What are your age limits?
23 – 74 years. … snip … The minimum age for holders of Irish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Israeli licences is 30 years.

and also:

Holder of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Israeli licences there is a non waiveable excess of €2,500.

Is this kind of discrimination legal? Why did they throw in Israeli people too? Why not Greeks? Don’t they trust even their own Irish people?!

٢ isaac@cooper:~
% host 69.69.69.69
69.69.69.69.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer the-coolest-ip-on-the-net.com.


There is so much at stake … the US and the world can’t afford 4 more years of a Republican US President. Even if the GOP seems to be defeated, shattered and panicking, Republican voters always end up voting for their guy on election day, while Democrats have great problems closing the deal. It has to be different this time.

We need Obama to win tomorrow, and we need him to win big. And a Democratic wave to get a filibuster-proof Senate majority and a comfortable victory in the House of Representatives, so they can enact a progressive agenda in the upcoming years and restore some of the damage from the last two Bush terms. We also need a solid ‘no’ to Proposition 8 in California and similar ones in other states, so no excuse to stay at your place just because you are in one of the bluest states.

I would like to ask you to do your best tomorrow, but probably Larry Lessig does a better job at it.

Once we are past this, the hard work starts, trying to hold every elected representative accountable, draft better candidates for future elections, spot DINOs, …, but for now, let’s focus on tomorrow. I am hoping for the best, and I wish I could do more about it, but it’s up to you Americans. Do the right thing and leave everything on the road, you don’t want to regret it tomorrow.

I welcome our new cool future phones

You can get a 30-day free trial account if you want to check it out, the point is that I thought it was really cool, but it was a bit pricy, 55 euros/year for an individual and 1080 euros/year for a site (up to 50 employees and students) and these were the academic licenses!!! And I don’t even have any real need for it

So I thought it would be an interesting project to do something similar, albeit just focusing in the ‘word sketching’ part, as described in this paper.

After a weekend I got it working although I didn’t devote any second to make it look good as you can appreciate: Collocations and other stuff.

For now only the corpus of the state of the union addresses is loaded, with almost 400000 words. You can select that corpus, click on sketch and get the sketch of any word, for example, the ‘word sketch’ for problem.

We can see that the adjective used more times with ‘problem’ is ’serious’, although if we look at the relative frequency it’s ‘complex’. The verb which has ‘problem’ as object more times is ’solve’ followed by ‘approach’, ‘address’ and ‘deal’. You can also click on the numbers to see the actual sentences in which these words appear, for example, ’serious problem’.

So how does it work? First of all it does part of speech tagging using Apertium. Once the text is POS-tagged we apply a set of ‘regular expression’-like rules to identify the relation between words, such as:

*DUAL
=a_modifier/modifies
2:[tag=adj] [tag=n]{0,2} 1:[tag=n] [tag!=n]

This rule expresses the relation between adjectives and the nouns they modify, matching sentences like ‘the red ball‘ and ‘the red football ball‘. Each relation is stored in the database with extra info about position in the text. Once the database is created accessing it to display the sketch and concordance information is really simple.

The site and auxiliary tools were written in around 1400 lines of Python/Django. I am still not sure about what to do with this, if there is anyone interested on adding some corpora to it, continue development or anything else, please let me know.

The town is quite small, with around 2000 inhabitants, and not much social life, except for the hotel where we are hosted. The hotel is great, probably the best I have ever been to. Great swimming pool and jacuzzi, really friendly staff, nice rooms with big and comfy beds, a magnificent “biergarten” where we have some drinks and dinner every night, delicious food, bikes to ride for free, …

Despite the lack of social life, the town is beautiful, first of all it’s in the middle of a natural reservation, with dense forests completely surrounding the city. Every house has a gorgeous garden with loads of flowers and some interesting decorations. The highlight is this really high pole in the city center with loads of coats of arms, and a pine on top of it. Hilarious

The work is pretty good too, bleeding edge stuff, really good working environment, nice and international workmates and free drinks

And today I uttered my first full sentence in German since lots of years ago!!!

Here is a screenshot of the ad:

You can see a full screenshot of the search too.

On one hand, I am kind of honored about the fact that a California-based company which has raised almost 20 million dollars in venture capital and has over 30 employees is targeting us (a self-funded company) in such an explicit way, it must mean we are definitely on the good track

On the other hand, this reminds me of the time when Ximian started to play with KDE keywords … yeah, we both are developing an open-source product, but one of us doesn’t care about ethics that much.

BTW, we have a new shiny website

Some of his detractors dismiss his speeches as lousy, empty or vague, but you just have to listen to a couple of them to see that he is genuinely smart (such as the one about faith and atheism or the interview at Google).

He doesn’t only take the right stance on most issues that I care about (Iraq, foreign policy, ethics, net neutrality, …), but he does it in a sincere way. Obama just gets it. I have got this impression from watching several of his speeches and interviews, but Marc Andreessen had the chance to spend an hour and a half with him a year ago and got the very same feeling.

The main argument against Barack Obama nowadays is his alleged lack of experience. “Watch how I run my campaign”, Barack said to Marc when inquired about that. It’s obvious that running a primary campaign isn’t the same as being POTUS, but being the president’s wife isn’t exactly the same either.

So if we compare the Obama and Hillary campaigns we can easily see Hillary’s experience as an “old school” politician. She overstates, lies, accepts loads of money from lobbies (because “they represent people too”, haha), resorts to fear-mongering (“Obama is not a muslim, …, as far as I know”, 3 a.m. ad), sides with McCain if needed to get some extra votes, surrounds herself with nitwits, … . To summarize, she uses every dirty trick she has learned in these years in Washington, and that’s exactly what I am so sick of right now.

On the other hand, Obama’s campaign hasn’t just been one of the best organized and executed campaigns I have ever seen, but also the cleanest one. He has managed to overcome double-digit Hillary leads in most states without having to resort to any of these experienced politician’s dirty tricks. If I have to trust one of the two to run a country, the decision is obvious.

If I didn’t manage to convince you, I hope Lawrence Lessig and xkcd’s Randall Munroe do.

Obama is leading and almost there, he just needs the final push. Please, do the right thing.

I’ll never forget Jimmy McNulty, a troubled Irish American dipsomaniac murder detective (played by brilliant Brit Dominic West) or Omar Little, a Robin Hood-like stickup homosexual man in west Baltimore. The rest of the deeply portrayed characters of the show are great too, but above all of them, the real starring role belongs to Baltimore. I am sure Baltimore’s reality goes way beyond this show, but I don’t think a show can get more real than The Wire.

Each season focuses on a different topic, such as drug-dealing, unions, politics, the press, always keeping the police department around. The story arcs are really long and complex, The Wire is not the kind of show you can enjoy watching a single episode of, but more like, as its own creator – a former Baltimore Sun journalist – put it, a “66 hour movie”.

Well, I could keep praising it for hours, but lots of people have done that already, even Barack Obama loves it (:P, let’s ride the hype). Praise available in Spanish too Besides, Eliot Spitzer has made wiretaps really popular again these last days

Really, you must see it.

Let me check what I have done lately … well, first of all I spent 10 days in San Francisco in November, I had a really great time, we spent most of the time there but also paid a visit to the Googleplex, Stanford, Berkeley, … and went several days to the Yosemite National Park, a great trip overall

Besides that I gave up one of my jobs (the boring and not challenging one …) two months ago (although it seems like it was ages ago) and started working full-time in my company. In addition, I spent New Year’s Eve in London to begin the year in a different way

Right, that was all