Sam Spade

I have been listening to old Sam Spade radio shows, complete with plugs for Wildroot Cream Oil Hair Tonic.

Again and again, The choice for men Who put grooming first.

Obviously not directed at me. Although in other respects, the forties ( radio version ) seem like a good fit. For example, complete crassness in all dealings with women, and a prevalence of villains who let you deliver two minutes of rapid-fire patter before you punch them out.

Most of the villains I encounter are of the snarky type, who won't listen to patter, and don't let you punch them at all.

An enormous day for the semantic search engine, and an enormous amount of work trying to get its cousin, the literary engine, to successfully stem, parse, and search French texts, too. It is curious to me how anglocentric so much of the work in computational linguistics has been ( that, or I've been reading the wrong books ). Even French poses special challenges in stemming, for example -- I can't wait to try something like Arabic.

Another temptation - the Reuters corpus arrives in the mail, one full year of formatted news stories to play with.

So if people want me to improve and augment the Semant-O-Matic, I am going to need to see a show of hands. One big help would be splitting up the huge Boing Boing entries, which are messing up all the word co-occurence patterns. Another would be phrase searching, or automatic updates, or lord only knows what other chrome-plated sleek usefulness.

Let me know!