cat /proc/claus

A few weeks ago, I got from a Couchsurfer a pack of Kangaroo meat as a present. In the package, there was an illustration of a herd of Kangaroos in the wild. That got me thinking about one of the things I find most surreal in our world.

Have you ever noticed how many packages for animal-based foods, or restaurants which specialize in a kind of animal, often sport images of such animal in a happy or cartoonish way? Like the pork restaurant with a cute pig with a chef hat in the billboard, or the fried squid tents in Japan with a happy squid preparing the fried squid balls. Now, while I don’t object in any way to eating meat, these kind of illustrations are just creepy to me. I mean, the animals probably wouldn’t be too happy about being eaten, and certainly would not be preparing the food themselves. Really, it is just WRONG.

When my RPG player blood is strong, I often enjoy imagining counterpart scenarios, like festivals made by trolls and orcs where images of cute little boys or smiling women illustrate the tent where they sell snacks made of unlucky adventurers…

By the way, the Kangaroo meat was not that good, if you were wondering.

I was talking to a friend these days about our childhoods, and I heard something that stuck to my mind.

There is a holiday in Japan for the birthday of the emperor. Currently, this day falls on December 23rd. However, during the previous emperor’s reign, of course, the holiday was in a different day. After that emperor died, however, that date remained as a holiday, and it’s name was changed to “Green Day” or “Nature’s day” (and if you never knew where “midori no hi” came from, now you know).

Now, when she was a kid, this friend thought that, since the former emperor’s birthday was still a holiday, eventually, after a number of emperors had passed, most of the year would be made of holidays! So, in her kid mind, she wanted the emperors to die as quickly as possible, so she could have more days off school.

I found this pretty amusing

Today I woke up at 5:00AM because some Couchsurfers were leaving early to take a plane in Narita. Actually, I don’t mind it at all. I read some news on the net, put the trash out, and then after 1 hour went back to sleep.

When I went back to sleep, however, I actually started thinking about Sleeping. Sleeping is a fascinating function of most higher animals that we still don’t understand fully - what exactly is its function, how much sleep do we need, how it works. The second question in particular was grabbing my mind at the time.

How much sleep do we need? The common answer is about 8 hours of sleep per night for an adult. Some people live on 6 hours sleep routines (I did for a while). Yesterday, I went to bed around 1 in the morning, and, having woken up at 5, that puts me at 4 hours. Since I had no reason to stay awake, I decided to “fill my quota”, by sleeping another 2 or 3 hours before waking up for good.

But is it okay if we sleep 4 hours, stay awake 2, and then sleep another four? What about 4 hours sleeping, 4 awake, 4 sleep? What about breaking it in small intervals? Or one big 6 hour interval and three 1 hour intervals? I was thinking about that. I remembered a story about a famous scientist (was it Newton? or DaVinci?) who was said to live in a “sleep one hour, stay 3 awake” schedule (XKCD has a different suggestion). At these times I wish I had been a neurologist…

Eventually I went back to sleep, but now with the late spring sun rising early in the morning, I was up again by eight. Well, all the better for me to get to work, but now I must start taking care not to sleep too late if I want a full night of rest before the sun wakes me up

Small script that might be useful for analysing data. The script takes multiple files (filemask is $1) which are composed of data columns, and produces the average of each data point across the files. Leaving around for future reference.

Usage: $ average.sh “filename.*” > filename.avg

sum=`ls -l $1 | wc -l`
tf=`ls $1 | tail -n 1`
fld=`tail -n 1 $tf | wc -w`

count=1
while [ $count -lt $(($fld + 1)) ]; do
paste -d” ” $1 | nawk -v s=”$sum”\
-v fld=”$fld” -v f=”$count” ‘{
for(i=0;i< =s-1;i++)
{
ta=f + i*fld
tta=tta+$ta
}
print tta/s
tta=0
}' >> tmp$count
count=$(($count + 1))
done
paste -d” ” tmp*
rm tmp*

Bonus points for anyone who can make the above code simpler.

UPDATE: Thanks Pat for the bugfix. Whups.

Two days ago I went to this Nomikai (work-related drinking “parties”) with some industry contacts of my lab. While the nomikai itself was not very exciting (I don’t really like this kind of Japanese event, but that’s for another post), I had a nice little neat idea while chatting there.

One of the research topics addressed in my laboratory is the use of Evolutionary Computation to assist in music composition. Basically, a EC algorithm generates multiple small pieces of music, which are evaluated by the human composer, and those evaluation scores are sent back to the computer, which try to generate a new generation of pieces similar to those which received a high score. This particular framework of evolutionary computation is called “Interactive Evolutionary Computation” (IEC) [1], because the fitness function is a human operator, and not a algorithmic function.

A big issue IEC is “user burden”. Evolutionary computation is based on scoring multiple candidate solutions, many times - when this evaluation is done by a human, instead of a computer program, the user may get tired after scoring too many individuals. To avoid that, it is important to either use the least amount of evaluations as possible, or make the evaluation as quick and painless to the user as possible - a lot of research has been done in both areas.

Now, the idea - how about using the concept of crowd sourcing to IEC? Instead of having one user evaluating the songs, we would have multiple users evaluating them in a asynchronous manner. The example we thought up would be a website where, say, mobile ring tones are generated by EC, with downloads and user evaluation being used as scores. Every few days(?), these values would be used to generate new tones, which would replace the old ones. This could not only generate more interesting tones, but also be able to “track” or “follow” fashions or memes of users.

A quick google search on the above keywords seemed to reveal that this is still a new idea (nothing relevant shows up on the first page for “crowd-sourcing IEC” and “crowd-sourcing composition” only show non-EC approaches [2]). Try it while it is fresh. Brainstorming in the comments is welcome

Links
[1] IEC on Wikipedia
[2] Crowdsourcing Composition