the next generation of German soccer players to learn how to handle a ball??).

Observations

I need a new category for something that is not a rant but just the record of an observation....

Sexist comments

• Sexy Girl (April 2006)
  
• Sexy Girl II (July 2006)
• And now for the guys.... (July 2006)
• What attracts us? (July 2006)
• Man or woman? (October 2006)
• Speaking quietly (November 2006)
  

General

• USA 2006 (June 2006)
• Bispingen and the Boat Lift (October 2006)
• Two class medicine (November 2006)
  

Soccer

• Black - Red - Yellow (June 2006)
• All that remains (July 2006)

Rants

• You are not a valued customer (Februar 2006)
• The Vending Machine (July 2006)
• You must speak so that I can hear you (April 2006)
  

Other topical lists:
Home girl life - Wikis - Plagiarism - Book Reviews - Didactics - 'Puter Stuff

The Kings of Our Hearts

Well, at least they made third place, otherwise the Germans would now throw themselves into a deep funk of depression to make up for all this frivolity of the past weeks of the World Cup. There was a sweet show at the Brandenburg Gate today (I only saw it on TV, I am not standing with 500,000+ people in 35 degrees C heat to catch a glimpse of the sunny boys - or to maybe catch a ball they kicked into the crowd).

Most of the players (especially Bastian Schweinsteiger, the one-man-goal-getting-machine of the last game) looked, shall we say, a tad tired? Like as if they had been partying a bit much all night? Whatever, they earned it. And as the party went on, they turned sillier and sillier, singing songs and Schweinsteiger "helping" the drummer of Sportfreunde Stiller (the singers of the new hymn "'54,' 74, '90, 2010") - the drummer gave him his drumsticks.

They all wore the number 82 on their backs and "Danke, Deutschland" on the front. This was far too intellectual for many of the fans, they had no idea what the 82 meant. There was a little "Mio" underneath - they meant "Thanks to all 82 million+ Germans who helped us these past weeks).

But by now we kind of know all the names of the guys. And Germany is still feeling good. I hope this lasts. I am proud of Germany - that they managed to be such a good host and such a good loser, still keeping their good humor. I mean, look at the change in Angela Merkel - could you have imagined her hugging and kissing ice-cool Klinsmann a year ago? Right - what a scene that was when she gave him his medal.

Now, back to work, Germany.

Jetzt wird wieder in die Hände gespuckt, wir steigern das Bruttosozialprodukt. -- Geier Sturzflug

And now for the guys....

Okay, I've been writing too much about girls, time for the guys to get what's coming to them!

I was at Tropical Island over the weekend (without my computer, would you believe, but with some older c'ts and Atlantic Monthly mags). This is a large hall, built for a company planning on building zeppelins before going bankrupt, that was bought for a song by a Malaysian investor and transformed into a South Sea/Brazilian/Thai/WARM paradise. The air is 28 degrees, the water 28-32, and you can stay there 24 hours or longer if you want, hanging out in a bathing suit.

Bored without my computer and the Internet I thought I would do some guy-watching, seeing as how there were lots and lots of guys in various stages of undress walking around.

Let me sum it up like this: I think I know why the Germans are dying out.

There was lots of starch+sugar converted to fat on display, and not just the beer bellies and distended navels. There were guys with breasts some women would give their eye teeth for, and some with massive thighs. Guys with all sorts of tattoos: fancy ones, brutal ones, infected ones (yuck, I was sharing water with that one??). Guys with their heads shaved and guys who had not seen a barber in many a year. Guys wearing big, baggy shorts riding so low I wanted to hand out suspenders.

The occasional good-looking guy tended to be sporting a big, clunky, gold chain. Or smoking up a storm. Or both. Oh, the one dancer from Brazil was cute - he was wearing Brazilian flag underwear, which could be ascertained because his pants were riding very low, below the apex of his back end, held up only by, well, some forward anatomy. It was amazing to watch him move, I fully expected to see the pants fall at any minute (they didn't, maybe he used glue).

Ah well. Maybe they need to add a weight-lifting room. And try and police the very polite signs suggesting that everyone put on some shoes and clothes before heading to the food court.