Yosef's Blog

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Scifi.com archive

A short while ago, I searched for free science fiction online, and stumbled across a great blog post detailing the various options available - books, short stories, and audio books, here. One of the sites it listed was this website, which was discontinued in June of 2007. Because I fear it may be taken down some day, I mirrored it, and will be making it available at shmsoft.com/yosef, shortly. It will be in the form of a folder with 182 MB of files that together can be browsed in the same structure as the website. If you dislike the dark background that may appear, use Firebug to inspect the element and delete the color (denoted by a #) in the first line of the body.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

At work

Here at work, I am learning NLTK, a natural language processing toolkit that uses Python. Though setting it up is a real big hassle, in Windows and Linux, I'm slowly progressing. Here is a model of the uses of the words "American" vs. "citizen" in all the inaugural addresses up through 2005. I wonder who it was who used "citizen" so much in 1841 - Andrew Jackson maybe?

America vs. Citizen

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Snow in Houston

Last Wednesday, December 10, it snowed in Houston. Weather forecasters were surprised by the system, which did not show a strong chance for snow until Tuesday morning. It began with small ice bits at around 5:30 at the University of Houston, and grew to flakes large enough to land on the ground and not melt right away, as I was driving along Main Street, inside the 610 loop. It tapered off near home, but came back in an hour in force. My sisters enjoyed throwing snowballs at each other and me. Temperatures rose, and the snow, almost half an inch deep in places, melted later in the evening. However, it stayed cold enough in midtown Houston that at 9 AM on Thursday, there was still snow left on cars in the UH parking lot, where I quickly fashioned a snow bunny.