Thu 5 Oct 2006
Rocketboom ran a story I suggested (!): The Glass Pumpkin Patch at MIT. Steve Garfield, the Boston corresponent, did an interview of the MIT Glass Lab Director, Peter Houk. The patch is a great thing to see when they have all the pumpkins on display. They show over 1500 pumpkins! Look out for the Glass Pumpkin Patch next year at this time.
Thu 8 Jun 2006
This is a followup to my Exploding Maple Tree post. The folks at EepyBird.com figured out that Menthos dropped into Diet Coke caused a large buildup of gas and caused small geysers. Check out the video!
Sat 8 Apr 2006
These all came together last night…here’s how. We went to see the Boston Lyric Opera production of La Traviata last night, and happened to sit next to my former Quantum Physics professor Claude Canizares (now Associate Provost); head PodZinger honcho Alex Laats had him as a Prof as well. Last night however, I discovered that the seats on our other side belonged to his old physics professor making three generations of Physics students in a row, at the Opera.
As I was chatting with my Prof. about PodZinger, the gentleman in the row in front of us turned around and said “I’ve heard of that - I think it’s really very important!”
So how do funny costumes fit in, aside from the performers? I helped organize a gala a few years ago which happened to be within a month and very similar in theme to a Boston Lyric Opera fundraiser. I saw fellow committee member Mindy Garber last night as well, as well as some other attendees such as MIT Professor Stuart Madnick and his wife. So I figured I’d post some funny costume photos.
Here are some links to Opera Podcasts:
Fri 31 Mar 2006
Last year on April 1, I was driving home listening to a great story on NPR, about how cheap foreign imports of Maple Syrup (from boiling discarded maple furniture) were harming the Maple Syrup industry in the Northeast. Untapped maple trees would then explode, often harming and killing the maple farmers. You can listen to the story on NPR’s page.
It might be worth following up on these other stories from a year ago:
Enjoy!
Mon 13 Feb 2006
University of Pennsylvania Professor Mark Liberman has an interesting analysis of some of our PodZinger transcriptions. Prof. Liberman was searching PodZinger for any interviews of George Deutsch, a former NASA public affairs officer.
Deutsch resigned his position last week after intense public scrutiny when it was reported by the Scientific Activist Blog that he lied on his resume by listing a degree from Texas A&M which he never received. For more background information on this, check out: the Scientific Activist Blog, a New York Times account, the Bad Astronomy Blog, and Deutsch’s article that the theory that a Satanic cult killed Laci Peterson is “actually quite credible.”
Prof. Liberman’s search for “NASA” turned up good relevant Podcasts, but there were some funny transcriptions. “NASA’s top uh climate scientist” came out “nasa’s top arafat climate scientists.” Our speech recognition works with a language model trained mostly on news articles. My theory is that “top Arafat aide” is disproprtionately represented in our language model due to the time window of our training data and news-weighted inputs, leading to a likelihood that the bigram “top Arafat” appears.
Also, check out Prof. Liberman’s prior post titled “PodZinger rejects Jesus.” It is quite humorous and a good look at how our technology works. However, if you listen to the last podcast referenced in that post, be sure to be in a work/kid-safe place!