randform

Sorry for the retarded blogging. We are moving again. So I have to think about what to do with the furneture and other unpleasant things. I am moving fully back to Berlin – the city with international flair, Tim will commute. The search for schools in Berlin was sort of similar to this one. Here some examples:

Sehr geehrte Frau Kutz,
sehr geehrter Herr Hoffmann,

Entschuldugung für die späte Antwort.
Zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt sieht es leider so aus, dass kein Platz frei werden wird.

Wir können Ihr——- nur auf unsere Warteliste setzen, wenn Sie dies
wünschen. Dafür müssten Sie uns dann allerdings noch Unterlagen
(Zeugniskopie, Informationen über die ——- Vorbildung) schicken.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Im Auftrag

Sehr geehrte Frau Kutz,
sehr geehrter Herr Hoffmann,

nach Prüfung der Platzkapazität in den jetzigen 5. Klassen muss ich Ihnen leider mitteilen, dass ich Ihnen keine Zusage zur Aufnahme Ihr—– geben kann. Auf der Warteliste für die zukünftige 6. Klasse erhält —— die Wartenummer “2”.
Zur Vervollständigung der Unterlagen benötige ich noch eine *Kopie des Halbjahreszeugnisses 5.Klasse*.
Zur Information für Sie möchte ich Ihnen noch mitteilen, dass …..

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I am thinking about syntax, equation representation and display, symbolic computations, and all that stuff a lot lately. Now by chance I stumbled over somewhat the reverse process (via micromath):
detexify, a nice little tool that lets you draw a symbol and (hopefully) retrieve the corresponding LaTeX command for it. Mathematical formula recognition seems to be a beast of its own kind, still it would be nice to have sort of an electronic scratch paper on wich you can scribble your formulas and the system reads them and checks them for validity.

Our friend Sophie Molholm coorganized recently a conference in multisensory research. Looking at the conference announcement I felt inspired to ask myself again to what extend rational cognitive instances do influence perception. An example: A traffic light in the western world is usually considered to have the colors red-yellow-green (or at least red and green (although the new LED lights look kind of bluish)). However I think it is important to note that in japaneese the green color for a traffic light – is not “MIDORI” (green), but “AOUI”, which is BLU! Did this make japanese people more prone to call something green-bluish “blue” instead of green? Doing experiments for this example might be difficult due to the ethnic pecularities, but I am sure there exist other examples and probably even studies on that subject.

here a little collection of randform posts related to the subject:

naming-gaming: evolution of languages
wirepullers: artwork challenging salience
manicone: artwork challenging 4 dimensional space perception
focus and context, part I: evolution and knowledge formation
focus and context, part IV: A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies: knowledge formation in humanities vs natural sciences
Le manoir du diable: conscientious coloring of astronomical data
common sense: designing computer minds at media lab
canny skinny skin scans perception and quantum computing (see also focus and context, part IIa: A quantum computation game)
error incognito:perception and space
Dreammachine: psychadelic effects in neuroscience
uncanny paintings: link to an experiment using facial expressions as a feedback interface for a painterly rendering algorithm
visualizing meaning: link to a survey concerning the usefulness of diagrams and charts in knowledge building (and a funny comment to that)

On the heater in the entrance hall of our appartment building neighbears left a collection of VHS magnetic tapes for free.

I was wondering wether there exist/will exist VHS lovers in the same way as there exist Vinyl lovers (see e.g. this documentary about vinyl lovers or this randform post). (VHS scratching?! huh)

For the upcoming weekend a youtube link to a very dark but brilliantly made animation called “Fallen Art” from 2004 by Tomasz Bagiński

-> youtube link

via slupczynski-vs-mickiewicz

Last weakend we were doing a visit to the Deutsche Museum.

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Some images from the Curie museum in Paris featuring among others the investigation of radioactivity by Marie Curie and coworkers.

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