tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post7709846537443418393..comments2023-07-05T09:38:23.624+01:00Comments on The Half-Dipper: 2003 Xiaguan "Jiaji"Hobbeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10719619695211038389noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-63972461620270653512012-08-25T14:50:50.336+01:002012-08-25T14:50:50.336+01:00Dear Nicolaus,
ML at Google is very definitely wi...Dear Nicolaus,<br /><br />ML at Google is very definitely within the same choir, probably within the same section of the choir. :)<br /><br />Do you not think it possible that some languages have a lower information rate when spoken than others? Chinese is certainly very ambiguous when spoken, and so has high relative entropy. You'd need a fairly wide joint distribution to capture it Hobbeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10719619695211038389noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-46104334690300814452012-08-25T14:46:02.125+01:002012-08-25T14:46:02.125+01:00P.s. Mackay's book is free to download in .pdf...P.s. Mackay's book is free to download in .pdf format.Hobbeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10719619695211038389noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-84870424505126417582012-08-25T14:45:26.287+01:002012-08-25T14:45:26.287+01:00Dear Shah,
One of my favourite books on language,...Dear Shah,<br /><br />One of my favourite books on language, which is just a good old-fashioned "excellent read" is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/History-english-language-Barnett-Lincoln/dp/B003L9HGZ4" rel="nofollow"><i>History of the English Language</i></a>, by Barnett.<br /><br />A great book on the more technical aspects of information theory is that by Prof. Mackay: <a href="http:Hobbeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10719619695211038389noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-41220972314738560962012-08-25T04:33:39.963+01:002012-08-25T04:33:39.963+01:00Hehe, I'm not quite surprised -- you're ki...Hehe, I'm not quite surprised -- you're kinda preaching to the choir =).<br /><br />My day job, aside from drinking tea, is toiling in the salt mines of machine learning and NLP at Google.<br /><br />The problem with measuring archived data file length is that it's applying a general compression technique (meant to work on images, music, data files, text, what have you) into a very Nicolaus Motehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04131563725062484425noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-76153069514347179762012-08-24T16:27:15.285+01:002012-08-24T16:27:15.285+01:00See that? A tea fueled that scholar!
Do have a b...See that? A tea fueled that scholar!<br /><br />Do have a book on language that I really need to get around to reading. Do that after I finish the Indian history survey through the lens of religion. Which I'm reading, chapter by chapter, between long bursts of wholesale paranormal romance novel consumption...shah8https://www.blogger.com/profile/04537529816304128000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-45654834163621361122012-08-24T15:14:23.705+01:002012-08-24T15:14:23.705+01:00Dear Nicolaus,
The notion of examining archive-le...Dear Nicolaus,<br /><br />The notion of examining archive-lengths sounds silly for comparing data, but it is used surprisingly often. The concept of information encoding is defined using a general-purpose Turing machine, and determining the minimum encoding length for a given set of data is typically an intractable task. So, the length of archived data-files is often taken as a proxy, albeit a Hobbeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10719619695211038389noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-56964756050758366672012-08-24T07:01:33.019+01:002012-08-24T07:01:33.019+01:00Thanks to you, Hobbes, I just spent a bit of the e...Thanks to you, Hobbes, I just spent a bit of the evening reading about information gain across different languages.<br /><br />Mark from Language Log applies a <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002379.html" rel="nofollow">naive but interesting technique</a> to look at byte lengths of parallel corpora before and after compression (the compression bit is an elegant hack Nicolaus Motehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04131563725062484425noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-30780317125805929482012-08-15T11:41:36.366+01:002012-08-15T11:41:36.366+01:00Dear Justin,
Thanks for the offer - perhaps we ...Dear Justin,<br /><br /> Thanks for the offer - perhaps we can arrange an exchange of samples! If you'd care to e-mail me (hobbesoxon at gmail), then we can swap addresses.<br /><br /><br />All the best,<br /><br />HobbesHobbeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10719619695211038389noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-74050729076231230352012-08-13T15:46:03.954+01:002012-08-13T15:46:03.954+01:00Hello Hobbes, this is such a fantastic post! For s...Hello Hobbes, this is such a fantastic post! For some time now I've been thinking about sending you some puerh I purchased while studying abroad in Yunnan a few years ago. This gesture would serve both as a modest token of my appreciation for years of information and joy your blog has provided, and also of course to get your much respected opinion on the tea. This would require your sending aAnonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17216298075924403202noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-46893237296200973412012-08-10T13:41:14.003+01:002012-08-10T13:41:14.003+01:00As with everything, it pays to be cautious! There ...As with everything, it pays to be cautious! There are some howlingly bad Xiaguan tuocha out there; indeed, one of the worst puer'cha that I have ever encountered was sold a Xiaguan export tuocha sold for a Euro or two.<br /><br />However, there can be some really stonking examples to be had for very little outlay. I still have tons of tubes of early-2000s tuocha from a lucky find in Hobbeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10719619695211038389noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-753589427119541238.post-59536225489747130702012-08-10T13:09:26.021+01:002012-08-10T13:09:26.021+01:00My first puerh experience was with Xiaguan tuocha ...My first puerh experience was with Xiaguan tuocha in Singapore.I was purchasing tuos for less than a dollar back then.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com