giving you up

A slow march of death,
Pulling down one at a time,
Nefarious. Ish.

So what's with all these celebrities dying? It seems like places can't take care of themselves when I leave. Last summer the Midwest went and got flooded when I was out in CA, and this year the US's just letting all my childhood heroes (well, maybe) drop like flies: MJ, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Billy Mays. And now Rick Astley might be dead? Get your act together, folks. ;)

i'm on a boat! also, dresden

Never thought I'd be
On a boat... and all that. But
I did. These guys rock.

This was the first weekend since Berlin that I've headed out on the train on my own. I guess that, in short, it was a touring fail and a socializing win.

The ride to Dresden provided me with the company of two fellows: Jens and Martin. (Damn, I am meeting a lot of Martins/Martyns here for some reason.) Martin was a computer game artist, and Jens was a pump salesman. We spent 4 hours chattering about the ever-changing state of world politics (also apathy), the strange summer that's settled in here in Germany, and when advertisers will start paying people to have their jingles as ringtones. It was a better way to spend my time than catching up on my newsmagazines... although I still desperately need to do that.

Upon arrival in Dresden, I managed to find, despite my terrible memory and new hairstyle, the proper Jens and another friend, Jupp. These were two of the guys that I had originally met for/during the Cluster Challenge at SC08. We had to spend a week around each other, sleep-deprived, in Austin, so we, you know, became friends. I probably laughingly told them at some point during that week that if I were ever to come to Germany, I'd surely visit them. Anyway, the rest is history.

Social wins: we went out to a club with Norman, one of Jupp's friends, and, even though the music was terrible, it was kinda fun. We hung out outside for a long while (an hour or so after the sun started rising at... 4:00 am), chatting, and it was güt.

Robin, Jupp, and Jens showed me around their campus the next morning. Some of their lecture halls are awesome. One used to be a prison, and you can actually still see the bases of bars on the windows where they were cut out. Their CS building also amused me a lot; there were some huge sculptures in the middle of the main hall that totally looked like those little green aliens from Zelda GameBoy games (I can't think what they're called..).

Tourism fails: the next day we went to the city centre to explore all the (...can you guess?) old buildings. On the tram ride there, I got caught without a ticket and had to pay €40. :( That's quite a step up from the €1.80 that the ticket was going to be... but it's not so unlikely that I have, um, "borrowed" approximately that amount in train rides, anyway, so I didn't feel too bad about it. We strolled down the bank of the Elbe, past the University of Fine Arts (which was really gorgeous) and the Hofkirche and the Frauenkirche... we tried to get into a couple of the churches in the area, but they were both closed. Argh.

Some of the buildings in downtown Dresden are really interesting; they were mostly destroyed in the war, but they were also rebuilt, and they used a lot of the original stones for this new construction. This gives a neat effect, though. There are a lot of black stones that are really old mixed in with a lot of white stones that are really new. Dresden: the dalmatian city.

Some of the buildings are interesting for other reasons. Various kings and other royalty have made Dresden their home over the centuries, and they've left behind some amusing structures. One that I found particularly amusing and overly-lavish was the Zwinger palace. I was told that it was built as a harem for one king's women. Bahahaa... these guys knew how to live. :D

Social win: That night we (at this point, "we" was Jens, Jupp, Robin, Mandy (Robin's girlfriend), and I) went out to a bar that was known for serving beers from various countries around the world. I tried Chinese, Taiwanese, Cuban, African--which was crazy... it was called "Juju Beer," and it was intended to be served by a young African virgin girl?--, and some other kinds of beers. Delicious! I learned like two more words of German, too. (vocabulary++!)

Social win: Later that night, "we" became Jens, Jupp, Norman (Jupp's friend), Stefan (Norman/Jupp's friend), and Bine (I hope I spelled that right... also Norman/Jupp/Stefan's friend), and we went to a club called Downtown. It was totally ridiculous. I was informed previously that Germany was still "musically in the 80s," but I didn't quite believe it until I was given the choice opportunity to dance to MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This" in a club. A lot of the music played was in English, actually, which led to a couple of amusing conversations. For instance:

Pussycat Dolls: Don't cha wish your girlfriend was raw like me... (aside: this can be fairly indistinguishable, even to a native speaker)
Jupp: So these lyrics are kind of weird, right?
Me: Um, yes.

Social win: BUT THEN, THE SHINING, MUSICAL SUN BURST FROM BETWEEN THE CLOUDS OF TERRIBLE POP MUSIC TO REVEAL.... RAMMSTEIN.

My dad, a metallurgical engineer, is a big fan, and some of it rubbed off on me. Much to the astonishment of my German friends, not only could I sing along to terrible English music, but also to really angry/hard/odd German music. It was awesome.

The next morning, I believe I instigated the next epoch of Germany. I guess that not all aspects of American culture have pervaded everywhere yet, so I did the only decent thing and introduced Jupp to I'm on a Boat and Jizz in my Pants (probably these links are NSFW).

Then, we went on a boat! It was a tour of the Elbe. The Elbe river valley in Dresden was a UNESCO World Heritage site until, um, two days before I got there. The city of Dresden decided that they need to build a huge, ugly bridge in the middle of the most gorgeous and pristine part, and I guess that the critical ugliness (or something) was reached just then, so I missed out.

There was one really neat bridge to be seen along the way, though: it's known locally as the Blue Wonder. It was built before people knew really how to build suspension bridges, so they basically threw it up and crossed their fingers. 150 years later, it still stands!

Tourism fail: At the end of the ride stood another castle. Shocking, I know. But we weren't allowed to get near it. I guess, through fantastically unfortunate planning, I had managed to pick to visit on the one weekend when there was going to be a huge festival and a) everybody and his brother was overloading the tiny town and b) there was an entrance charge to get close to the castle.

Whatever, there're other things to do. Jupp and I decided to wander up the hill at the back of the town to see what we could see, and we found our way to the top of a vineyard--really unusual at Dresden's high latitude. Then it was pretty much time to go, but there was time to stumble across a mini Renaissance faire and do some archery.

Social win (maybe?): Back on the train to head home, I met an intriguing fellow from Belaruse who now lives in San Francisco. He spent 6 hours telling me about ridiculous court cases in San Francisco and how the government isn't run correctly, as well as giving me tips on my upcoming visit to Poland. It was an amusing ride, to say the least.

retro

Sometimes it's hard to
Be pressed for time, but more will
Come if you can wait.

So I know that I've been really bad about posting photos this summer (yes, that is a nod to you, Dresden guys), and it's kind of because I haven't had time, but also because I just... umm... well, mostly because I haven't had time. But I had some time this evening, so I went back and added photos to most of my posts. Well, the ones where it makes sense. As a sidenote, many of the photos were unapologetically stolen from Mathieu and Jeff.

I'll work on writing something up about Dresden in a moment, too. :)

my job, or something

What's in a name? A
Keyword by any other
Name would smell as sweet.

Hard to believe that I've been here for a month. In that time, my research has actually made some progress! (In spite of what it may look like from my blog activity, I have actually been working, you know.) Just yesterday I made the major breakthrough that means that the rest of the summer will tend towards the downhill. My supervisor gave me a pep talk a few days ago about how "research pace picks up towards the end," and I guess that's true.

I have a better idea about what exactly it is that I'm doing now, too, which is, um, good. My supervisor's research is in the area of keyphrase extraction, and I'm doing an extension of that: the technical title of my summer project falls somewhere in the topic of "unsupervised back-of-the-book indexing." Basically, I have to write a programme that is intelligent enough to read a book and decide what words belong in an index for it. This also involves word sense disambiguation (that is, it means that I shouldn't index the word "sausage" separately from the word "bratwurst," but that I should instead realize that the two are related in an "instanceof" way and display something to that effect).

UIMA is an interesting framework. I can't say that I approve of their use of .xml files, but a lot of the ideas that underlie the actual coding seem sound. There are three types of processors: readers (they gather the initial data about a document or a collection of documents), annotators (they parse the document text and overlay markings that indicate whether specific phrases are Named Entities or Noun Phrases or what have you), and consumers (they aren't allowed to add information, but they read it and can output statistics, like the precision and recall of a given run of the annotators). Having an xml file expressly for the purpose of pointing to a java file, though, bothers me a bit.

Anyway, I'm excited to get to the real science of my project. Not much work has been done in this area; Torsten was only successful in finding three papers, and all three were by the same two authors. Csomai and Mihalcea and Valkyrie will be the only ones to have their names on anything. What a strange combination of syllables. :)

wtf, canada?

I guess nothing is
"Cool" enough for Canada,
Since they're, like, frozen.

This article describes a study done recently in Canada that attempted to determine why fewer students are going into Computer Science and related fields. There had been ideas that they were avoiding it because of "parents getting burned from the dot-com crash, or high school counselors warning about [Information and Communications Technology] jobs being outsourced," but apparently the reason is that the jobs aren't "cool" or "fun" enough. Especially during the economic crisis, I have to say that I'm a bit surprised that "high school students place a greater emphasis on the coolness and fun factor of a job, even over job security and salary."

It's sort of like the worst nightmare of groups like Just Be and Women In Computing (at least, that's what they're called at IU, but any groups that try to improve the image of CS/Informatics in order to encourage new applicants) is coming to fruition in the frigid North.

Seriously, Canada?

the nurture of my discontent

Life is good, or so
They say, but a stick and a
Slogan speak volumes.

I'm not sure what it is about Europe, but I guess that they're pretty unhappy about something. It seems like every city in every country that I've visited has brought me to the edge of a protest or demonstration about something, excepting, of course, those neutral Swiss.

With topics ranging widely, protests are everywhere. One thing that I particularly like about the demonstrations was something I discovered during a conversation with Alex (I think, anyway... source attribution error! ack!) wherein he noted that the reason that people were protesting on weekends all the time was because they had to be at work during the week. Way to be fired up there, people.

I wonder what it is, though. In the US, there haven't really been large numbers of protests since, well, Vietnam, probably. I was involved in one protest against the Iraq war a couple September 11ths ago, but I was talking to professors about Dunn meadow, and they said that it is no longer the bustling protest nest that it once was. Maybe we're too complacent, maybe they're too bitchy, but I do think it's nice to see that they're willing to go out on a limb to be heard. I respect that a lot.

A list of all the protests I've seen:

• Fair treatment of milk cows (Berlin)
• No more silly taxes, i.e. for-pay public restrooms (Berlin)
• Some mysterious protest that I never found anything out about, but it closed the damn hauptbanhof (Frankfurt)
  
• Riot over a torn Qu'ran (Athens)
• Bringing murderers to justice (London)
• Keep public universities tuition-free (Darmstadt)
  
• Neo-nazi rally (München)
  

münchen ado about nothing

History's weight, it
Can crush you if you don't take
Care. See the past now.

Standing at the top of the stairs, just where Hitler stood a few dozen years ago to give a speech to some 20,000 people, at a plaza in München was almost crushing. I know that I've talked about this in a number of posts, but it's incredible to be in places where the wheels of history really turned. I know that we've had a few skirmishes and great men in the New World, but there's nothing that can compare to this. Dachau, the first concentration camp, is about 20 minutes from München. The room from which Hitler ordered the Kristallnacht to be carried out was just off the town square. On the tour we attended, every other building came prefaced with something like, "This is the third one of this building built... the first two were destroyed in..."

There were some pretty frickin neat buildings, though, with neat stories. My favourite story that we were told was about the opera house downtown; its first design included an inverted dome roof for collecting rainwater, and this reservoir was then connected to a series of tubes (the first internet?) that were intended to be a sprinlker system. It was an ingenious system, and it was given a chance to prove itself just a short time after the construction was completed. Fires broke out downstairs, and a worker raced to the proper valve to open it, and... nothing happened. Unfortunately, it was January, and the pool of water in the dome was frozen solid. This meant, unfortunately, that all the water in München would have been frozen, so he had to come up with something else... but what liquid was there going to be in great enough quantities that it might put out a fire?

Oh, beer. He ran a few blocks to the Hofbrauhaus (originally built solely for the Royal Family) and convinced the owner and patrons thereof to form a human chain down the street to the opera house, passing kegs and glasses and any other sort of container that could be found, each filled to the brim with beer.

Strangely enough, despite the fact that many litres of beer seemed to be leaving the Hofbrauhaus, not that much was making it to the other end of the line. The opera house burned down. Alex commented that "that story pretty much sums up humanity." It's a fair point. :) Culture? Let's save it! Well, hmm... beer.

We learned some pretty interesting things about the Hofbrauhaus "back in the day," as well. Originally it was designed only for men, since it would not be seemly for ladies to be intoxicating themselves in public. It was an extremely busy place, so once one got a spot, one certainly would not want to lose it, ne? But consuming alcoholic beverages tends to lead to a powerful need to urinate, so the solution was to put troughs under each table that ran the length of the brauhaus, and each fellow could just open the flap at the front of his lederhosen and let go under the table.

Also back in the day it was (and still is, perhaps) illegal to throw up in the main room of the building, so a "vomitorium" was installed in the men's restroom. Our guide commented that it took him some time to figure out exactly what that curious structure was with a powerful flush and large basin, located too high to be a urinal... Classy.

One of the most famous sights in the city is the Glockenspiel. It was underwhelming, to say the least. I guess it was one of the first things of its kind (although I'm not precisely sure what "its kind" entails), so it's impressive in that respect, but unfortunately it was really, really lame. It only does its famed dance 3 times daily. Before we knew this, we hung around for about 20 minutes to try to see it go off, although I guess when it really went off we weren't much more excited. There are two scenes: one depicts the marriage that essentially created Bavaria, and the other is of cobblers dancing to celebrate the plague's being gone (for the time being). Love and death, what an interesting balance. Too bad it was a poorly-executed one.

We learned a bit about the history of Munich's name and its founding, as well. "München" means "monk" in German, and before it was a city, München was just a collection of monasteries in the middle of Bavaria. Munich is actually the word for monk in Old German, so that's where its English name comes from. Our guide (he was with New Europe Tours, for the record, and really good; they have tours running in several cities, and I was quite impressed with this one) told us tales of some of the kings and dukes of the area, and we felt learnéd.

I guess I didn't even mention who "we" was yet. Part of the purpose of this trip was a reunion of Mathieu, Alex, and Nadège, who had met in the language course in Berlin. Titilayo and I sort of came along to crash their party. ;) Certainly these sorts of trips are more fun with more people, and another girl, Marie, from Sherbrooke (where Mathieu and Nadège go to school) came along the second day, as did a guy named Steven who recently moved into the dorms in Dieburg just down the hall. RISE kids on an adventure. Seriously, though, it was good to see them. I guess I only really knew them from 36 hours or so in Berlin, but in summers like this there's no time to waste on the whole awkward "getting to know you" crap; I learned last summer that all that nonsense can be skipped in favour of having lots of fun together like old friends.

I have to say that I'm a bit jealous of Alex's experiences; he's actually living in the middle of a small town in Germany and is surrounded by the language all the time, while I'm in a sad little bubble of English. :( I did just find out that there's a free German course offered by TUD, and I'm pretty surely going to look into it.

Oh, the trips to and from Munich were quite intriguing in themselves. Mathieu, Titi, and I all elected to try using a German rideshare website to get there, and Mathieu and I used it on the way back, as well. The man who we rode with to Munich was a really nice, knowledgeable guy from the area (sort of) who had been in Frankfurt for the day doing an interview for a job as a consultant for a law firm. He pointed out some neat sights on the way into town, including the Allianz Arena and the Queen's Plaza (which I can't, for some reason, find any information about... perhaps I'm misrecollecting the name). The people we rode home with were really interesting; I'm pretty certain that they were German hippies. They drove a red VW bus with a kitchen (!?) in the back, and they had just come from a wedding and some kind of seminar about their shared job: occupational therapy. :D

The Autobahn was another experience. I had always assumed that it was just one road that connected, perhaps, the main cities in Germany, but every highway is an Autobahn. No speed limit means that people in nice cars drive fast; Alex mentioned that during his several trips along the A9 he'd watched Ferraris and the like racing the ICEs, which, mind you, go about 300km/h. Next step is driving it myself.

There was, of course, some time spent "enjoying the local culture," but those stories are best told in person. The internet doesn't need to know everything.

mails and males

A nation of the fit
Does more than just code, they know
How to par-t-tay!

So that haiku was awful, but I'm exhausted. Today was the TU Meet n' Move (which is a ridiculous name, I know... but it was in English, and I guess it sounds, er, alluring?), which basically meant that anyone could get free entry to the stadium here and fool around with sports from different countries, including football (aka soccer), disc golf, dodgeball, hopscotch, marathon running, and climbing.

The climbing was totally sweet: Mathieu and I checked it out. I guess it wasn't all climbing... it was more like... an obstacle course suspended between trees? I'm not exactly sure what to say about it, and neither of us had our camera. Anyway, it involved rock walls, log walks, swings to walk between, hanging skateboards, and ziplines. Totally worth it (especially since it was free).

After that was Jugger! There was a different set of guys today, and an entirely different tone. It started with a round of Last Man Standing, which is basically the best excuse there is to hit each other with sticks when there aren't enough people to play a game. Mathieu eventually materialised, though, which led to real play. :P I brought Titi along on Tuesday, and she seemed to have fun with it, but Mathieu really took to it today. I decided that facing the Chain is a pretty decent throwback to being 8 and playing jumprope.

For any of you in Bloomington who are reading, I think that we need to start a Jugger team in same. The guys here have helpfully created a wiki detailing how to play/build weapons/etc. (sadly in German, but theoretically I'll remember it), and it's definitely worth it. Also, please watch Salute of the Jugger before I return if you get the chance. :3 One of the guys today commented that I "shouldn't have any trouble finding 9 others who would be interested, especially since [I'm] a girl."

I also got mail! (hint, hint) It was exciting to get my first package, but I did learn the very important fact that in Germany people do not use FedEx. The nearest FedEx is about an hour from where I live, so Mom had to have them redeliver to my workplace. (Note: if packages are sent in the future, please use the package address on the blog.) I'm really happy to have a charger for my camera again, especially since Mathieu lost his. Yay, photos!

Also, yay, news! I haven't been keeping up with happenings as much as I perhaps should have been, due to the fact that Time and Newsweek don't come to me any longer. But Mom mailed those, too, so they should keep me company on the ride to Munich tomorrow.

they know

Really? A chef hat?
Maybe I'll try that and see
If North's full of crap.

on liberty

Sneak around, or don't,
But you'll be on camera.
Famous? Maybe. *shrug*

London has a very interesting blend of perspectives on liberty. I can't say that I've ever been in a city where I'm followed on CCTV cameras essentially everywhere I go, but neither have I ever been in a country (well, continent, maybe) where things like naked bike rides and Shakespearean-age sex jokes are permitted. I guess I have a few thoughts on both of these things.

The fact that I'm being watched all the time is mystifying. Who's watching the tapes? Is it actually live to them? I've seen in movies some uses of the London CCTV setup (the Bourne movies, for instance), but I've never actually heard of it in real life. Still, cameras were perched everywhere: beneath stoplights, in deserted corners, at the entrances to public toilets... Does the English government know where I am? I know that my government knows; ever since they elected to start putting RFID tags in passports (and I got a passport), they know. Gah! It seems that the only person who doesn't always know where I am is my mother!

I can see exactly where writers like Alan Moore (V for Vendetta) and Eric Blair (aka George Orwell, 1984) got their ideas from. Going through the Tube was frequently a navigational nightmare due to "planned engineering works," a phrase whose spirit rang through V for Vendetta's "planned demolition with celebratory fireworks." On the way back from Greenwich on the DLR, the whole DLR system was stopped mysteriously. Sara (one of Jeff's friends, surprise, surprise) and I were speculating about what might have happened, and there were no announcements except that the DLR was to be closed for planned maintenance. We were in the middle of two stations when it stopped.

Still, these oddities are mixed with liberations in other senses. Like I said, Romeo and Juliet is one of the raunchiest plays out there, and the actors were not shy about flaunting it. Neither were the performers in A Little Night Music. I suspect that in order to sell tickets to this latter show in the states, some form of ID may have been required. The elderly woman who drove the plotline kept the pace up with her reminiscences of lovers won and lost and played, and there were a few racy scenes featuring housemaids and butlers. It was a story of what the world is, and the U.S. couldn't accept it, I don't think.

Strange that in North America we are so accepting of violence and repressive of sex. Here is entirely the opposite. From what I can see, this system works for them. I guess that's what I get for being born on a continent settled by Puritans. *sigh*