this and that

A couple of completely unrelated and slightly old, but interesting pieces of news:

• Now that the Nepalese army (hopefully) doesn’t have anyone to fight at home, some Nepalese special forces have been deployed to Darfur as peacekeeping forces. From the International Herald Tribune:
  

  …Thailand would provide the only non-African battalion out of 18 on the proposed force, while Nepal was the only country to offer special forces. Three Nordic countries — Denmark, Sweden and Norway — had offered an engineering unit.

  I hope they do well and prove useful, but at the very least, it has earned Nepal a rare positive mention in the international press.

• American-born physicist Garrett Lisi has proposed a new possibility for a Theory of Everything, or in other words, a theory that tries to unify the seemingly incompatible worlds of quantum mechanics (the Standard Model in modern physics parlance), and gravity (in effect, general relativity). Most of the media coverage surrounding his paper has centered around the fact that he is not affiliated with any university and that he spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii (he published his paper on arXiv), so if you really want to look into what the paper says and what the reaction has been like so far, you should first head to Wikipedia.

The annual Progress Prize for the Netflix contest has been announced. The prize was won by Team BellKor, two researchers from AT&T Research who “blend[ed] 107 individual results” to come up with their 8.5% improvement over Netflix’s Cinematch algorithm (Thanks to Dan and Sujan dai for the pointers).

This contest was part of my senior project at college, where we looked at a number of algorithms to try to predict movie ratings using Netflix’s data (and use them to generate movie recommendations), and also generate recommendation of courses for students at Carleton, using historical transcript data.

Wikipedia entry on Tihar, the Nepalese festival of lights (and a lot more).

And from the BBC website, “Nepal dogs honored” (thanks to Rosie for the pointer).

I just realized that they could be talking about our politicians (they’re not).

Stephen Colbert has been in the news a lot lately, especially with his new book I am America (and so can you!) (currently #1 on the New York best sellers’ list, as he just pointed out himself on TV), and with his attempt at running for the president only in South Carolina, on both the Republic and Democratic ballots.

I’ve been watching The Colbert Report on and off almost since it started and while there are some segments such as Better know a district and The Word that I’ve always liked, there was also a period when I found many other parts of it somewhat repetitive and pointless. I’ve started finding it more engaging recently (partly because I actually have a TV and time to watch it now). His supposed run at the president has also been drawing all sorts of opinions, including concerns about the legality of calling on corporate sponsors. I personally think it was really funny and made for great TV, and if nothing else, it at least made us aware that in South Carolina, to run on the Democratic ballot, you need either 2500 dollars or 3500 signatures, while to run as a Republican, you need thirty-five thousand dollars.

Unfortunately, as I write this, he just said on his show that he did not make it on the Democratic ballot. (He decided earlier to not try to get on the Republican ballot.)

Ah well, it would’ve been fun.

Anyway, most of Colbert’s recent media appearances are easily found through Google, including this appearance on Larry King, on which Larry King makes his irrelevance pretty obvious, like he has done before. I thought I would point out a couple of recent interviews with Stephen Colbert on NPR, one of which features the not-too-common appearance of Stephen Colbert the comedian (as opposed to Stephen Colbert the character):

• Interview on All Things Considered with Stephen Colbert the character; includes an interesting discussion on how NPR differs from other radio: “[NPR program] Morning Edition has a measured barbituate vibe….Where’s the craziness? Where is the Mike and the Mad Dog? Where’s Consuela and the Cheetah?” (I really like NPR, by the way. Maybe I’ll post a list of my favorite programs some day.)
• Interview on Fresh Air with Stephen Colbert the comedian; Stephen Colbert talks about his show as himself, and it’s pretty interesting to hear what goes on behind what is basically his facade

And then, there was mention of Colbert’s campaign in one episode of the Wall Street journal morning edition. I really like listening to this podcast, but the anchors are somewhat out of touch sometimes; in this episode, anchors Gordon Deal and Gina Cervetti wonder if Stephen Colbert will ever appear in the media as himself.

Apparently they prefer Consuela and the Cheetah to NPR.