e pur si muove

What I did this year:

1. Talked to a friend of a real-live geisha.
2. Made a cameo appearance in the 2005 US Department of State Report on Human Rights Practices in Singapore.
3. Saw the most beautiful, unspoiled beaches in the United States.
4. Took my first decent photo of fireworks.
5. Lent my camera to a labmate, who promptly cracked the LCD screen, rendering it promptly useless.
6. Inspired a new culinary concoction.
7. Contributed, even if it were in some trivial part, to a prominent upcoming local production.
8. Experienced the warmest winter (11°C, 53°F) on campus.
9. Spoke at length to one of my favorite cartoonists.
10. Switched away from Bloglines.
11. Witnessed wild turkeys try to cross the road and board a bus.
12. Met up with the Screwy Skeptic, and l’oiseau rebelle, who went somewhat out of her way just to visit me in town. Thanks for the rendang spice mixes! *waves*
13. Adopted my first prospective mei.
14. Passed my PhD candidacy exam.
15. Submitted my first paper for peer review. (The peers, evidently, have been notably lax in
16. Watched my first restored 70 mm print, and relearnt a whole new appreciation for Audrey Hepburn.
17. Gave my first cooking lessons to eager freshmen.
18. Learnt what weltschmerz and escargotiere mean.
19. Coded my 2000^th line of Fortran 90.
20. Got a talk accepted at a national conference.
21. Saw my first pet tortoise being taken for a walk.
22. Lost a close friend.
23. Bade goodbye to a close reader.
24. Had my first server overload.
25. Got put on the map. Literally.

Thank you for you, today’s readers, and for your continued patronage. Sometimes writing on this blog seems like shouting into a marshmallow cloud, but your continued readership and discussion of topics brought up on this blog (and the forum) are greatly appreciated.

For 2006, I’m Elia Diodati.

Did anyone else notice that they hanged Saddam in a holy Muslim month, very close to the peak season of Hajj?

I wonder if there’s any significance to this, or whether I’m just indulging in numerology.

This quote comes from a Thai friend of mine I knew from my undergraduate days. We were talking about scholarships, he then said something that neatly summarized the whole institution of scholarships:

The system encourages people to do well, but it also presents enormous opportunity costs to quit.

What is the Gender Genie?

The Gender Genie is a website claiming to be able to tell the sex of an author solely from a sample text written by said author. The website explains briefly:

Inspired by an article in The New York Times Magazine, the Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.

You’d think that if it made it into a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, it should be solid stuff right? Let’s find out.

Methodology

I chose a selection of blogs for which I thought the results would be the most interesting. No effort was made to ensure random unbiased sampling.

I took the most recent post from each blog listed that was of significant length (>150 words or so) which did not quote extensively from an external source. I then pasted the text into the Gender Genie and clicked through after marking that it is a blog post. Numerical scores calculated were ignored since I am merely testing the final conclusion.
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