Psychonaut's Journal

Nadya makes delicious Zwiebelkuchen, a kind of German onion pie. She uses the recipe from Bavarian Kitchen but adds lots of extra cumin for an interesting Mexican note. It's normally got diced bacon, but we recently had some vegetarian folks over for dinner and found that substituting sun-dried tomatoes works well.

We had been living in Darmstadt for almost six months without ever having switched on our television except to watch DVDs and downloaded movies. But at my insistence Nadya has recently started watching an hour or so of television a day in an effort to improve her German. A few weeks ago she discovered a new documentary series on RTL II called Traumfrau Gesucht. It follows four German bachelors to Eastern Europe where they hope to meet the women of their dreams with the help of a matchmaking agency. The show is fascinating in much the same way as a horrible train wreck. The allure is principally thanks to one of the men, Walther, a 50-year-old travel agent from Berlin. Walther fancies himself a consummate Lothario but is in reality the creepiest and most clueless lecher I've ever had the displeasure of seeing.

In the first video below, Walther invites one of the other bachelors, Karsten (44), to tea "to reveal to him the secrets of Russian women". For those who don't speak German, Walther has taken pity on Karsten, whom he sees as shy and awkward, and has decided to impart to him his valuable wisdom on how to seduce a woman. (Never mind the fact that in the first episode, Walther revealed that before engaging the matchmaking service, he had written unsuccessfully to over 500 women on Internet dating sites.) Lesson one: the right gift. Walther explains that Russian women just love to get little trinkets: in Germany you can get some "guardian angel" bauble for just one euro, but as a gift to the economically backwards Russian women it makes "an unbelievably amazing impression". His second gift suggestion is a cheap little butterfly brooch—Walther proudly demonstrates to Karsten how such presents give one the opportunity to cop a cheap feel from your date(!): "See, you put it like this on her blouse or her jacket, and then you've got your hand on her breast, and she can't do anything about it! When you're giving her a gift, she can't pull back! She's thinking only of the butterfly, but there you are with both your hands on her body!"

It only gets worse from there, but there's no need for me to post any further translation, as the video speaks for itself.

Amazingly, despite Walther's unabashed on-camera admission of his intention to commit sexual assault, the producers turn him loose on the unsuspecting women of St. Petersburg. One of Walther's first dates is Natalia, whom he takes on a "romantic" coach ride in front of the Hermitage. He whips out a box of marzipan pralines and starts hand-feeding them to the poor girl. (In a follow-up interview he explains, "I was expecting her to offer one to me as well so that I could nibble her fingers, but unfortunately that didn't happen.") Then he feigns coldness and starts snuggling up to her, pawing at her, and kissing her. "You like to be a princess?" he says as he starts picking the lint off her jacket, probably not coincidentally focussing on the area around her breasts.

With the exception of Karsten, the other bachelors featured are almost as bad. Manfred (42) has an obvious foot fetish: he selects all his dates on the basis of their footwear, constantly compliments them on their feet, and proposes shoe shopping as a first date. Elvis (28) recently gained something like 50 kg, but sent photos of his younger, thinner self to the matchmaking service. He refuses to wear anything other than a dirty black T-shirt and shorts, even when meeting his dates for the first time.

I'm amazed that a show like this got to air without all those involved in it getting sued into oblivion. Until last year it had been over ten years since I'd had a television, so I missed the whole rise of reality shows and pseudo-documentaries which I suppose are still all the rage now. Is Traumfrau Gesucht typical of what's being produced these days?

One of our favourite foods for breakfast, or for that matter any other meal, is Kaiserschmarrn. Growing up I knew this by its Hungarian name, grízsmarni, but I don't think my grandparents ever made it quite the same way I've come to know it in German and Austrian restaurants.

Kaiserschmarrn could be described as a very large, very fluffy pancake which is cut into large pieces while cooking and into smaller pieces before serving. The batter contains eggwhites which are beaten stiff, and also usually raisins soaked in rum. The finished product is dusted with powdered sugar and served with any number of sweet toppings, including fruit compote, jam, or syrup. In the photo below you can see all the things we serve it with: from left to right, peach compote, lingonberry sauce, raspberry sauce, and cactus jam. We also like it with golden syrup, but had run out on the day we took the photo.

The recipe we use is from Bavarian Kitchen.

I have discovered ambrosia, and its name is kutia.

OK, so I know I already said this yesterday about millet. But Nadya's just made me something which is just as good. Kutia is a sweet groat porridge made from wheatberries and poppy seeds. You all must try it, because it is delicious.

Kutia

Ingredients

• 200 g wheatberries (a.k.a. wheat groats)
• 150 g ground poppy seeds
• 50 g raisins
• 30 g ground hazelnuts, walnuts, or almonds
• ½ cup cream
• honey, sugar, and vanilla sugar to taste

Directions

1. Spread the wheatberries on a large flat surface and pick through them carefully to remove any stones or other foreign material.
2. Wash the wheatberries in a bowl of cold water several times until the water becomes clear. (Or alternatively, put the wheatberries in a sieve and wash under running water.)
3. Put the wheatberries in a pot, cover with twice as much water, and cook on medium heat until very soft (about two hours), stirring occasionally and replacing any water that evaporates. Then drain and let cool.
4. While the wheatberries are cooking, cover the poppy seeds with hot water and let them soak until you can easily smear them between your fingers. Then drain.
5. Pour boiling water over the raisins and let them scald for five minutes, then drain well.
6. Mix all the ingredients together and serve.

Makes three servings.

I was browsing through some old issues of Dragon magazine from the 1980s when I came across the following advertisement for a hilariously awful-looking anti-Soviet role-playing game:

I suppose this game, like the contemporary Red Dawn, was produced to capitalize on the hysteria fostered by Ronald Reagan's anti-détente policies in the Cold War. It makes me wonder whether the Soviet Union likewise produced popular films and games featuring an American invasion.

I have discovered ambrosia, and its name is millet.

Millet, for those who don't know, is a cereal grain which is commonly eaten in Africa, Asia, and some parts of Europe, but is almost unknown in North America, except as animal fodder. But as I recently discovered, millet porridge is fantastic; it's by far the most delicious porridge I've ever had. I far prefer it to oatmeal, semolina, farina (Cream of Wheat), steel-cut oats, grits, rice pudding, or any other hot cereal. Nadya was so surprised at my reaction to millet, since it's considered a boring staple breakfast in Russia, but as someone who's never had it before it was such a wonderful surprise for me!

So without further ado, I present Nadya's recipe for millet porridge, pictured above.

Millet porridge

Ingredients

• ½ cup millet
• 1 cup cold water
• 1 cup cold milk
• sugar and salt (to taste)

Directions

1. Wash the millet grains in a bowl of cold water several times until the water becomes clear. (Or alternatively, put the millet in a fine sieve and wash under running water.)
2. Put the millet and water in a pot, and cook at the highest temperature, stirring constantly, until almost all the water evaporates (about 10 minutes).
3. Reduce heat to medium-low and add the milk, sugar, and salt. Cook until desired thickness (about 15–20 minutes).
4. Remove the pot from the stove, cover in a thick towel, and let stand for 10 minutes.
5. Serve with butter.

Makes two servings.

I just wanted to draw everyone's attention to this great animated film we saw this week. It's called Mary and Max and it's about two lonely misfits who strike up an unlikely long-distance friendship. It's really charming and you really must see it!

Besides film's the writing and artwork, which is just superb, I really enjoyed the soundtrack. Over the closing credits plays a really catchy and familiar-sounding instrumental, which turns out to be "Swingin' Safari" by Bert Kaempfert. The tune is in the style of South African street music, adapted for a jazz orchestra. It is now officially my favourite song of the moment. You can hear it as the third song in the following medley of popular Kaempfert melodies. (The first song, which I'm sure many people will also recognize, is "Afrikaan Beat".)

From October to December 2011 I took the free, online machine learning course from Stanford University. Today I got the following certificate of achievement:

The course was very good, and I can definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a very thorough but easy-to-understand introduction to machine learning. The subject matter was particularly important to my current field; in the past fifteen years computational linguistics has seen an explosion in the availability of linguistic data in electronic format, and a corresponding growth in the use of ML techniques to process it. Many of the techniques covered in the class, such as support vector machines, have found particular application in my research subarea of word sense disambiguation.

Stanford is offering another set of free online courses beginning in January and February of this year:

• CS 101 by Nick Parlante
• Natural Language Processing by Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning
• Software Engineering for SAAS by Armando Fox and David Patterson
• Human-Computer Interfaces by Scott Klemmer
• Game Theory by Matthew Jackson and Yoav Shoham
• Probabilistic Graphical Models by Daphne Koller
• Machine Learning by Andrew Ng
• Cryptography by Dan Boneh
• Lean Launchpad by Steve Blank
• Technology Entrepreneurship by Chuck Eesley

Registration for the courses is now open, but enrolment is limited. I can't speak for all the courses, but in the case of the ML course, it is presented as a series of video lectures, each about ten minutes long, so they're easy to fit into your schedule. There are mandatory review questions and optional programming assignments. The professor estimates that watching the lectures and doing the assignments will require about eight to ten hours per week; I skipped the programming assignments and ended up spending about two to three hours per week.

Bold for the ones I've eaten, italics for the ones I'd like to try:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac
37. Clotted cream tea (for breakfast this morning!)
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O shot
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Single malt whisky
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee
100. Snake

Occasionally when I send someone an e-mail, they will write back telling me that my message included a mysterious attachment named "signature.asc" which they can't open. At first this confused me, because I never attached a file by that name. Then I realized that these reports were always coming from people using Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Outlook Express which, as it turns out, do not support PGP/MIME. (Just about every other mail user agent on the planet either supports this 16-year-old standard, or has the good sense to gracefully ignore the signature.)

I've therefore written "What is 'signature.asc'?" which explains the matter to a non-technical audience. I'll refer any future enquirers to this page. In case anyone else who routinely signs their messages gets similar reports from their recipients, feel free to refer them to that page, or (if you feel it's too polemic or not polemic enough) adapt my explanation into your own.

Today I discovered Last.fm Tools, a set of nifty visualizations you can add to your Last.fm profile. (Last.fm, for those who don't know, is a great free service which automatically keeps track of the music you listen to, and then provides you with Top 100 charts, and can also recommend new music for you based on an analysis of what you already listen to.) Probably the coolest things Last.fm Tools can produce are tag, artist, and album clouds. For example, here's my current album cloud, which shows covers from my most listened-to albums for the last ten years or so:

You can embed these clouds into your Last.fm profile page, and they will automatically update themselves every few weeks.

Many thanks to Philip Washington Sorst for providing such a valuable tool.

Lately I'm finding myself having to write a lot of business letters in German (e.g., to my landlord) and while I'm fluent enough to make myself understood, I sometimes overlook small but obvious mistakes, or phrase things unidiomatically. I'm therefore thinking about taking a German course. Some time ago I learned that students and employees at my university are entitled to free language courses, so I visited its Language Centre for a placement test. It turned out to be the simultaneously the simplest and most difficult language test I've ever taken: it consisted of five paragraphs of running text, and each paragraph was missing the second half of twenty words; the task was to fill in the missing halves. It was therefore extremely easy to lose points if you didn't have a good vocabulary, or if you did have a good vocabulary but weren't familiar with the inflections. (I question the value of such a test for analytic languages such as Mandarin Chinese, though I suppose it's appropriate for German.)

Anyway, my score for the test was 65/100, which correctly placed me at the level I already knew myself to be at (namely, C1 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, or CEFR). C1 is the second-highest level, so I guess the test scores don't map linearly to CEFR levels. Anyway, the university follows the CEFR-aligned UNIcert certification scheme, wherein I'm expected to take five 30-hour courses, selected from any two specialist courses plus any three general courses:

Among the courses being offered this semester for which I qualify, only two of them, Wortschatztraining and Hören – Verstehen – Diskutieren II, are offered at a convenient time for me. (Wirtschaftsdeutsch I seems to be what I need most, and it is being offered Mondays from 11:40 to 13:20, but I need to be at work then.) I wonder which one (if either) I should take. Registration is on Friday.

I read today that Google will be shutting down many of its services, including the source code search engine Google Code Search. This was actually the first I'd heard of Code Search, so I visited the site and whimsically entered a query for "Frettchen". The following was among the top results (follow link to enlarge):

To give some context, Gnowsis was a semantic desktop service environment developed and published by my former research group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. It's since been spun off to an eponymous company headed by my former colleague Leo Sauermann, who is now doing great things with it. It also lives on in Nepomuk, a standardized, conceptual framework for Semantic Desktops, the most well-known implementation of which is for KDE.

While I was at DFKI I had little to no involvement with the Gnowsis/Nepomuk projects and was therefore unaware of this little homage to Frettchen in the code (which may in fact have been added long after I'd left). However, it was heartwarming to discover it many years after the fact. :)

Incidentally, I performed a few vanity searches on myself and have discovered to my surprise that some public domain code of mine has apparently found its way into GNU Octave. I'm also apparently listed in the credits for GNU Coreutils, though for what I don't rightly know or remember…

Yesterday Nadya and I went to Wiesbaden. Naturally there are photos available, among them the following:

I've finally got around to posting some albums of photos from the past few months.

Darmstadt, April–September 2011

Five albums, including Darmstadt, Bessungen, the Vivarium, and Hundertwasser's Waldspirale

London, Spring 2011

Walthamstow Village, Westminster, the Tower of London, home cooking and baking, and Nadya's floral arrangements

Windsor, April 2011

A visit to Windsor Castle

Frettchen, April 2011

Some of the last photos of the late Frettchen Rättchen

Frettchen passed away this afternoon in the arms of the people who loved her the most. She had contracted an infection from which, perhaps due to her insulinoma and despite several courses of antibiotics, she was unable to fully recover. She was eight and a half years old.

Frettchen attacks a clementine, December 2003

I've been reading Slashdot since shortly after it launched 1997. In a distinct lack of prescience, I failed to actually register for an account until two years later, depriving myself of one of those now–highly regarded three- or four-digit user IDs.

On Saturday I wrote up a couple short articles and submitted them to the firehose. They got posted to the main page within a couple hours, which made me feel useful. :) My submission history is now as follows: 9 total submissions, 4 of which have been accepted, for a pass rate of 44.44%. I've still got a lot of catching up to the prolific reddragdiva who's had 34 stories posted.

Anyway, if anyone's interested, the two stories are here:

• HD transfer of Star Trek: TNG to arrive this year
• The Linux Counter relaunches

Inspired by my 1999 essay Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend, Maximilian Scherer of the Darmstadt University of Technology has written a web application which computes your own chances of (never) finding a girlfriend. Check it out!

Here photo albums for some recent trips.

Epping Forest, February 2011

Nadya, Frettchen, and I tromp around the bits of Epping Forest by the Sir Alfred Hitchcock Hotel.

Newbury, February 2011

A short visit to the historic market town of Newbury.

Canterbury, March 2011

A visit to Canterbury with Nadya and our friends. We saw the cathedral, the ruins of the abbey and castle, the Roman museum, and the rather disappointing Canterbury Tales attraction.

Evidently the writer of this poster has confused the instructions for the fire alarm with those for the firing squad.

• I upgraded my home and work laptops from openSUSE 11.2 to openSUSE 11.3. The latter does not play nice with NVIDIA graphics cards. Despite reports suggesting it may be an issue with the Linux kernel rather than the Nvidia drivers, the openSUSE team is assuming it's a problem with the drivers and are not investigating further. I can only hope that eventually someone at either Novell or Nvidia gets sufficiently annoyed with the problem to track down its cause and fix it. In the meantime, fortunately, there is a workaround.

• I use NoMachine NX to remotely access my home machine. For at least a year I've been plagued by extremely poor display performance in remotely running KDE applications; even very basic window updates were extremely slow, with lots of garbage and flicker. Today I finally discovered that this happens only with the default KDE 4 style, Oxygen. Switching to a another style (preferably a simple one such as CDE or Motif) fixes things. Possibly the same result could have been obtained by tweaking the Oxygen settings, though as there are probably hundreds of possible combinations of settings to try, this probably isn't practical. From now on I launch all my remote KDE applications with --style CDE.

• One other NX problem that's extremely annoying is that, at random intervals, it will re-send the last keypress. So, for example, if I've got my mail program open, and press the Delete key to delete the message I'm reading, and then leave my desk for lunch, by the time I come back my entire inbox could be empty because a Delete keypress gets sent again every few minutes. I hate the fact that NoMachine doesn't have an open bug tracker so that these issues can be reported and tracked. I would gladly use a Free Software package instead, but last I checked FreeNX was impossible to set up and use. Google recently released a Free NX server called Neatx, which looks promising—I should look into it. Or maybe one day broadband will be fast enough that I can just use ssh -X…

• For the last six months at work I've been at a customer's site and have been forced to use a Windows XP machine. I can't begin to enumerate the little things about that operating system's user interface that annoy me to no end. Here are a few of them:

  • It seems that about one in every ten times a window appears, it gets placed completely off the screen. You can see an entry for the window in the taskbar, but clicking on that entry doesn't display the window. The most obvious solution would be to bring up the context menu of the taskbar entry and try the "Restore", "Maximize", or "Move" entries, right? Well, none of those has any effect. No, what you need to do is select the "Move" entry, then hold down the Control key and press one of the arrow keys, then jiggle the mouse. Obviously.
  • There doesn't seem to be any obvious way of deleting all the text to the end of a line. On every other operating system I've used, you would select the text with the mouse or by pressing Shift+End on the keyboard, and then hitting Delete. On every other operating system I've used, this will delete all the text up to the end of the line. On Microsoft Windows XP, this will delete all the text up to and including the end of the line, appending the next line to the current one. Gah! No! BAD!!
  • Far too many applications have incredibly stupid "autocorrect" features enabled by default. The web browser, for example, will automatically prepend http:// to domains you type into the address bar… but only if the host name starts with www.! Anything else is treated as a keyword search.
  • It's not possibly to horizontally resize the console window. What idiot thought this restriction was a good idea? Did it never occur to them that some people just might want to see more than 80 columns of text at once?

Thanks to Nadya for discovering yet another translation of Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend, or rather a synopsis thereof:

Katram vientuļam vīrietim ik pa laikam nākas uzdot sev jautājumus kā “vai es neesmu pietiekami agresīvs, vai es neesmu pietiekami pievilcīgs, vai es esmu pārāk resns vai tievs”. Tā vietā, lai es sūkstītos par savām neveiksmēm ar sievietēm, es pirmais atzīšu, ka manas izredzes stāties attiecībās ar pilnvērtīgu sievieti ir ļoti niecīgas. Kā arī es atteikšos atzīt, ka šai problēmai ir kāds sakars ar mani pašu. Tā vietā es domāju, ka var situāciju var izskaidrot racionāli ar statistikas formulām.

The language, in case you didn't recognize it, is Latvian, and you can read the full article, "Kāpēc man nekad nebūs draudzenes". As usual, a machine back-translation via Google Translate is available.

I've just discovered that someone has translated my article Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend into Japanese:

なぜ彼女ができないんだろう。男なら誰だって一度はぶつかる疑問だ。残念ながらこれに対する絶対回答はないし、一言で答えられるというものでもない。なのに男の多くは矛盾を百も承知で理由を探さずにはいられない。「奥手だから？積極性が足りない？最初の一言で引いた？ボクってつまらない男？太り過ぎ？やせ過ぎ？いやいや、単にボクが醜男で対象じゃないってだけの話か」 ひとしきりありそうな理由を考えて辿り着く結論はこうだ。「きっとボクには何か問題™ があるんだ」…

Read the full post at ボクに彼女ができない理由：Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend, and also Google Translate's back-translation into English.

This is the second time in a few months I've stumbled across a translation of my article. I sure wish people would tell me when they translate it—I think it's cool! :)