Hi Folks, it's been well over a year since I posted, so it's time to let this site RIP. I am continuing a casual speech technology tracker at the old URL here, if you're interested. Otherwise, you can keep up on pictures on my Flickr page.

Best for 2007!

Happy New Years! Thank you for all you 250+ people who have come by to check my site since October. Sorry for the silence. In brief, I finished my degree, in a final stretch of intense essay-writing, went on a road trip with my buddy Andrew to New Zealand, left the antipodes to celebrate Christmas in Hamburg with my family and spend two amazing weeks with Guy and friends in Quebec (a quick surprise visit). I'm currently sitting at Montreal airport writing these lines, which is an appropriate place to write this update, emblematic of the next junction of what has been a very disjointed (if phantastic) thirteen-odd months. From this weekend onwards I'll be a citizen of Berlin, my new home for the forseeable future. I'd like to keep the posts coming and seeing that change is once again imminent, I'll probably actually do so.

Much love and all the best for 2006!

Okko

Went away the past two weekends, in spite of the end of term madness that's impending. Here are some pics of the weekend getaways in Canberra and Blue Mountains. Canberra is what you'd expect when you hear it's an artificial town built solely for the purpose of hosting the Australian government. Pretty backdrop of mountains though and a much more temparate climate than Sydney (or coastal NSW in general), which was refreshing. The Blue Mountains are more of a rolling hills with an impressive number of cliff formations. They get their name from the blue haze that hovers over them, which is produced by oil vapors of the vast eucalyptus forests covering them. The pictures are taken on a bush walk around Wentworth Falls, which my friends Irmine and Willem-Jan and I went on.

Here's a review of Gould's Book of Fish. More from me later this month, when uni calms down a bit. Til then!

Hey folks, here is a travel account of my trip to Bali with Guylaine a few weeks ago. We had a great time and are trying not to let the bombings of October 1st taint our experience too much. Even if we don't get to go back (too much to see on this planet) letting that happen would seem like giving in to the wrong message, so we'll try to remember the good people we met and the sheer beauty of the place...

In other news, this semester is short of a month from being over. So in the next three to four week I suspect I'll be a hectic wreck trying to get papers done and whatnot, while doing my best to make the most of my remaining time here. It's not entirely sure where I'll be come January, but it may not be here, so I'm treating this as the last spurt. I do however know where I am from November 27th until December 13th, since Andrew and I have booked flights for New Zealand, which I am insanely stoked about. We'll book a camping van and drive around for most of that, so expect lots of nature photography and hopefully some good stories when we come back.

For now, here is a critical literature review I wrote about the differences in accounts of causality in cognition under various A.I. and philosophical paradigms that deal with cognition. 'Causality' here roughly refers to how action in living/'intelligent' things is caused by inner states. The paradigms discussed are classical A.I., Connectionism and Dynamic Systems Theory, which represent the three main research programs tackling cognition and questions of how to model/simulate it during the past 30-odd years. I make reference to a fourth proposal along the lines put forth by Aaron Sloman, whose work I've already explored in earlier papers. Let me know what you think if you have a chance to read it.

Coming soon (hopefully): A review of Gould's Book of Fish, which I read while in Bali.

Oh, and while I hate doing meta-blogging, I just wanna say that I will make some changes to the site since some people have complained that the little icons I use to represent various types of links aren't exactly clear to identify. They are a wine class, an old-fashioned camera, a printing press and a movie reel, roughly linking to recipes (or food reviews), picture galleries, papers (or book reviews), and movie reviews, respectively. I'll blow them up or find better ones some other time. Just thought I'd clarify for you confused souls out there... And I was so proud of them!

Review of A Long Way Down, Nick Horby's latest, here. Also this week: Meat Pie recipe and Meat Pie reviews. Cheers!

NOTE: This entry was written a few weeks ago but I've been very tied up so I haven't really been posting much. Since then I've found a job and the semester has gotten busy quickly, so my apologies if you were dying to hear what I'm up to. If, like most, you're not and I've since talked to you, then don't worry, just a few pictures from Japan are now up. Enjoy!

Back in Australia. I took a few days since to digest my recent trip to Japan, and I'd be foolish to say I'm done with that. Visiting a new country, a full switch of seasons and seeing Guy after all these months made for a pretty intense experience. I spent three weeks, two in Kyushu (the southernmost of Japan's main islands) and one traveling to Tokyo and Kyoto. Guy had weekends off so we used those to take trips around her town, Miyazaki. A more detailed account and some general impressions are here.

Yesterday, Sunday (NOTE: This was July 18th), was the precise half-way mark of my time in Australia. As it turns out, because of my trip to Japan I've only planned things until about this weekend. So, being rather listless I decided that before fully launching into my routine here for the second half of my Australia experience, I should take the spare time to look at finishing my last paper from last semester, starting a part-time job, making some travel plans for semester two and doing some light Sydney sightseeing. The paper will likely be in some form about the evolution of language. Wasting no time, Guy and I want to go to Bali in September, hopefully not stressing the travel budget too much. (Gotta save some for New Zealand in December.) Sydney still has a number of cool-sounding neighborhoods I haven't seen, so this should be a good week or two.

While in Japan I read and reviewed Nick Hornby's latest, A Long Way Down. Also some cookery happened which I'm planning on sharing, and some more academics (especially on the evolution of language) which I'll post here. Come back soon for those goodies..

I've been keeping a good running regiment this past month, though it's often a bit of an effort in the morning. Yesterday however, after forcing myself out of bed early to go on a run, I was rewarded by the sight of a herd of dolphins traveling along the Sydney shore - a sight not common according to locals. Sad to think I almost missed out on it. Lesson learned, get out of the house even if you don't feel like it.

School work is mostly on track, which kind of explains the two week hiatus. I've got four papers that are done or quasi-done. Feel free to read and comment on them. One is Robert Cummins view of representation, another on Music, Schema-Theory and Neural Nets, yet another is a short seminar paper on Aaron Sloman's work in AI and his theory of intelligent agents (my favorite reading from this semester) and a last one about the Connectionsm/Reductionism debate that was spawned roughly twenty years ago when neuroscience boldly proclaimed it could answer all the philosophical questions in Cognitive Science that Philosophy, Psychology and Linguistics (as well as Symbolic AI) could not. Enjoy. Feel free tell me what you think, as always.

In the midst of all this, I did manage to get out of town for a day last weekend to go see the Hunter Valley and sample some of its wines (Thanks again, Dena!). We went to four different vineyards, Broken Wood, Tempus Two, Little Wines and Bimbadgen Estate, in that order. Broken Wood set the standard for the others, which was not to be surpassed. Tempus Two was a bit of a mass-market, glass-and-steel affair (with its own helicopter). We bailed pretty quickly. Nice looking bottles though. Little Wines was quaint - distinctly a family business. Wines not too exciting, but they make an exquisite port wine, which tasted of maple syrup. Bimbadgen Estate resembled Tempus Two in terms of size (though the glass and steel replaced by hacienda-style pink-washed walls) and approached Broken Wood quality.

On the sampling side, I felt obliged to stick to reds, and whatever Shiraz - the ubiquitous Australian flagship red - was on offer. These rarely disappointed, but few truly overwhelmed. A wonderful surprise were several Sangiovese (Bimbadgen and Broken Wood), of which I brought back a couple of bottles. Broken Wood also offers a fantastic 2003 Pinot Noir, whose grapes were spared by the bush fire of that year, while adopting a distinct smoky flavor. Very special.

Meanwhile, 'winter' has taken hold and the three non-indigenous plants on our street (some type of chestnuts) have lost their leaves, making for good spotting of some of the Lorakeets that tend to congregate in there. Cute little birds that make a lot of noise. Here are some pictures.

Okko-time has been upgraded from Busy to Crunch. Two papers are mostly done, but three are still outstanding, as are two presentations and an exam. This is the good stuff

After a solid week of typing, I got a bad case of cabin fever on Tuesday night and decided to take a half-day off on Wednesday and go on a little trip into town. After well over three months I still hadn't been to Darling Harbour, so I took a bus into town for the afternoon. On the way I discovered a little gem, the Chinese Garden of Friendship, a beautifully constructed walled garden/park located just west of CBD and south of Darling. The Sydney Aquarium was also very impressive, though taking pictures was tough. Snell's Law all over the place. Had to fiddle with exposure and flash quite a bit to get something going. The shark tank was just awe-inspiring.

Also had a chance to try some Italian bread recipe that I heard about a while ago.

Three weeks until I'm off to see Guy in Japan! Better get those papers in.

Weird week. Strange mix of post-Starwars tristesse, bogged down in load of reading and a creeping feeling that 27 years of northern hemisphere biorhythms cannot simply be undone by packing a suitcase. The latter is befuddling since after a week of rain it's gone back to a sunny 22C, which is roughly the weather I'd be expecting right now if I hadn't come here.

I was tempted not to write this one but I did anyway. This one is a completely unedited first draft of my paper on Cummins' view of mental representation, if anyone cares for a bit of proof-reading. Mostly a synopsis for now, and a lot of critical evaluation at the end still to follow. Cheers.

Not much news this week. Rainfall is supposed to be evenly distributed throughout the year here, but if this week is any measure it must rain alot, which Sydney postcards and various agricultural and environmental catastrophes Downunder seem to refute. Anyway, it's been raining. As I said, not much news this week.

Made a neat little dish last night. Nothing special, but thought you might like. Also saw Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes on DVD this week. Thought I'd write a short review

It's 6:30am and already light out. Since May is the new November and usually November is associated with dreadfully dark mornings, I'd say "winter" downunder isn't going to be so bad. Anyway, I'm up, early as it may be for a graduate student, and I don't think I'll be going back to bed.

This recent hiatus (10 days) is largely due to the fact that I've been working out the remnants of the Robert Cummins paper and picking up steam on a few others. I suspect Cummins is onto something critical when he makes the distinction between a mental representation's target and content (as per below). I was wrong in my initial assessment of the theory in that targets are not real world objects. They may be suppositions ('imagine an X') and even when they do refer to real-world objects (whatever that means), targets are quite clearly not those objects (Cummins cautions not to confuse target and referent). In either event, targets are hard to put your finger on. If they're external, they don't do anything to understanding error that a so-called use theory of representation ('usage as meaning') can't do. However a second level of representation (one of 'that which X means when we use X') looks a bit too much like a control structure that I rather doubt exists.

I'm proposing a criticism of Cummins view along those lines, with a suggested remedy to shift away from targets and focus more on 'intenders' (the things that fix contents to their targets and therefore determine 'what do we mean when we use X to represent it'). The reasons for that are two: 1) it gives an account of error that is deals only with things on the erring side and 2) intenders will be easy to find in the real world (in humans and other intelligent systems).

I also cooked more meals worth reporting. A Greek one, Stifado, and a bastardization of the Brazilian Maqueca de Peixe. Enjoy.

Happy May 1st. If you're from one of a number of European countries, it's Labor Day, and you may just be shouting paroles or hitting the streets with nice placats professing your disenfranchisement. Anyway, since this tradition falls on a Sunday this year, numbers should be low.

Last night I cooked my first fish since moving to Sydney. I've been too busy sampling the fried-with-chips variety to really check out the fish markets, but the quality of seafood, as expected, is really quite astounding. Anyway, there was an article in the L.A. Times on cold preparation of seafood recently (thanks O for pointing that out to me), which describes cold-poaching and cold-steaming among other techniques for preparing fish w/out seriously heating it. The result is lovely. Fish that are fried, broiled, steamed or BBQed all have very different textures and flavours. As expected, none of these produce the same kind of texture in a fish as does cold-poaching, during which fillets of fish are submerged in boiling hot liquids (stock usually) until both reach room temperature. This is said to work well with all lean and flaky white fish. Here's my recipe.

I've started seriouly gearing up for my assignments, which I mentioned are all due in the same week. The first to tackle is an essay on the nature of mental representations. Cognitive Science, unlike Behavioural Psychology or other disciplines that eschew talk of 'mental' events, posits that a mind has certain states called 'representations' (roughly correspond to states of the brain, but aren't at all the same thing). These represent things in the outside world. These representations are construed from real-world stimuli and handled by 'functions' of the mind for 'meaning'. One problem in this approach is the nature of error in cognition (i.e. when we are mistaken about the meaning of a certain stimulus).

Apparently, an error cannot easily be explained in terms of a plain theory of representation as it has been formulated to date. This first essay will be exploring the nature of error and the theory of error in linking representations to real-world objects and events posited by Robert Cummins. To Cummins, among others, an error occurs when there is a mismatch between what a mental representation's 'content' (in the mind) "means" (its 'target' in the real world) and what its use in the mind 'intends'. More on this later, but write me if you know anything about this.

Wow that was almost too fast. I've written my first little flash game: Captain Squiggle vs the Squiggly Gnats. CS is an amicable dude, a product of some bored student's imagination, in perpetual struggle with the nemesis of the universe, Sguiggly Gnats! His trusted purple-highlighter-laser is his only defense. Enjoy. To play, just move mouse and click. Oh and let me know if you have comments. Cheers.

Busy week school wise - however it seems the gods of procrastination have once again put me to the test. 95% of my graded material for the semester is due in the last week of the semester. That means 50 pages of essays and an hour and a half of presentations. Let's see if I can break the spell and get some of it done a few weeks ahead of time.

My roommate moves back to London this week so we had a few out-of-town parties/BBQs down in Wollongong, oft and lovingly dubbed The Gong by locals. Was a nice weekend, though a bit of an upset to my bedtime routines. Took some nice pics of the beaches and surrounding landscapes though, which I posted here along side some pics of Chinatown.

Sydney Chinatown was a bit of a dissapointment. Having seen New York, Toronto, Boston and Montreal (ordered roughly in terms of size, Sydney seemed a bit small and sterile. Though bigger than Montreal, it was nowhere nearly as large and exciting in terms of produce and shopping as the next three. The lunch we had was fantastic though, including some Northern Chinese fare I've never had before (Clay Pot noodles).

In other news, I've started dabbling in some Flash animation recently and hopefully will post some stuff here. No promises, but we'll see what Okko's twisted imagination can come up with.

Sorry for the lack of bloggage. Time has really flown by since vacation, mostly cos school's picked up significantly in terms of pace and work. I've started working on my first major project. I'll be exploring various computational model of the human mind.

Cognitive Sciences (or some cognitive scientists) hold that the human mind is in essence a computer, as defined by the British mathematician Alan Turing. The details of how and the extend to which the mind is indeed a computer are contested. Some take the analogy literally and attempt to delimit the human cognitive framework in computational terms (most notably Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn). This has prompted a debate over whether our understanding of the mind is guided too strongly by our understanding of modern (digital) computers.

Fodor and Pylyshyn will disagree, but the point is valid; Turing's thought experiments - which showed that all the complicated things that the mind does can be expressed in terms of dumb computation - supposed a machine much different from modern computers. Further analogies between short-term/working memory to RAM and long-term memory to harddisk storage, while useful, are plainly speaking on the wrong track.

I think there are many valuable things to be taken from computational mind models. Interrestingly it's not from outside criticism, but from among believers of this view that the most interresting points are coming. They mostly concern the ways in which information, knowledge and skills are represented by the mind, hilighting limitations of said models. That's where I think I'll pick up in this project.

Anyway, these are just a few thoughts on mind and computation that I've been having. If you've had thoughts or have strong feelings on this, or investigated along those lines, let me know. Cheers.

Oh and here is my work in progress on ranking Fish and Chips I've been eating. Bon apetit.

I managed to squeeze a five day trip to Tasmania with two friends into my Easter week. It seems much neglected by locals and even many long-term tourists alike, even though it's perfectly accessible by plane, or even boat if you're bringing your car. I'd say is a must-see, from what I took away from it this week. Maybe it's the temperate climate that people try to get away from when they come to Australia, but I went and I absolutely loved it. Here is an account of my trip out there.

In my continuous effort to bring you footage of Australian wildlife, here is a Wallaby (more on these small kangaroos in my account of Tasmania.)

Not much other news obviously. Pictures from Tasmania are accessible from the link above, but can be seen here, here, here, and here. Now I gotta make sure I don't fall behind in my reading, so back to it. Happy belated Easter and April Fools (no pranks from me).

Took a well-deserved break from Sydney this weekend and went camping with my new roommates and a ton of their friends to the pretty Bouddi National Park. Thanks for inviting me guys! Took a couple of pictures. The park is small but quite lovely. It consists of a few hilltops at the base of which are thick eucalyptus forests. It's border to the ocean is mostly stunning cliffs with some really neat rock formations. There are three beaches connected by hiking trails. Even though there were people's homes less than a ten minute walk from the campsite it all felt pretty secluded anyway. Our tents were about forty meters from the ocean, and sleeping with the sound of the surf was kind of novel.

Wildlife was a bit scant but had a few interresting encounters. The first one was with some Thieving Magpies, who were ubiquitous and, arrrrrgh always after meee hot cross buns. More interresting were the Kookaburras, who look a bit like giant Kingfishers, and are really pretty. And as some fellow campers experienced, they like saussage (making them the coolest birds ever in my book.) They like saussages because they resemble snakes, which they hunt. Here's an amusing video (sorry, kind of large) of how much they like saussage, and what they would do with a snake if they caught one.

Culinarily, not much news this week. Much of the weekend was drinking beers and some lovely Shiraz on the campsite, but we did manage to go on a token 4km hike which built up a healthy appetite and prompted the purchase of meat pie on the way home. For the uninitiated, meat pie is fluffy pastry filled with meat, and a big thing in Australia. When my Top-5 list of Sydney Fish'n'Chips is done, I'll start a similar one for meat pies, promise.

I've got a week off in early April, which I'll probably spend traveling to and fro around Sydney, or to Tasmania. Haven't quite decided yet, but should be fun either way.

Anyway, happy start of spring/fall to all of you, depending on where you are.

Another week gone by. Finally did some sightseeing around the better known parts of Sydney. Went to Hyde Park, Oxford Street, CBD, Harbor, walked through the Rocks, past the opera house and back through the botanical gardens. Then had beer at a lawn bowling facility in Clovelly. Interresting day. Starting to get different perspectives of Sydney, which helps orientation and a general feeling of connectedness. Anyway, here are some pictures I took.

Also went to see the Aviator. Here's a review.

I'm going to start a Fish and Chips restaurant review here soon. Have tried three different ones so far, but figure I'll need critical mass of at least five to start a serious list. Coming soon.

Here are some thoughts on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami, which I finished reading about a week ago.

Flying over Australia makes you feel like you're looking at a large sun-dried tomato... a stunning sun-dried tomato.

Whooheee, time flies. It's been a while, but I guess lot's has happened to merit such a delay. Let's see, in brief, I liquidated or stored all my assets in Montreal, visited my family in Hamburg and moved to Sydney. But who cares about all that, you wanna hear about what's been happening now and here, right?

Well, in short the settling in was as smooth as anyone could've hoped for. I spent three nights at a backpackers on Bondi Beach (a dump, but not writing review here, cos I couldn't have expected any more). During that time I went out to hunt for apartments, successfully, now living with two really cool roommates in Randwick, near the UNSW Kensington campus.

Uni has been incredibly welcoming by organizing a range of events from tours to weekend getaways. The school, and especially the school's international student services (ISS)have spared no cost or effort. Here're a couple of pictures from one trip, a walk from world famous Bondi beach to my personal favourite Coogee beach... and some spiders

I'm sure I have more to report about life in Sydney over the next couple of weeks/months. But my initial reactions are 'this place is fresh' (stealing an expression from my friend Yael) and 'this place is hilly'. 'Fresh' I think has to do with the eucalyptus trees that grow everywhere. Hilly was something I didn't see on all those aerial photos, but hey, gets me in shape. Unfortunately most birds here make some of the world's most annoying sounds. Nothing like European song-birgs, although I admit the local ones look much cooler (even those huge black and white crow things.)

While this has been a fantastic month in terms of new impressions, I've pursued some older passions, mostly reading. Two books I've finished reading this month are Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex and Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (review for the latter coming soon - still digesting it.)

Cookery has been a bit low recently with so much going on, but I did make a nice duck for my parents when I was home. Here's how. Inspiration (a.k.a. Cooking without some key ingredients) came from this book by Greg and Lucy Malouf, which I found was a gem of Middle Eastern recipes, cuisines that have unfortunately been pigeon-holed as boring and bland in the past.

I've got a host of thought swarming in my head since I started uni, but I'll wait until thoughts are a bit clearer to post them and start discussions. In particular, the mind-technology analogy is something I intent to explore further this year. Feel free to add thoughts here.

Oh and surfers suck. I'm not surfing (revision one of my list below.) Replace 'surfing' with 'scouting the city's best fish and chip restaurants' (a task much more noble.)

Until next week!

So it's done. I'm almost moved out. Place is rented, things are sold or stored. I think I can sleep a bit tighter from now on, which is much needed since I haven't been exactly kind to myself in this whole moving and packing adventure. Let's just say the level of stress is inversely proportional to quality of food consumed (but directly proportional to the comfort of the food consumed). Here's a review.

So after all that, I've finally had some time to add to the site and do a bit of reflection of what's coming up. First off, I'd like to praise all the Australian bureaucracy I've had to go through to get here. From my UNSW application to getting health insurance and a student visa, it's been the most plug-and-play, streamlined process imaginable. There were alphanumeric reference numbers to copy from the university's websites and paste into the immigration one. Online forms galore. Ample what-next notifications. And my student visa took a grand total of five working days after I submitted the application to get to me. I think the only thing I had to get out of my chair for was taking a chest X-ray to prove I don't have TB. Oh well. Anyway, go Australia!

All that being said, it's a funny feeling getting up and leaving so many people, places and things behind. I suppose most people go through this once or twice in their lives. I've done it three times, so I should know what I'm getting into. Yet somehow every time is different, which makes this incredibly exciting. So what do I want to get out of going back to school in Australia?

There's the obvious: Education. This constitutes the largest investment in time and money for the coming year. Since my degree will be multi-disciplinary, I think I'll need to re-adjust intellectually to a slew of new ideas, which is exciting. My writing has suffered in the last four years (from not writing) and that's a little less exciting.

Then there's the other obvious: Meet new people. This is something I've had to do very little of on my own in recent years, and it'll probably be what will take the most energy and adjustment in the first few weeks. But I hear people are friendly over there.

The third obvious is learning to surf.

Get a tan.

Climb the Blue Mountains.

Scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef.

If you have suggestions what I need to do during the next ten months, post it here and I'll write a report on it when I do it.

I'll probably be offline until early March, when I'm hopefully settled in. Until then here is a collection of 101 Hungarian TV commercials from the 1980s!

Been a busy week, but thought I'd put down a few lines tonight. Went to see Clint Eastwoods new film Million Dollar Baby tonight, starring himself, Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank. Reviewed it here

Moving out, selling stuff and packing is coming along OK - about 60% done. Kind of tiring as I'm still working, but if there's no snags I'll be off to Australia soon, which is an intoxicating thought. Wish me luck.

Happy New Year Folks!

Just a short happy entry. I got into school, so I'm officially off to Australia in a few weeks. Now comes the fun part of packing, selling, storing and bureaucratic hurdle jumps. Sounds olympic, doesn't it?

All the best for 2005!

Back in Montreal. Hope that all who celebrated it had a nice Christmas. Air France made up for their pre-Xmas debacle and I had a pleasant flight back. Hamburg-Montreal, 13 hours door to door.

Our good intentions for Christmas payed off. Only four presents per person on average. That's about 30% of the possible maximum. I think we can be proud.

I recently read the Russian Debutante's Handbook. Here is a review.

Off to Toronto for New Years. Best wishes to everyone.

Home for Christmas! We've finally done it: No gifts for anyone in the family this year. Celebrations tend to be about 15 people, so doing a quick calculation to determine how many presents each that should come to (if we all got presents for everyone except ourself, i.e. 15^2 - 15), we quickly reach 210 presents. That's about 21 square meters of gift wrapping paper (e.g. the floor space of a normal apartment for two in Tokyo) plus 100 meters of jolly stringy things (e.g. two lanes of an Olympic size swimming pool). Anyway, not really necessary for joy and goodwill, so we made a pact not to give any.

I was thinking of ranting about Air France a little bit. They've successfully turned a twelve-hour trip home into an eighteen-hour one, without real compensation, bringing my Minor Catastrophy Trips with them in the past three years to eight, or about 67%. But after realizing that for once it wasn't their fault (heavy storms in northern France), I've decided not to rant, or figured I'd feel good enough if I only said I wanted to rant and left it at that.

We went to go get my grandmother for Christmas yesterday and the car ride made for some wonderful photo opportunities. I like the effect of these sunset pictures, a compounded effect of the speed of the car and the dirt on the car windows through which I took them. Small aside: if you use a digital camera in cold and possibly humid climate, and your batteries are low, don't be surprised if your camera forgets to write the pictures you took. A walk in the magical woods of Ihlow earlier that day, abounding with beautiful imagery, turned into a bit of a disappointment when I realized sub-zero temperatures and low batteries kept my camera from writing anything. Bummer. Oh well next time.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 15th 2004

I found some pictures from a trip to New York that I made with Guy and our friend Andrew in September. I've been meaning to post them for some time. Here they are.

I'm leaving for Germany for ten days the day after tomorrow, and probably won't write much here until I get back. I promise to bring back pictures of Christmas and some recipes. Until then...

Happy Holidays!

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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12th 2004

If you ever wanted to know why not to deep fry entire turkeys - or why many devices manufactured for that purpose are a bad idea - check out this educational short film. Spanish version in second half.

Remember the bouncing snowman I saw last week? Well he's really a penguin and I finally caught him on camera. Here he is.

Went to see Oceans Twelve last night. Don't see it gaining too great a cult following, but I can see a few options for amusing 'spot that reference' drinking games. Very enjoyable.

Happy 3rd Advent!

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THURSDAY, DECEMBER 9th 2004

I've done it - I think this layout is much superior to the previous full-page one. This one should be much more viewable for all sort of browser-screen-size combinations.

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WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8th 2004

Quick entry today. I plan to make a few more modifications on this site in the near future, like adding a less cumbersome and ad-free discussion board and improving cross-browser compatibility, but I think I have the basic webpage structure working for now. In the not-so-immediate future I might use tables instead of frames, update everything to XHTML, use Style Sheets to control fonts etc, but I'll keep it as-is for now. Don't want to spend too much time on details of layout if things are looking OK. Send me feedback if you find anything you see is off, or could use improvement.

I had another discussion with a friend, Omar, about the text-as-medium rather than 'meaning' issue. A good example I hadn't thought about that Omar brought up is the presentation of printed text, especially poetry, in specific layout or format. Poetry already heavily relies on line-length in printing to mirror or emphasize rhythm, meter and rhyme, but some poets take it a step further and make the specific layout of the printed text part of the work itself, such as e e cummings' lower-case writing. HTML provides another a striking example of how text is a medium where presentation is as important as 'meaning'.

I saw a rather ridiculous Christmas decoration in the window of a local hardware store. Basically it was a five-foot snowman, rigged to a chain of little lights, attached to some insane pulling mechanism that made him bounce around the window. His giant nose got squashed about twice a second in the window glass. Gave me a chuckle. Will swing by tomorrow to take a pic and post it here.

Lastly, I'm coming down with a cold, so I made myself some yummy mushrooms for dinner tonite.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 4th 2004

Guy's gone now, so things are a bit empty around the house. The two kitty cats are still living with me. We keep ourselves entertained. It's been snowing more, so I think I'll spend the weekend at home.

I went to see Alexander on Thursday night. Reviews were fairly unforgiving. I thought Oliver Stone could bring something to a movie about Classical Greek history that Wolfgang Peterson (Troy) couldn't. This is somewhat true, and that something I've tried to describe here .

I've been having some Cognitive Science thoughts. Actually more about the technology-mind interface. My buddy Mike is working on his PhD comprehensive exam and, among other things, talked about our understanding of 'text' and 'writing' as media. To him, with the invention of printing, typewriting and digitization of text, textual formats become standardized to the effect that people no longer viewed text as 'meaning' rather than another medium. We speculated in discussion over some beers on Thursday that this transition has come full circle (my choice of words) by looking at language technologies. Speech rec has made speech as a medium auditory again (and in conjunction with text-to-speech audible too) and this completed a circle in which speech in general (not just text) can be seen as simply a medium like text, bereft of meaning, i.e. something that exists outside (though not completely) any human headspace.

Anyway, that's what I walked away with, so correct me if I'm wrong, Mike.

This prompted some thinking on my part, trying to explore the traditional mind-technology analogy. I read somewhere recently about how historically the latest state of technology represented a common model for the human mind. Examples were a catapult in antiquity, a telephone switchboard in the 1930s and a computer recently. These analogies are interresting as a collection of cultural artifacts. However the most recent model (the computational one) no longer stands as a simple analogy. The mind-computer analogy has become really an interface (in AI, speech technology and related disciplines) where there's sufficient feedback between the understanding of mind (or parts of it) and technology for the two to distinctly influence each other. This, I believe, is new in the history of the understanding of the mind. Certainly catapults and telephone switchboards weren't inspired by analogies with human capacities, in the same way that speech recognition and AI in computer games are.

I've set up a discussion board, for anyone interrested in sharing their thoughts.

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WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1st 2004

This year's first snow came falling about 7am. Quickly turned into ice rain at about 9:30. Working from home today, since Guylaine is leaving for Japan tomorrow. Getting some quality time together. That means mostly last minute packing and doing taxes. Drinking some hot chocolate at home is also rather nice.

Last night we went to the Baton Rouge. It was the first restaurant I ate at in Montreal, January 1st 1998. Almost exactly 7 years ago. A week before the Ice Storm of '97 that crippled the power grid in eastern Canada ... And by 'crippled' I meant that, from a student perspective, not going to classes, hanging out at friends' houses (if they had friends who had electricity) or live in hotels for two weeks.

Icy rain then and now, Baton Rouge then and now, me arriving and Guy leaving, 7 years in Montreal. All feels like something has come full circle ... or at least it feels like events today have meaningful connection with those back then. Either way, it makes me feel it's good timing to move on, shake things up and hit grad school soon.

That being said, the Baton Rouge has become a pretty over-priced restaurant with a long line up. Don't go, at least not too often.

So as it looks like now, I'll be studying Cognitive Science next year. I'll be posting my thoughts on that, before and while I study on this site, to share with anyone interrested. Would be nice to get a dialogue going on some issues. Feedback is always welcome and can be provided here or here.

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