Sunny California

The first two weeks of home-coming have come and gone. I have my first sun-burn of the summer, after reading Harry Potter by the pool-side all afternoon, but it is good to see some color in my legs again.

I did not expect much to change in three months of absence, yet I have somehow changed and I now see things with differently-colored glasses. I look at the people around me and wonder what their story is, where they came from, and what their dearest wishes are for themselves and their families. I think about my scattered family, scattered possessions, scattered memories, and wonder if I’ll ever truly be ‘home’. My heart and mind feel heavy with confusion, and I wonder what it was that was important, and what is left to take its place.

Angst and a foreboding sense of bereavement walk beside me.

En Route

It’s 4 a.m. and I am huddled on the floor in the Las Vegas airport, monopolizing the last remaining power outlet, my belongings fanned about me in a three foot radius. Why, you ask? You could ask it again.

It is such a surreal state of affairs. And this place does not help. There is something rather sleazy about lone persons sitting in front of slot machines at unearthly hours, something unsettling about the oblong, motionless bodies sprawled out on the waiting benches, something utterly goofy about sitting here, writing in my blog, nibbling on a small bit of melted chocolate that someone gave me before I left, which is the last vestige of food in this forlorn neck of the woods.

I have only myself to blame. Thursday morning I woke up early, studied all day for an exam, took the exam, ran home to pack, spent the rest of the evening schwenking with my friends along the Saar, all the way until five in the morning, at which point three of my friends walked me to the train station and off I went to my next big adventure. So far, so good.

I had a long 8 hour flight into Philadelphia, but something along the way must have flipped in my brain because at the gate for the next flight to Phoenix, they sent out a call for volunteers to give up their seat in exchange for a free round-trip ticket to anywhere in the continental US, as well as free hotel accommodations if you didn’t manage to get a later flight that day. I remember someone telling me that this was a great way to get a chance to travel if the opportunity ever came up. So I figured it didn’t hurt to ask.

They told me I could get a re-route through Vegas and be in San Jose only a few hours later. This sounded like a great deal, so I stood back as everyone rushed to fill the plane, then headed over to customer service to change my itinerary. I had no problems getting a new ticket, as well as my free trip voucher and a free meal for that evening in the airport. The trouble came later on. They were late boarding the flight to Las Vegas because they were cleaning the plane, and in the meantime and out of nowhere, storms rolled over Philly. Sigh. My brother’s wedding had to be fudged due to storms in Philadelphia. I should have known.

We were more than two hours late leaving the runway. When we arrived in Las Vegas, all of our connections had, of course, long departed, and we were ushered down to the ticketing counter to revise our plans. We were welcomed with a mile-long line of people hoping to do the same thing. Two hours later, my only option is a flight leaving at 10 a.m. to San Francisco, no free hotel bed just because the time constraint would make it impractical, and I still have to pick up my bags in San Jose. There is some consolation, however: I get to fly first-class as it was the last seat available.

At this point I just feel giddy with the lack of proper sleep and real food. I wandered the halls, hearing snatches of rants here and there from people who vow never to fly US Airways again, and all I can do is smother my giggles over my own nuttiness.

And pray, almost devoutedly, to be safe in bed soon.

Unpredictable

If I were a classifier, I’d be a maximum entropy model.

Most of the time, one tries to make decisions that result in the least amount of entropy and which are clear indicators of what the future might hold. Our experience is our data.

But then comes the paradox: better performance is gained by classifying only what you really know, and preserving the maximum amount of uncertainty about what you do not. Favoring the unpredictable. Admitting the outliers.

Coming to Germany was a result of this. Even the weather in Saarland tells me so. Just as in winter, the Saarland cannot seem to make up her mind about the season. One minute, she is sure it is summer, blasting us with a sultry sun. The next, it is certainly winter and she releases a tempestuous deluge. Both are short-lived. At least her conviction shows at these times and the periods of indecision are few. Gives me something to look forward to.

My Half Marathon

Runners at the Front
A few weeks ago, some of my friends and one of my flatmates signed up to run in a race in Dillingen. They told me it was a half marathon and asked if I wanted to join. I respectfully declined.

But then one guy dropped out. And I found out it was only a 5k run. (I had run, and won a 5k, once before in my life). And that if they didn’t find a fourth person, they wouldn’t be qualified as a team and would have to resort to cheating.

So at 4 o’clock, when it was clear that no one else would run with them, I showed up and agreed to do it, if they didn’t mind. The shirt fit, I ran off to grab my shoes, and we were on the train by 5.

Nine thousand racers, a torrential downpour just before the gun went off, town citizens cheering from their windows. It was amazing. I could not but revel in it: the exhilaration of feeling your body perform, the evident happiness in the faces of those around you who have the same stretch to cross, the giant mud-puddles that some would holler about and avoid and others would splash right through knowing that those behind would follow..

In the end, I managed to finish the race in under 40 minutes, which I was quite happy with, considering I haven’t run longer than twenty minutes in the past year, and not at all in the past few weeks. It was also stiff competition for us seeing as they entered the all-male category and I was supposed to be a young man named Mohammad Abdel. On the other hand, one of the guys on the team never got a scoring for some reason, so we don’t actually have a team placement. Oh well, twas all worth it to me.

Still, for anyone who needs proof, you can find our scores under ‘Computer Geeks 1’ at http://results.davengo.com/index.php. Remember to look for Mohammad..

UPDATE: I just posted all the pictures here.

Später Alligator, Geil Crocodile

Shit, sheiße, putain, and taddi were the happy words I heard as I sat on the grass Saturday afternoon. They were the sounds of the German, French, Indian, and Chinese playing football together on the campus field (sorry if these offend others).

I, of course, do not play football, but after being cooped up in a stuffy lab all afternoon, I thought it would be a nice change to continue my work out in a more natural setting. I was reminded, however, of how lucky I am to again be a part of the university bubble.

In the short time I have been here, I have made friends in the most unlikely places. From a group of geeky PhDs from MPI, to the crowd of clever Chinese students I have dinner with in the mensa, all the way to the gang of Indians and Pakistanis who made me chai, my life has been made richer by every one of them.

It is certainly their friendliness, but perhaps it is also their humor. Sprinkle in some non-native German speaking abilities, a quirky foreign accent, a dash of geekiness, and, due to the unexpectedness of a witty reply, often I am just stunned into laughter:

Me (to my Indian friend): “Did you know you can’t move the tables in the mensa because the university spent their cultural grant on it, so now the way they are positioned is considered art?”
Sikander: “No-oo! Come on, you are farsching me!”
|__ verarsching –> verarschen –> to fool

Me (to my Chinese friend): “My favorite thing is to curl up in bed with my laptop and code..”
Tianxiang: “Ah, you mean embedded com-pu-ting!”

Me (to another Chinese friend): “Mars tells me that you’re quite the playboy and that you skipped our party for a girl!”
Fu Yu (to Mars): “??/??..”
Me (to Mars): “Hey, what’d he say?”
Mars: “He says I should just broadcast it over a distributed network.”

If there was a unicorn in the world, life would be more beautiful

Meta-theorem 22:
The morphology of our world implies that if there is a unicorn, life would be more beautiful, iff the union of our morphology and the statement ‘there is a unicorn’ also implies that ‘life would be more beautiful’.

Proof:

  1. Assume ? ? ‘there is a unicorn’ ? ‘life is more beautiful’.
  2. Then we know that every valuation that simultaneously satisfies ?, also satisfies ‘there is a unicorn’ ? ‘life is more beautiful’.
  3. For every valuation which simultaneously satisfies ?, it must be the case that V(‘there is a unicorn’)=F or V(‘life is more beautiful’)=T.
  4. Assume ? ? {‘there is a unicorn’} ? ‘life is more beautiful’
  5. Then there must be a V such that ? ? {‘there is a unicorn’} is simultaneously satisfied, but V'(‘life is more beautiful’)=F and V'(‘there is a unicorn’)=T.
  6. However, this is a contradiction to line 3, hence:
  7. ? ? {‘there is a unicorn’} ? ‘life is more beautiful’

    8.  

  8. Now assume ? ? {‘there is a unicorn’} ? ‘life is more beautiful’.
  9. Then we know that every valuation which simultaneously satisfies ? ? {‘there is a unicorn’}, also satisfies ‘life is more beautiful’.
  10. It must be the case that V(‘life is more beautiful’)=T or ? ? {‘there is a unicorn’} is not simultaneously satisfiable, such that V(‘there is a unicorn’)=F.
  11. Assume that ? ? ‘there is a unicorn’ ? ‘life is more beautiful’.
  12. Then there is a valuation V’ that simultaneously satisfies Γ, such that V'(‘there is a unicorn’ ? ‘life is more beautiful’)=F.
  13. Then it must be the case that V'(‘there is a unicorn’)=T or V'(‘life is more beautiful’)=F.
  14. However, this is a contradiction to line 10, hence:
  15. ? ? ‘there is a unicorn’ ? ‘life is more beautiful’

If I would be a linguist, I would speak wery vell…

I talked to my parents the other evening for the first time in many months. They again had to ask me twenty questions to try and understand what it is I am studying. My poor little parents. When people ask them what their eldest daughter is up to, they reply, “Oh, she is off in Germany doing a masters program in… uh… language.” Those people then smile to themselves, picturing yet another liberal arts female throwing away money on a frou-frou humanities degree.

So how is one to explain to one’s mother support vector machines or linear regression or kernel methods or how one would shatter data in the most efficient way possible?

My mom was trying to convince me that the term ‘algorithm’ had become a buzz word in California, attributable no doubt to Ask.com’s ridiculous advertising campaign to get one up on Google. I thought I would mention some of the buzz words cropping up in my little circle. Most of these are due to the fact that non-native English speakers have a tendency to pronounce words in a deliciously amusing way.

Here are some of my favorites:

  • Algorithm => Al-gore-ithm
  • The unique solution => The eunuch solution
  • Vague and available => wake and awailable

And of course, the worst mistake of all which most every German makes and is the title of this post, wherein the conditional is put in the if-clause… I am not helping things by writing that in a post. Because by validating that expression in text on the internet, I am making my future work that much more difficult. After all, everyone knows that ‘the the the’ is ungrammatical. However, I just now wrote it. And if I wanted to generate grammatical English rules on the fly by parsing huge amounts of text on the internet… well, I can see that my work is cut out for me.

A Typical Day in Class

Semantic Theory, Thursday morning. Prof. Pinkal is up at the board explaining how linguists seek unicorns and how difficult this is for semanticians.

I sneeze. Hervé turns around and says “gesundheit.” Prof. Pinkal turns around and says, “Hmm? What was that?”.. Akira looks up, nods his head, makes a sneezing gesture and says, “Ja, ja, gesundheit. Das ist richtig..”

The class bursts into laughter as I blush, hide my face, and giggle.

It just wouldn’t be the same without Akira.