September 20, 2004
LA
New LA pictures posted! While in LA, I highly recommend the seven-course prix fixe menu at Hayakawa! :D Courses 1, 2, 3, and 6, which include such delicacies as ankimo (monkfish liver) with caviar and halibut fin sushi, are shown in the pictures.
Posted by bnc at 04:25 AM
September 11, 2004
September 05, 2004
amazon.com hack
|
Here's a useful recipe for automatically obtaining the entire text of
many books on amazon.com:
look up desired book
click on search inside
search until last useful page p (e.g., before the index)
text = ocr(page p)
str = least probable n-gram(text)
while pages left
url = search on str (full-text search - YEAH!)
get pages p, p+1, p+2
text = ocr(page p + 2)
str = least probable n-gram(text)
What's needed is a good, free OCR program and a decent text data set to
help compute least probable n-grams in written works. Anyone know of
a good OCR program for Linux? I've tried a few and they all seem to
do really badly. Isn't this a standard machine learning 101 programming
assignment? :P
PS On a completely unrelated note, "Elements of Information Theory" is now selling for 60% off ($37.80 as opposed to $94.50 previously) for whatever reason! Given the number of bugs on amazon lately, I wouldn't be surprised if this is unintentional (couldn't find anything on an imminent 2nd edition for example). :D (Note: There apparently is a 2nd edition to be released in May 2005.) |
Posted by bnc at 01:12 AM
| Comments (3)