Save Pasargad

We, the undersigned, regretfully have to inform all the inhabitants of our planet earth that one of the greatest parts of the historical heritage of human race is on the verge of permanent extinction. The Islamic Republic of Iran has embarked on the finalizing stages of a dam construction in south of Iran that will ultimately drown the archeological sites of Pasargad and Persepolice, the ancient capital of the Archimedean Empire – a rich and complex site that, since its inception, has been considered by all writers of antiquity as one of the wonders of the ancient world and, thus, a part of the cultural heritage of the human race. Sign this petition here!

My Exhausting Assignment

I have a very exciting assignment for my optimization course: calculate the Hessian matrix for a feedforward neural network. I don’t know if there is any simple trick for simplifying things, but the way I’m extending the usual backpropagation to the second order derivatives are really exhausting. I guess one might have published a paper just for this calculation a few years ago.
(At least, I hope that Bishop’s book has a solution for it. I really don’t want to implement a code without checking it before.)

GNUPlot and Octave

Just now, I’m doing some experiments using gnuplot! It is a cool software IMO! Moreover, I tried Octave and it was cool too. It is somehow (or even more!) like MatLab with the same command lines – as far as I see. It is wonderful that these kinds of softwares are freely available (neglecting the fact that MatLab was also free for me too! 😀 ).
A very interesting phenomenon can be seen in my current life: I am facing a rush of new softwares, tools, and even culture! I guess this learning step is much bigger than whatever I’d in a few last years. Maybe not too! like this condition – at least now.

CSGSA BBQ

Today, we had an annual Computer Science Graduate Student Association (CSGSA) BBQ in Hawrelak park. I’m not that familiar with guys there (and I’m generaly a shy person), so I didn’t participate in all activities there, but overally it was a good program for my Sunday. Well! Hawrelak park is a really beautiful place to walk or run on big fields of grass!
emmm … There, a big dog thought that we would be its owner, and it followed us for a few hundred meters. During that unwanted partnership, it bites a few bikers too and those people thought that it was our own dog!)

Learning LaTeX

Well! Right now, I am learning LaTeX a tutorial and reading some LaTeX files simultaneously. It is a fun experiment, however, I do not like the deadline of the paper which I should prepare using this new word processor.
If LaTeX loves don’t kill me, I must express my doubt in the reason of using such a difficult method for word processing. What’s the problem of using a good written WYSIWYG software? Flexibility?

Intelligence and Your Interface

Many people believe that intelligence is an embodied phenomenon: one cannot be intelligent without having a body to interact with the environment. It is not definable at all.
Moreover, intelligence or looking intelligent (which in someone’s opinion might be the same) needs that all intelligent-looking process of interaction do their job well. If you are able to do many symbolic processing very fast, but you cannot speak at all (or in the way you want) or you understand what you are required to do, you are not considered intelligent by others. I guess in this situation, not only you are not “considered” intelligent, but also you are “not” intelligent at all!