Continuing on my blogification of Peter Norvigs excellent talk, the question is, when to watch out for the flu, e.g. if you live in Denmark?
1) Go to www.google.com/trends/
2) Type in the word "influenza"
3) Select your geographical region (Denmark in my case)
4) See data up to year 2008, to avoid the graph being squished by the outbreak of A(H1N1) (which leads to unusually many people talking about the flu)
Turns out the answer is: watch out in October and February.
How to find out how long a year is on Earth by only analyzing text? This approach is lifted straight from an excellent and very inspiring talk by Peter Norvig.
1) Go to www.google.com/trends/
2) Type in the word "Icecream"
3) Measure the distance between the peaks (turns out that the average is exactly the length of a year)
Math in Genealogy is a great project (donate online). Sven Köhler from Potsdam, Germany has written a python script for visualizing the database, which I'm going to try.
Next step is to install e.g. GraphViz, which is needed to visualize the dot file as a graph. Go to the download page for GraphViz, and follow instructions for your OS.
This should install the commandline tool also. Now you can visualize Leonard Euler's supervisor family tree (direct descendants) like this:
$ dot euler.dot -Tpng-o euler.png
$ dot euler.dot -Tpng -o euler.png
Looking at the database is easy. Every invocation of ./genealogy.py --search writes to a sqlite3 database file (genealogy.db).
$ sqlite3 genealogy.db
$ sqlite3 genealogy.db
This opens up a prompt. Have a look at the schema of the database like this:
sqlite> .schema
sqlite> .schema
And see what is inside the thesis table like this:
Gregory Palamas (1296–135), spelled Γρηγόριος Παλαμάς in greek, was a monk on Mount Athos, a place I've visited with my father two times. It is a beautiful peninsula in northern Greece, scattered with old monasteries. Furthermore, only men have been allowed on the peninsula for around a thousand years.
Simonopetra, Mount Athos.
Palamas eventually became the Archbishop of Thessaloniki, which is a city I incidentally happened to live in from 1995-1996. Below is a picture of Gregory Palamas, in the form of an icon.
Gregorio Palamas
In his early youth, my father (Georgios Kefaloukos) was also a monk on Mount Athos. There he learned the art of icon painting, and could have painted one of Palamas, although I don't think he did. Below is a picture of my father taken on Mount Athos.
My Father on Mount Athos in 1966
When I first heard about the Math in Genealogy project, I was thrilled to find out that a Gregory Palamas, who lived long ago and was the Archbishop of Thessaloniki, apparently had a transitive relationship with people in science through an unbroken chain of mentoring (112861 "descendants" in total). I became curious, and wanted to find out which famous people he might be connected to.
While Palamas was the Archbishop of Thessaloniki he mentored Nilos Kabasilas (1298-1363), who later replaced him as Archbishop. Nilos in turn mentored Demetrios Kydones (1333-1397) and this lineage of mentoring continues in an unbroken line, through many scholars and countries, until we eventually arrive in Germany and at the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß in 1799.
Gauß himself mentored a few students, one of whom was Christian Ludwig Gerling (1788-1864), who went on to mentor Julius Plücker (1801-1868) and so forth. Again the chain of mentoring continues until we reach Marcos Vaz Salles, a Brazilian Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen, which is the city I was born in... And here comes the surprising part, for me at least, because Marcos is now mentoring me, together with Professor Martin Zachariasen!
Maybe I should start reading Bill Gates blog as well, just for more of that feel good vibe I got from reading the blog post. I not being sarcastic.
Everything is relative, especially the news value of things, so this is of course only news to me. Having been too busy with life to sit down and quietly read a post that is non-technical.