@Heike Ack, the second colon gets percent-encoded... oh well.

This is not going to be a ticker feed. Let's just wait until the initial flood of items passes.

looks like you did set it up as a ticker feed

@yoda Initially lots of feed items will pour in. I'm waiting for that. After that I'll set it to a message feed. If it turns out to make too much noise, we can always change it back to ticker.

oh I see. I guess that's fine. We don't have as much meta activity as the main site, so a message feed will be more visible

I'm done for today. See you guys later.

Good night.

adios

Is your mother tongue English @yoda ?

@Szabolcs no, but I speak English natively (or near native)

What language is it then?

hmmm... some crazy language :)

@Szabolcs I thought he was an alien?

Hm ... that must be somewhere in Asia or something really exotic

:D

Good relations with the wookies, I have

The only person I know who told me something similar was from the Philippines

lol... you speak more!

I'm only fluent in hu/ro/en, I can get by in Norwegian if I really must, and I've been studying some Greek and Chinese on my own

'tis the truth. he spoke greek to me once!

I remember... it was all... Greek to me!

@yoda badum tish!

@yoda it's driving me crazy now, I've been coming up with all kinds of weird hypotheses while washing the dishes...

If you can't read in one, then you also can't write that one. This is either because it doesn't have a writing system, or because it's awfully difficult to learn. Chinese characters is a good guess. But I can't think of a place in China where one could learn two other languages natively which do have a writing system.

@Szabolcs the other alternative is that reading is easier in the sense your mind fixes the grammar and fills in the gaps (and you needn't worry about spelling), whereas to write, you need to be decent at both

For example, I could speak German fairly well about 10 yrs ago, but it started slipping away. There came a point when I could read it and it would make sense, but I couldn't, for the life of me, write anything

Yes, I assumed you can read but not write in two, and can can neither read nor write in one. I'm leaning towards the doesn't have a writing system hypothesis for the last one.

Oops ... never thought you were from Europe! :D

hmm... now it's getting more interesting...

@Szabolcs are non-europeans forbidden from learning german? :)

No!

It's still driving me crazy ...

@yoda that's common I think. I can easily read Dutch newspapers, for example, but I doubt I could express even simple thoughts correctly

@Szabolcs lol... @acl took the short route to the answer :)

cheat :)

@acl That's the same for me with German

And Dutch as well, but only under special circumstances

@Szabolcs Your curiosity is intriguing... so here's a little hint that you can brute force with mma :)

The above is a gravatar of the city I was in before I moved to the US (certainly not my native city, but for all practical purposes, home.)

You can check this against all possible city names. But... since that might be a bit too simple, I've included 4 uppercase letters in the name :)

Give me a bit of time, I just got a Skype call when I was considering Kunming as the city ;-)

If you do find the answer, please confirm as a comment under my mma account (on some random post of mine), and not here.

OK!

of course, the simplest way would've been to email me, but this is certainly more fun :D

some very long names there. maybe brute forcing isn't such a good idea

did you randomly select 4 letters and uppercase them?

@yoda I could give it away, but I won't. I'm curious to see how long it takes.

@acl hmm... would restricting the uppercase letters to be wthin the first 8 chars of the city name help?

When I export an animation to an avi file, why does the resulting video contain both the forward and reverse time steps? Is it possible just to get the forward time sequence? Thanks.

@yCalleecharan how are you exporting the animation?

Check out this question stackoverflow.com/q/9251252/1078614

For example if I have Animate[plot[t], {t, 0, 18}], then I am using

Export["forward2xwhirling.avi", Animate[plot[t], {t, 0, 18}]]

@halirutan Is your link stackoverflow.com/questions/9251252/… addressed to me? Or maybe it was not meant to me.

@yCalleecharan Hmm, curious. Have you tried to use ListAnimate instead? That seems to work on my system.

@Heike Trying ListAnimate[plot[t], {t, 0, 18}] gives an error message:

ParametricPlot::plln: "Limiting value t in {s,0,t} is not a machine-sized real number"

@yCalleecharan no it was not addressed to you. Just a funny question.

@yCalleecharan ListAnimate animates a list of expressions, so you would have to do something like ListAnimate[Table[plot[t], {t, 0, 18, .5}]]

@halirutan Ok no problemo...

@Heike Hmm..I do not not know this command. It is for my question that you answered on Friday:mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/1592/…

@Heike Can you please indicate how to insert the ListAnimate then?

@yCalleecharan The quickest way is to do Export["file.avi", Table[plot[t], {t, -0.0001, 18, .5}]]

(The reason that I start at t == -0.0001 is because there is a bug in plot[t] that causes it to break when t is exactly 0)

@Heike Thanks a lot for your very kind help. It works fine. Yes things are not so smooth at t=0.

@yCalleecharan I've fixed the bug. The updated version of plot[t] should work fine at t=0.

@yoda In what way do you retrieve avatars from gravatar for a given word?

where "string" is the word you want

@Heike But there's more than one way to hash ... without knowing the algorithm he used, I don't stand a chance

@Szabolcs Sorry, I forgot to include "MD5" as the second argument in Hash

@Heike Got it, thanks!

getGravatar[email_String] :=
 Import["http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/" <>
   IntegerString[Hash[email, "MD5"], 16, 32] <> "?d=identicon"]

Works on your email :-)

@Szabolcs Yes, I noticed. It's a bit scary.

But it's not easy to get the email from the hash,

On yours as well

@Szabolcs That's true, bit it did give me a slight "big brother" feeling when it popped up amongst other generic avatars.

@yoda CityData[] has 165000 cities and I get get 4 gravatars per second ... Even if you don't use any uppercase it'd take half a day.

@Szabolcs perhaps you could restrict to a particular country

those capital letters have discouraged me

(I gave up earlier today on this as too tedious)

@Heike Thanks for updating the post. The code works fine.

I wonder why this question I asked got downvoted. I have no feelings about it whatsoever, I am just wondering. Did I not do my homework and research it sufficiently? I thought I did.

@Szabolcs oops! I went to look at it and saw that I did! I must have misclicked when trying to upvote earlier today)

sorry, let me fix it

hm locked unless you edit it...

sorry for that!

oh right, i was reading it on an iphone and maybe it happened when I dragged it downwards...

@acl literally and figuratively

@Heike yes! and now I feel guilty :)

:D those nasty iThings always cause trouble ;-) Don't mind about rep any more I just wanted to know the reason

good night all, kalhnyxta @acl :-)

@Szabolcs night (I'll reverse it once it is edited)

sorry again!

@Szabolcs to judge from today's events in athens, your greek might soon lose any practical utility