this and that

(On the phone) “…Yeah, mom. This is the big deal, mom. Comps. Pass or fail. Thousands of dollars down the drain…”

I washed my iPod shuffle (first generation, a present from last summer), including earphones, in a Maytag Newton heavy duty washer this evening. It’s a little cold and smells mildly like detergent but it seems to work all right so far.

Seveal months ago, I wrote about how nice it would be to have a Wikipedia in my mother language Nepal Bhasa. Now, thanks to a medical student from Kathmandu (English Wikipedia user page, Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia user page) there is one. It uses the Devanagari script (Nepal Bhasa has her own scripts but they are not supported by Unicode yet. It sure is nice to be able to contribute to an encyclopedia in your language, and get encyclopedic knowledge in your own language!

As I mentioned in that earlier post, the Nepali wikipedia has already been in existence for some time now. If you know either language and wish to contribute, click here to learn how you can type in Devanagari on a Windows machine. Also, check out this Roman to Unicode Nepali Converter, developed by Deepak Khanal and Carleton alum Sujan Rajbhandary.

The World is a radio production of Public Radio International and everyday, it features a “geo quiz” which poses a question about a location in the world and information about the answer. Today’s question, to my pleasant surprise, was about a “royal park…at the foot of the Himalayas,” “Nepal’s oldest national park.” It was a very short segment but amidst the disheartening lack of coverage of news from Nepal in this part of the world, even a short piece about Nepal’s natural heritage was refreshing to listen to.

This Geo Quiz page has the question. You can also find out the answer and listen to an audio postcard from Nepal, recorded by Australian sound engineer Greg Simmons.

I went back home to Nepal for winter break, and got back to Minnesota on New Year’s day. I had a lot of fun with my family, and I also got to see my new nephew Ayush, who was born a year ago when I was in college.

Check out more pictures from the break.

Nepal rebels make peace promise: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6129314.stm

And the actual peace deal [PDF, 36KB]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/08_11_06_nepal_deal.pdf

The problem is that many people will find it hard to simply sweep under the carpet, the thirteen thousand deaths from a decade-long conflict. Nevertheless, with the existing power structure, I am sure this is a positive step forward.

CBC, which broadcasts As it happens every night on Minnesota Public Radio, reports the finding of a giant rock-face three hundred miles southeast of Calgary, Canada, by a Google Earth user with the alias “Supergranny.” As CBC notes, “not all explorers require boats, or risk scurvy.” It is clear that with the power of programs such as Google Earth in the hands of anyone with a fast-enough internet connection, such discoveries are likely to occur more frequently.

Read more:

• CBC story
• Google Map picture of the face

I spent last summer (summer 2006) in New York working as a programmer (Java, some scripting, a cool templating language called Velocity, HTML, CSS) for a big investment bank. It was a very good experience: the work was interesting, I love New York, I met some very interesting people, and the monies were pretty decent. So much so that I am very likely to keep doing it, at least in the short run, after I graduate.

I am now a senior® !!! And I am actually doing comps®. For those unfamiliar with Carleton parlance, “comps” is short for “comprehensive exercise.” It is a big project undertaken by seniors in all majors: what one might call a “senior thesis.” The actual details vary from major to major. In my major Computer Science, comps takes the form of a group project in which we work on an interesting Computer Science problem. More information on Computer Science comps can be found here. I am part of the Recommender System For Choosing Courses group, though our project has somewhat changed direction: more on that later, hopefully.

I am also taking Artificial Intelligence and Elementary Number Theory, and I am doing an independent study called Human-Computer Interaction. They are all keeping me pretty busy, but I have also been making some time for table tennis, Mortar board and Yahoo! crosswords.

I just found out about this:

wehaveschiller.com: only at Carleton.

I usually prefer cold weather to hot weather; my usual argument is that while there is a limit to how much you can take off, there is no limit to how much you can put on (well, maybe there is a practical limit, but most of the time, it’s beyond what is sufficient). Besides, I sweat really easily.

Nevertheless, I doubt if there was anyone who didn’t welcome the warm clear weather here in Northfield during the past week. Here are some pictures I have taken around the campus; they are also at the gallery, where I will post more as I take them:

Tree and top of Skinner Chapel

Tai-chi in the sun: People in Prof. Qiquang Zhao’s tai-chi class

Close-up of a bench that didn’t fare so well through the winter

A plane and its contrails against the clear Midwestern sky. If you look at the actual size, you will see how surreal the plane looks.

Rosie with Canoe House’s canoes

New flowers growing among dead foliage in the Canoe House lawn