Will my Mac fly?

A MacOS port of No Man’s Sky dropped this past week. Let’s try it out! This will be a short stream (half hour?) at 10 Central time today, and I’ll give it a quick trial.

This is all shiny and new, so I’m not going to be shocked if it crashes a few times. I also have no idea about performance — I’ve been running this on an Intel machine running PopOS Linux before this, and now I’m going to try it on a Mac Mini with an M1 chip and 16GB. Fingers crossed — it would be nice to see the Mac become a viable machine for gaming.

Wow, that went smoothly. No crashes. Performance was far better on my inexpensive little Mac then it is on my bigger, fancier Linux box (but to be fair, the Linux machine is 7 or 8 years old).

Apologies if you tuned in expecting nothing but gamer/gearhead talk, I mainly chattered away about our current research project. And spiders, naturally.

We’re in the Spider-Verse now

We’re in summer research training mode. Mary & I took one of our students to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse so that she could learn what the life of an arachnologist is like.

It was a little more kinetic and colorful than I expected. But good! These spider-verse movies are spectacular and intense.

To bring us back down to earth, this morning we’re headed out to Glacial Lakes State Park for some real spidering, which is a little more sedate.

Tina Turner has died

One of the most energetic voices of my youth is no more.

In a statement on Wednesday night, a representative said: “Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock’n Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Kusnacht near Zurich, Switzerland. With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.”

Who is going to run the Thunderdome in the absence of Aunty Entity?

They grow up too fast

She might have growed up a little since this photo was taken.

My daughter, Skatje, is doing her PhD defense on Thursday, and Mary and I will be attending over Zoom. Naturally, not wanting to look like a dope, I thought I’d look up her work (finally) and get a little hint of what I’m going to hear. I’m already lost.

Hallo, I’m Skatje Myers, a PhD student in Computer Science (joint degree in Cognitive Science) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, advised by Martha Palmer.

My research focus is in accelerating development of new corpora for semantic role labels (SRL).

I’m investigating techniques for conducting active learning for semantic role labeling: How can we determine which sentences will most improve the model when annotated and added to our training data? This methodology enables us to improve annotation efficiency by selecting only the most informative sentences to annotate.

Additionally, I’m examining approaches for projecting semantic annotation cross-lingually: If we know what the semantic roles are in an English sentence, and we know the translation of that sentence, can we figure out which words to assign those roles to in the target language? These projected annotations may serve either as a starting point for manual annotation that will expedite the process, or as training data themselves.

I’m presently exploring these techniques specifically in regards to developing and expanding a Russian PropBank corpus.

I suspect that plunging right into a thesis defense in this field is going to be bewildering, but we’ll try.

Where’s my Big Carrot money?

Big Meat is training up influencers to propagandize meat eating.

This has been around for a while. Several years ago, a student at our local high school talked up vegetarianism — I think he even got an op-ed in the local paper — and almost immediately the Cattlemen’s Association showed up at the school to give away free steak sandwiches. I think they’re running scared.

We’ve mostly* given up on red meat for a number of reasons, but one of them is that the meat industry is incredibly wasteful and damaging to the environment. It’s very sad that the Lettuce Industry or Bean Corp. isn’t knocking on my door offering big bucks to chat up their delicious vegetarian items. Moderation doesn’t pay as much as indulgence.

*”Mostly” because we’re not fanatical about it. If we’re out visiting friends or family and they serve a lunch with meat in it, we’ll say thank you and consume it — we’re mainly just trying to cut way, way back on it. Heck, if the Cattlemen’s Association shows up at my front door and hands me a steak, I’ll say thanks and include it in that night’s dinner, and also tell them I won’t ever be buying their dead cows, or encouraging others to order it.