A Sentimental Journey

Eee PC is sold by Research Machines as RM Asus miniBook; it has only solid state memory, which is tiny by modern standarts, but a 512MB RAM+ 4GB solid state drive version costs 200 ponds, with good discounts for bulk purchases. It is designed for school market, small, robust. Operating system is a limited version of Xandros (a clone of Debian Linux),  pre-installed software is open source (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc.). The trick is that Linux feels itself very comfortable in a tight configuration which suffocates Windows XP.

The graphic user’s interface is designed for use by children, made foolproof and cannot be modified. But the magic combination Ctrl + Alt + T opens a Linux console. If you remember the password which you set in  the initial (very short and simple) set-up of the computer, you can login as a superuser. One sad discovery is that the distribution contains no TeX, which is normally a part of most Linux distributions (BTW, Linux purists are very unhappy about licensing policies of Asus). But I managed to install a version of LaTeX following a hint  from eeeworm on user’s forum:

Follow Wiki for adding Xandros Repos: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/addingxandrosrepos
in terminal type:
sudo apt-get install lyx
sudo apt-get install texmaker

(texmaker is an editor for TeX, similar in its look and feel to WinEdt).

I may agree with Linux independence fighters that Asus breaks the conditions of GPL. But their mini-notebook opens an era when usable hardware becomes cheaper than a Microsoft license for Windows or any associated software. This is a huge boost to the Open Source and Free Software Movement. Down with Microsoft!

A few days ago I made a compulsive buy in an airport shop: I bought an Eee PC, a cheap handheld solid memory microlaptop running (a fragment of) Linux. Today I discovered that my vague memories of Unix from 10 years ago sufficed to guide me through installation of a version of LaTeX; I will never buy another Windows computer. Long live Open Source movement!

A picture for my previous post: endemic sponge forests of Lake Baikal.

With thanks to my dear old friend Owl and Oleg Timoshkin (photo is from his paper; an English abstract.).

My comrade-in-arms muriel sent me a link to NYT’s article about rising temperature of Lake Baikal.

It is an issue that concerns me: my native town was on the eastern shore of the lake, in the Selenga river delta. Actually, from an ecological point of view, Baikal is not a lake, it is a freshwater ocean. It is kept fresh and clean by a pattern of circulation of water caused by the annual cycle of change of ambient temperature. Crucially, mean temperature of air is below 4 degrees of Celsius,  the point of maximum density of water (the zero degrees mean isoterm crosses or at least touches the lake, its nothern tip lies in the permafrost area). A similarly deep Tanganyika Lake is dead below certain depth because of lack of water circulation.

Raising mean temperature by 4 degrees (possible in the worst case scenario of global warming) will kill Baikal — the surface water will stop to sink into the depth of the lake. However, this will happen pretty slowly: the water circulation cycle is 400 or 600 years, and the water mass is huge.

One of the principal lessons of my life was the degradation of environment: I grew up in a rustic place where hawks were stealing chicks from the barnyard, where flocks of migrating geese and ducks were literally darkening the sky — and the whistling sound of hundreds of thousands of wings was heard long before the dark cloud covered the sun. For a Russian reader, the Selenga delta was where Zilov from Vampilov’s Duck Hunt went from Irkutsk (where the action of the play took place) to shoot ducks. Indeed, duck shoot was fabulous — in a nearby settlement of istomino, I had once seen a man who was shooting ducks while drinking tea from a samovar on a terrrace of his house.  As a boy, I angled for baby sturgeon (fish so oily that my mother was using it in place of frying oil, to fry eggs and potatoes). All that has gone.

On a more technical note - I am looking for a good map of the Earth with isoterms of mean temperature shown in steps of 1 degree. By default, permafrost is formed in areas of below zero mean temperature. Such a map will show the area of permafrost which will melt after mean temperature rising by 1 degree (of coures, with all the simplifying assumption that warming is uniform, etc.). Still, it is something that would give some food for thought.

I was a guinea pig in an experiment by  Seb Schmoller which apparently proved that in machine translation, probabilistic methods are superior to rules-based.

The opening lines of Lawrence Stern’s A Sentimental Journey, the novel that gave name to my blog:
HEY order, said I, this matter better in France–You have been in France? said my gentleman, turning quick upon me with the most civil triumph in the world.- -Strange! quoth I, debating the matter with myself, That one and twenty miles sailing, for ’tis absolutely no further from Dover to Calais, should give a man these rights–I’ll look into them: so giving up the argument–I went straight to my lodgings, put up half a dozen shirts and a black pair of silk breeches–’the coat I have on,’ said I, looking at the sleeve, ‘will do’–took a place in the Dover stage; and the packet sailing at nine the next morning–by three I had got sat down to my dinner upon a fricaseed chicken, so incontestably in France, that had I died that night of an indigestion, the whole world could not have suspended the effects of the Droits d’aubaine*–my shirts, and a pair of silk breeches–portmanteau and all must have gone to the King of France– even the little picture which I have so long worn, and so often have told thee, Eliza, I would carry with me into my grave, would have been torn from my neck.– Ungenerous!–to seize upon the wreck of an unwary passenger, whom your subjects had beckon’d to their coast– by heaven! SIRE, it is not well done; and much does it grieve me, ’tis the monarch of a people so civilized and courteous, and so renowned for sentiment and fine feelings, that I have to reason with–

But I have scarce set foot in your dominions–

____________
* All the effects of strangers (Swiss and Scotch excepted) dying in France, are seized by virtue of this law, though the heir be upon the spot–the profit of these contingencies being farmed, there is no redress.

After taking the liberty of posting in my principal blog Mathematics under the Microscope an old letter by Donald Knuth on calculus reform, Donald Knuth: Calculus via O notation, I got 20,000 hits in 24 hours. I always knew that Donald Knuth had cult following, but I never thought that his fans followed him that close. Perhaps it is place to mention Knuth’s most personal book:

Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (CSLI Lecture Notes) . I strongly recommend it to you regardless of your (a)religious convictions.

Gordon Brown and leaders of major political parties of UK have a chance to save the Olympic movement by proposing that, starting from London Olympics of 2012, the Games should be depoliticised:

• That British politicians will give every possible behind-the-scene support to the London Games, but will refrain from attending the Games or any related public events.
• That appropriate British government officials (maybe, even Brown himself) will visit the Beijing during this year Games with a technical mission — as hosts of the next Games — but, again, refrain from attending any public events.
• That all official and public ceremonial functions will be performed by the National Olympic Committee.
• And that organisers of next games (including Winter Games in Russia) are invited to follow this example.

As it has now become common knowledge, Olympic torch ceremonies were invented by the Nazis in 1936:

Disposing of an old armchair, I cut it open and extracted 18 pounds 10 pence in small change, more than a US dollar and a Euro in corresponding cents, as well as some coins from Canada, Turkey and countries that I could not recognise.