[Brain dump]

I am finishing the book "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)" and what a refreshing and wonderful reading. After all the technical books about programming languages and this or that technology, it is fantastic to enjoy the stories about science and numbers, about the fascinating inner world of our universe from a "curious character".

The stories make the readers aware of many "ordinary" and every day things from a scientific point of view but also shows the human and normal side of an incredible mind that sometimes we forget by the halo of his achievements.

A few links if you want to learn more about Richard P. Feynman:

1. A great interview ("The pleasure of finding things out") at Google Video (49 min 38 sec)
2. basicfeynman.com
3. heyfeynman.com
4. Wikipedia entry

An entry appeared in my rss reader from Google Labs that got me excited, they are sharing a massive amount of data from their n-gram models research:

"That's why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times. "

That is some data! (available in 6 DVDs) I rushed to the linked Linguistic Data Consortium and well, end of story for me, they have two subscriptions for commercial members: $20,000(USD) - $25,000(USD)