Well, somehow the week got away from me -- it's been 8 days since my last post. I've got a couple of ideas for some essays, but I haven't really had the time to get them pounded out. They belong in my DumbSwede Slashdot Journal anyway.

Tomorrow is Valentine's day; it's already Valentine's day in China, which is where it matters for me since that is where my wife Nian is. Hopefully she will join me soon here in America, but for now she is there and I am here while we wait for word back from the INS on her K3 visa application. It's been two weeks since we sent the forms in and the best Valentine's present of all would have been getting new in the mail today. Hopefully tomorrow will bring word and would still count as a great omen.

I 've had to resist the effort to work on my "Monkey Typewriter" web toy, which I've mentioned a few times before, to the exclusion of other more important things. I did a little work on it over the weekend and its starting to come together. Now that the word database is constructed and it knows simple things like what are nouns and verbs the strings of sentences no longer look like strings of gibberish as they count down to match a given start sentence in a evolutionary fashion. I could probably get a simple version going with a few more hours of work, but I'm hoping to improve the power of the database to create more interesting synchronicity in the sentences generated.

I went to Wal-Mart yesterday for groceries and a few toiletries. While there I took a look at the new "Fusion" razor from Gillette. At close to four dollars a cartridge they have got to be kidding. Now I figure that with five blades in the front and one on the back it might make for a marginally smother shave, but once it dulls a little it would be virtually indistinguishable from the much cheaper 2 and 3 blade models. In fact at over three bucks a pop, I know I would be tempted to ring extra shaves out of each cartridge leading the irony of a less comfortable shave on average. I picked up some 3-blade generics for less than 50 cents a pop and some 2-blade disposable for less than 20 cents a piece. One blade razors could be had for less than 10 cents each, and keep in mind this includes the handle -- so about 35 fully serviceable complete razors can be had for the price of one "fusion" refill cartridge.

I promise a follow up post soon for how well Nian likes her gift. With any luck I'll also have news about our K3 visa application. Keep your fingers crossed everyone. I don't exactly believe in luck, me being an Agnostic and all, but I've never been one to turn down good wishes or even prayers.

6:05 PM CST

Just watching the Super Bowl and doing some audio experiments during the commercials.

.mp3

ADDENDUM
8:05 PM CST

OMG, what an awful Super Bowl Halftime Show this year. I've never been to a live Rolling Stones concert before, but I'm sure they normally do much better. It really isn't the quality of the individual artists, but the horrible audio mixing. The levels are all wrong, so much so that Mic Jagger's vocals are completely drowned out for several bars at a time. I actually got up to check that my stereo had both channels working. Of course the audio may have sounded fine up close to the 3,000 or so lucky fans in the familiar Stones' mouth and tongue shaped logo mosh-pit, though the aging boomers probably would have shown just as much enthusiasm if the Stones had started belting out a polka.

Things started out in the same before the game with the nation anthem sung by Aaron Neville. At first it was a barely audible whisper. You could almost imagine the sound board guy freaking as he struggled to bring Neville's mike gain up without starting a huge feedback squeal through the hundreds of speakers in the stadium. Neville was on key, but just never seem to be able to project.

I didn't watch the infamous Janet Jackson wardrobe-malfunction halftime, but I did watch Paul McCartney's halftime show last year and it put the Stones' show this year to shame. I wonder what the NFL thinks about the fact that people like me remember the halftime shows (good ones or bad ones) much more easily than the actual games themselves. I'm not really getting into the game again this year, as evidenced by my continued blogging while it is in progress. Still they probably really don' t care why we watch or what we think as long as we tune in every year and they can charge 2.5 million for a 30 second ad. Some of the new commercials have been clever this year, but probably only about one in four are really clever. At 2.5 mil a pop you'd think they'd try harder to do something really revolutionary. You also have to wonder why at these price points only about half of them are produced in HDTV after three or four years of Super Bowls in HDTV.

First things first. For those that are return visitors you may know that last November I married a lovely Chinese woman named Yang Nian. We had both hoped the U of I in Champaign/Urbana Illinois would renew their Scholar exchange program with Jinan University in Guangzhou and we would be reunited permanently in March. That doesn't look likely now, so we have spent the last month gathering and filling out papers to apply for a K3 visa (marriage to American citizen). I sent the papers to the INS Monday overnight mail so they could be pouring over them even now. Nian thinks we are in a for a long approval process, I'm not so pessimistic. We have about 3 steps to complete, and now that we have taken the first one, things should start going faster. How quickly the first set of papers gets approved should be a good indicator of how quickly things should move along (stay tuned).

This last weekend was the Chinese New Year, celebrations last all week in China. It turns out this year, the-year-of-the-dog, is the same animal-year as my birth-year. As such it was important to Nian that I wear special red underwear with a good luck symbol on them to ward off any misfortune in the coming year. Seems in China your birthday or birth-year are not necessarily lucky things unless you take steps to make them so, quite the opposite it would seem. Since it is now Wednesday and I haven't been hit by an errant bus or out of control turnip truck I can only assume the undies did their assigned job of scaring away any malevolent demons wishing to do me harm.

In addition to filled out INS forms in a package Nian sent me recently were special boxes to be filled with candies and given to friends an family to celebrate our marriage. While our marriage was in November there does seem to be good synchronicity with the Chinese New Years and our filing the I-130 for a K3 visa with the INS as the first step towards our life together in the US. Mutual friends of Nian and I gratefully accepted the boxes here State side and a few of my closer coworkers.

Changing gears a bit I had a couple of minor insights in how to code my Monkey-Typewriter application. It isn't in web form yet, but I got a simplified first generation command line version working last week. It was actually a bit of a let down. The transformation of text from one passage into another in an evolutionary driven way was not as amusing or informative has I had hoped. Still it is just one more step along the way to a more ambitious goal dealing with experiments in AI (Artificial Intelligence). In a way Shakespeare-O-Meter and BaBeLiZeR were steps towards Monkey-Typewriter. And BaBeLiZeR and REBUSizer are steps in automatically grabbing needed info directly of from the web to complete a task. All baby steps to be sure.

Anyway, I am constructing a better word-database for Monkey-Typewriter even as I type this. I downloaded the most common 15,000 words used in the English language some time ago as part of the Shakespeare-O-Meter project. Using this list I performed 15,000 web queries from merrium-webster.com to get their definitions. Right now I am doing some ad-hoc automated data analysis to denote the various categories (noun, verb, adjective, etc...) and connections (synonyms, antonyms, related words, etc...) to form the custom database that Monkey-Typewriter will ultimately use. As opposed to its more primitive categorizing methods (similar endings, similar lengths) the first crude version is using now. Hopefully this will result in more natural and interesting looking sentence evolutions.

Back when I worked at Wolfram Research I had had in mind to create a neural net based AI engine that used the feedback of thousands of website visitors to train it into giving useful responses. A first step would have been a proof of concept Eliza or Ractor chatterbot like program whose responses became more entertaining with time by allowing users to modify the web-search and query selection rules in a wiki type fashion. Ultimately I had hoped to develop a genetic algorithm to augment this process that learned from how users modified the query selection rules and question-and-answer database and could improve itself. Users would then grade how well the self-modification performed and reinforce modification schemes that lead to better responses.

All of this would require hundreds of feedback responses per day to have any chance of creating some non-trivial AI engine. Given that few of the toys written to date have had much use, I'm not optimistic about realizing these rather grandiose goals. Still I find that as I write my, admittedly simple, toy applications for BNL I end up creating tools that make writing the next toy easier and hopefully more entertaining. With a little luck I might eventually stumble on something that gets a lot of return repeat use. Nian's brother Yi suggested I develop my projects a little further and perhaps submit them along with a job application to Google. Too bad I missed the bandwagon on getting into Google before its recent IPO.

Well I'm running long again, I really do have to get the hang of making shorter more often postings. I haven't even mentioned Nian and my house hunting. But that is as they say a story for another day.