The awful German language

Today I read a very funny and informative text from Mark Twain discussing the bad and good aspects of the German language -- more often the bad aspects. You can find the text here.

Passau -> Paradise (?!)

This week I am staying in Passau, a city in the southeast of Germany near the border to Austria, mostly known for being the place where the three rivers: Danube, Inn and Ilz join together. Many German cities are rather small and basically survive because of universities that attract many students. Passau is not different. Everywhere you see students passing with their backpacks or riding to class. However, after some time, one can notice in Passau something very different from other student towns in Germany: for each man there are 5 girls!

Since I come from an engineering school, where the proportions are exactly the opposite, I found myself in a very unfamiliar situation: studying at the university library surrounded only by girls! At a first moment, one might think that Passau is a paradise for men. However, soon after you stay and sit in the table and hear the conversations, you can realize that this environment is too "girly"! They are constantly talking about superfluous issues, like how the girl in the next table is dressing and so on. What leads me to my second observation: Girls in Passau are very well dressed. One thing that I noticed in the streets of Munich, Koln, Dresden, and other German cities that I visited is that, differently from Paris, girls do not take much care about their appearance. I am still trying to understand why there is this different line of thought here in Passau.

Paper Accepted!

Just received this weekend the IJCAR acceptance notification with three reviews of my submission (together with Dale) about focusing and linear meta-logic. I've already commented about this paper before; the main contribution was to use the focusing theorem to encode different object logics, by just playing with the polarity of meta-level atoms.

The reviews were really good (3 accepts from 3 reviewers with high confidence). They did not point out any major problem in the paper and even pointed out some interesting directions that we already thought of tackling, for example, to obtain in a similar fashion an encoding of focused proofs, and perhaps, ultimately provide an alternative proof of the focusing theorem for linear logic. I think that is too ambitious, but I am already able to encode focused proof systems, such as LJF and LKJ, by extending the focused proof system used in the paper, to one with non-canonical exponentials. I hope that this will be my next contribution to the area.

Now, after this positive boost to my confidence, I have to start seriously to find some more deeper results.

Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss

It is not that common in the scientific community to find scholars that dedicate their precious time to the advertisement of science to the general public. Perhaps the most famous examples are Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman (definitely one must read his books :) and Stephen Hawking. Dawkins and Krauss are two, say, more recent examples of this sort of scientists. I've already written a bit about Richard Dawkins, an Oxford professor of evolution. Lawrence Krauss is a physicist at Stanford University, who seems to be very active in the US.

Today I saw a very enlightening and interesting debate among them. The format of the debate was also very different since there was no moderator, so they discussed freely about anything they wanted. They discussed from the beauty of science to social impacts of scientific education. One comment that I found very interesting is that, when discussing about morality, people tend to put science in a lower level with respect to religion. However, when there is a serious problem, such as an epidemic, people forget about what they previously said and resort to scientific methods. For instance, when there was the risk of an bird flue epidemic, the same government that allowed creationism to be taught in schools, discusses about the possibility of the virus to mutate, what would allow for it to contaminate humans, but does not discuss the possibility that the virus was created to destroy us.

Crazy Weather!

One of the worst of aspects of living in Europe is the weather. Today, for example, it was snowing, even though we are officially in spring. However, the worst is not the cold, since the houses here usually have a good heating system and to go outside it is enough to protect yourself well. The rain is terrible, specially because it affects my mood; more specifically, my working mood is completely destroyed. In the three winters that I've passed in Europe, this was definitely the most annoying; it was a constant period of light and cold rain. I just do not feel in the mood to work; at least not without some chemicals such as chocolate or coffee (the Illy version of the latter is the best; thanks to Andrea :).

Today, after four doses! of coffee, I've written some pages, and for that I am glad, but I seriously hope that spring comes soon!