Suppose you (B) and your friend (A) are expecting to meet a friend of theirs (D) who you've never met before. You're running a bit late, and just as you get there, you see someone (C) who is walking away, so must decide ASAP whether this is the person you're supposed to meet, so you can decide whether to yell. Are C and D the same person? If humans were digital creatures, B could instantly communicate...

The video of Robin Hanson's UAI lecture only has 20 views. I'm hoping this blog post will correct this. I found this lecture quite a good overview of his ideas on bet-based epistemology. Domingos got very enthusiastic about this, and they seemed to chat for many hours afterwards. Robin is interested in algorithms for keeping a consistent belief state (i.e. immune to Dutch book), which is a hard...

My Canadian cellphone is working as of yesterday. It's a very cool Samsung phone that doubles as PDA. Unlike the Treo, it folds along a different axis when in keyboard mode (though it is silly in that it closes whatever you're doing when you refold the phone). My student plan means I pay $28 for 250 daytime minutes (free weekends and after 6pm), and includes voice mail and caller ID: the main downside...

Today, the ugrads had some sort of activities fair, apparently all afternoon. But I thought undergrad classes already started! I may want to take ugrad classes in Stats, Cogsci, Bio. Also got a locker at the gym. UBC is pretty huge, and reminds me of UCLA in multiple ways.

I can hear absolutely everything my housemates do in the early morning (now, I'm 2 hours short of sleep). I turned on a little fan, which is helping marginally. Ideas: * put rugs in hallway * get a white noise machine, such as this one

"Dimensions" seems like a pretty cool movie about visual math, including visualizations of 4D figures. The first scene starts out easy, then explains that stereographic projections are conformal. The second scene shows that seeing 3D shapes by looking at 2D cross-sections is pretty hard, and proposes stereographic projections instead. I wonder if this is a general lesson. You can watch it here ...

Worst Captchas of All Time surely has some ideas for a SigBovik paper.

washroom(CA) - bathroom (US). When I hear "washroom", I instinctively think of "laundry room", and have so far failed to unlearn that. The pronunciation of "ou/ow" is sometimes counterintuitive, e.g. "Howe" is [ha w ], "Lougheed" is [lo w hid], "Kelowna" is [kəlo w na]. I met someone from Prince George, BC, and couldn't understand half of what he said. "Oh, he's Irish! Um, no he isn't. What the heck...

I'm all moved in. It only took me 90 chilled minutes of unloading, planning, rearranging, etc. My housemate got me an Ikea shelving unit with 12 square compartments (4 rows x 3 columns), and now I'm trying to find a logical way to organize my garments. I've also installed a plastic coat-hanger on the wall. I really like the place, and if I can negotiate the rent down to $800 or so, I may consider...

good * the buses really are timely and frequent. More so than in any US city that I'm aware of. * people I've met on the street tend to be polite, considerate citizens. People in bus stops make a proper line. This is unheard of for me! (even Helsinki was not like that). * I've had conversations on the bus pretty much every day, and I've met some interesting individuals. * downtown Vancouver feels like...