| some small bits of dorkery. |
[Feb. 25th, 2007|02:52 am] |
This morning, I uploaded a bajillion (by which I mean twenty-three) bits of art by Maurycy Gottlieb to the Wikimedia Commons. I scanned another (George Emmanuel Opitz, Dedication of a Synagogue in Alsace, 1820) from that Jewish Art book I've had sitting around. There's a lot of high-quality printed art there, certainly enough to justify the use of the scanner. I did some looking into dealing with halftone artifacts, and discovered that even what look to be reasonably well-printed images break down depressingly quickly once you blow them up a bit.
Ever wanted to calculate the correlation coefficient of two variables, but didn't have anything but awk to work with? Given a list of lines of the format line_number variable_x variable_y, running
awk '{sx+=$2; sy+=$3; sxs+=$2*$2; sys+=$3*$3; sxy+=$2*$3}
END {print (NR*sxy - sx*sy)/sqrt((NR*sxs - sx*sx)*(NR*sys - sy*sy))}'
data.txtwill give you the relevant number. Ah, awk--how did I ever do math homework without you?
Carin and I took a trip out to Borders this evening, where I tried to do a bit of research on nineteenth-century Polish painters, and failed utterly. There's nothing there on the subject. It's to be expected, as Borders isn't an academic library, but it was a bit disappointing. This will provide an excellent opportunity for me to put my new information-hunting skills to good use. It's surprising to me that there's such a dearth of information on the topic--to my untrained eye, there was plenty of fine art coming out of Poland in that era, but all you ever see in books on that era is France, Germany and the Netherlands. Not knowing jack about art history, I couldn't say why, but it's certainly a striking silence.
After we got back, we read some Shakespeare together: a bit of Midsummer Night's Dream and a bit of Hamlet. I may deny this sometimes, but I have indeed been getting better at making it sound like English and not like word soup. (The first trick was to stop pausing at the end of every line, whether or not it had punctuation there.) Still, I have only a faint idea of the meaning of what I'm saying, what with all the inverted clauses and subtle metaphors.
Did You Know that the word moussaka comes from the Arabic musaqqaÊża, meaning "chilled", by way of the Greek mousakas?
No comments today; nothing interesting to drop a line on. |
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