@TaraB Other NZers, or overseas tourists?

If I see a kiwi I'm happy!

@DavidWallace: Mostly overseas tourists.

@DavidWallace The NZers who accompanied us.

@JonasTeuwen Will Napier fit your itinerary?

@Gigili: Well, they didn't know what they were talking about.

I think so, yes.

@JonasTeuwen The fruit, or the bird?

@JM The bird, of course.

I'm not going to NZ to see fruit!

I didn't appreciate Auckland properly when I lived there. Now that I've lived elsewhere, I think it's an amazing place to live.

Well, they apparently have good fruit kiwi's there, so I can try.

@Gigili Did you climb Rangitoto? Visit Rainbow's End? Go sailing in the harbour? Go to Auckland domain?

By the way, we don't call the fruit just 'kiwi' in NZ. Kiwi only refers to the bird or the people.

@DavidWallace: Nice to see you coming to Auckland's defence a little bit now. =]

"I want to eat a kiwi" means you're Moari or want to eat a flightless bird?

@JonasTeuwen While in NZ, do NOT refer to the fruit as a kiwi. Call it a kiwifruit. Regardless of what the convention in other English-speaking countries is.

@Jonas: Not funny.

@JonasTeuwen That’s an interesting spelling of Māori!

@ClarkKent: Yes.

@BrianMScott You mean it is totally wrong, right? 8-).

Right.

That's an interesting way of saying that.

@DavidWallace Didn't know that. I'll keep it in mind when I get to visit...

@TaraB It's as sad to dismiss Auckland after seeing very little of it, as it is to dismiss NZ after seeing only Auckland.

@DavidWallace: Have you been to West Auckland? I mean way out west, not just New Lynn or boring places like that. =]

@BrianMScott Still looking at your answer. If we have a countable basis we have that every open set can be written as a countable union of basic sets, no? What am I missing? Here.

@JonasTeuwen Well, I actually meant more than just that it was wrong: it’s pronounceable, and the pronunciation tickled my funny bone a little.

@DavidWallace I don't remember well but we didn't visit that rainbow thingy. We didn't go sailing in the harbour either.

@TaraB ... Then how do you say you want the fruit?

@Jonas: kiwifruit.

@TaraB No, not way out west.

Probably no further west than the zoo.

@MattN Can be written as a countable union of sets from the countable base, but what about other bases that may not be countable? That’s what the OP was asking about.

@DavidWallace: It's beautiful. That's where I come from. It's not like a city at all.

@ClarkKent Not before you have to start swimming.

@TaraB OK, next time I and my family come to Auckland, we'll be sure to head west. Anything particular we should see while we're out west?

@ClarkKent That's about a kiwi?

@BrianMScott Oh! Thanks.

@JonasTeuwen It couldn't possibly be. Kiwi have wings and can't fly, so it would be wrong on both fronts.

@MattN That’s the same mistake that Ben and at least one other person made, so you’re not alone.

@BrianMScott Thanks : )

Not any useful wings apparently...

@JonasTeuwen No, I don't think they use their wings for anything much.

@DavidWallace: Go to the beach. My favourite is Karekare (I used to live there for a year), but Muriwai is definitely worth a visit.

@ClarkKent If I listen to the complete song my ears will start to bleed. I need more Benjamin Britten.

@DavidWallace Yeah, a bit like the ostrich...

NZ people recommending NZ people where to go?

@JM That bird is extremely cool.

It hit my head when I was feeding its friend... very hard.

@DavidWallace: There are also nice bush walks, for example to the waterfall at Karamatura. There's a great really long walk (seven hours or something) out at Whatipu as well. But probably nothing better than what you can find elsewhere in NZ.

@JonasTeuwen Look, NZ has so much to it, that nobody can have seen all of it. Since Tara and I are from opposite ends of the island (sort of), it's natural that we'd be able to recommend stuff to each other.

Okay, cool.

@ClarkKent I can believe that.

@ClarkKent Not as scary as cassowaries, tho.

Nasty buggers.

You can ride it, but it just goes wherever it wants, not where you want it to go...

I've tried to find photos of Karekare on the internet to show people how beautiful it is, but there's nothing there that really shows it. I guess it's because you'd need a 360deg view.

I've seen some picture of the coast line of NZ. Not as anything I have seen before. Cool!

@TaraB Nobody's tried taking a panoramic shot? Odd...

@JM: Well, they probably have, but I didn't come across it yet.

It's still not going to give the same feeling, though.

@JonasTeuwen Any particular part of the coast?

@DavidWallace No, just all the pretty pictures you see when you type "New-Zealand coast" in Google images.

It goes very quickly uphill.

The other thing I recommend to anyone visiting Auckland is to walk up one of the volcanoes. One Tree Hill is the best, and has a huge park around it. Mt Eden is more central though and has a very good view and a big crater (not huge like Rangitoto, but still impressive).

Here everything stays flat... up to Germany.

And there it is full of Germans.

@JonasTeuwen Except for a few famous hills used in bike races.

Or you go down and there it is full of Belgians.

@BrianMScott In NL? You have more of those in Belgium right?

@TaraB I was so disappointed last time I went to Mt Eden, that you're not allowed to walk down into the crater like you used to be able to. So I went off to Mt Wellington instead, which is smaller but still kind of cool.

It are hills but they are very steep.

@DavidWallace: Are you not? That is a shame.

@JonasTeuwen I believe so, yes, but there are a few gems in NL, too.

A lot of people fall each time on those hills during the bike races. They are usually quite severely injured.

I've just looked at the wikipedia page for Karekare. Those falls look cool. Are they close to the beach, @TaraB?

My mum lives in Mt Albert, so when I'm staying with her I walk up Mt Albert a lot. It's also smaller than Mt Eden, but you get more of a view to the west.

Sorry, I retract that question. The page says how far from the beach they are.

@TaraB I guess you would.

@DavidWallace: Yes, the falls are a really short walk from the beach. They are nice, and in the middle of summer you can swim there, but it's pretty cold!

@TaraB Which by my lights means that you can’t swim there! (Cold and I do not get along well.)

OK, definitely putting it on the list then. Of course, I don't know when I shall next be up that way.

The photos on the Wikipedia page really don't do the beach justice. There are better ones on Google images.

@TaraB How cold is "cold"?

@TaraB Wow, true!

A guest has "promoted" me to his local ICT guy...

@BrianMScott: Me neither really, but I'm going to have to toughen up. I insist on swimming in the sea in summer if I happen to be near it, and now I live on the coast of Fife in Scotland. So I'll get used to swimming in the North Sea.

@DavidWallace You're surprised by the beauty of your own country? :-).

@JM: It's about 15 years since I swam there, and I'm no good at temperature estimates anyway. A lot colder than the sea, anyway.

@JonasTeuwen Not surprised, just impressed.

It seems like a much nicer place to live than NL, but everything is much further away!

@TaraB Bbrrrrr!!!!!!!!!! No, thanks! :-)

@JonasTeuwen Yes, it's an awfully long distance from one end of NZ to the other. Which is why so many people just see Auckland.

@BrianMScott: But the sea is probably warmer than you expect.

@DavidWallace And there is hardly any public transport I suppose (from one side to the other)?

@JonasTeuwen But I've never been to Netherlands, so I can't really draw comparisons.

@DavidWallace Yes, but look on Google images!

@DavidWallace: Do you mean foreigners by 'so many people'? Or Aucklanders?

Everything is very very... flat!

@JonasTeuwen I assume you can get a bus from Kaitaia to Wellington, and from Picton to Invercargill. I'd have to check, to be sure.

But we do have dikes! And we are below sea level... Yeah, that's cool...

@JonasTeuwen Everything is... plane? ;)

My experience is that foreign tourists, or even people from overseas who live in Auckland for a while, usually see no more of Auckland than the city centre.

@TaraB Foreigners.

@JM Curvature vanishes.

@TaraB I don’t even go out for a serious bike ride unless it’s over 15°C, maybe even 18°C.

Everyone has told them that Auckland is nothing special, so they don't bother with it.

@BrianMScott You would never go out for a bike ride here, then :-).

"Everybody" is usually quite a fool...

@BrianMScott: That's different. You can get very cold riding a bike.

@JonasTeuwen That’s probably true, unfortunately.

@Jonas: So when are you going to Auckland?

@BrianMScott I think it is possible in the summer, for say three weeks.

@TaraB which is really a shame.

@TaraB Especially at any real speed.

@TaraB In March next year I think.

I'll be coming from Canberra.

@DavidWallace: Yes. But you were doing that just before! You told Jonas that Auckland is 'like any other big spread-out city'.

I've never been to a "big spread-out city".

=]

I could run all year round, except that I’ve tendinosis in one ankle and haven’t been able to run seriously in ... hm ... 25 years now. Very annoying. That’s why I took up cycling.

I'll go to London in two weeks.

@JonasTeuwen Go to Rotorua, as well as Auckland and Napier. If you've got time to head north, you have to check out the Bay of Islands. And if you're going to the South Island, then Hanmer Springs is a must.

@DavidWallace Okay thanks. I'll remember that. When it is closer to March, could I ask you again where to go?

@DavidWallace: Why do you recommend Napier particularly?

@DavidWallace: There, there.

@TaraB And Auckland is indeed like any other big spread-out city. But most big spread-out cities have interesting parts. Auckland is among them.

@JM I can sometimes feel it, but it’s almost never a problem.

@DavidWallace: I actually don't know any cities that are big and spread out in the same way as Auckland. They don't have them in the UK or Germany, because the outskirty bits are not counted as part of the city anymore.

Okay, I need to go to work... 11:30 AM already :-).

@TaraB Because he said he wanted to see kiwi.

Quick question: It's conventional to call $G \times X$ equipped with the obvious left $G$-action "the free left $G$-set on $X$"... but what do you call $X^G$ equipped with the canonical left $G$-action induced by the right self-action of $G$? I want to say it's the "cofree left $G$-set on $X$", but I'm a categorist...

@TaraB Sydney and Toronto both spring to mind.

@DavidWallace: They have them in the zoo. =]

Of course I want to see the kiwi. I love birds and only NZ has the kiwi.

It’s certainly nothing like the situation that finally forced me to give up serious running: I’d get up in the morning, and it would take at least an hour and a hot bath before I could walk without limping.

They don't have kiwi's in zoos here!

@TaraB But Napier is the best place to see them. Much better than the Auckland zoo.

I'll go to Napier.

@DavidWallace: Yes, probably quite a lot like Sydney in some ways, only much smaller. (Okay I have actually been to Sydney, but I was seven.)

See you later guys!

You don't have to go there now!

@DavidWallace: Oh, I didn't know that. I've only been to Napier for a conference. Can you see kiwis in the wild there.

Heh, na, I go to work now... So I have money to go to NZ.

@Jonas: If you're interested in native birds in general, you might like to visit Tiritirimatangi Island in Auckland.

Thanks, noted.

No, in the National Aquarium. It has a kiwi enclosure, with exactly the right level of light to keep the kiwi active, but visible.

Oh, right. Yes, it's pretty dark in the kiwi house at the Auckland zoo, so you can only just make out the kiwis.

@TaraB I could look it up, but you can tell me quicker: they’re nocturnal?

Yes.

@TaraB That's the case with most of the places in NZ with kiwi. Even the kiwi centre at Otorahanga. But the Napier one is not like that.

That was probably only marginally quicker. =]

Interesting; I never realized that.

@TaraB It was quite a bit quicker: I’m on dial-up.

I heard a wild kiwi once, up in Kerikeri. That was quite special.

@BrianMScott: There's still such a thing as dial-up?

@TaraB Shocked me, too. :)

guys. is it possible to define a command in TeX for colours? Example: I write \command{text} and it compiles as {\color{red}text}`

@TaraB There is indeed. I expect that I’ll finally get round to switching this summer.

@BrianMScott: Definitely recommended.

@Jonas: so we made the same choice! :D

@JM: What did? That kiwis are nocturnal?

@Ilya: Sure. \newcommand{\redtext}[1]{\begingroup\color{red}#1\endgroup}

@TaraB That there still are people using dial up : )

@TaraB No, when Brian told me he's still on dial-up, many days ago...

@TaraB It hasn’t really been a problem until the last year or so, but now there are just too many web pages that I actually do want that are loaded up with all sorts of rubbish that takes forever to load.

@JM: Oh, right! That makes more sense. =]

@BrianMScott: Yes, most webpages really aren't designed for people on dial-up these days.

@TaraB Very true. Not even the ones that perfectly well could be.

Indeed.

Everybody and his dog wants AJAX on their pages... :(

What’s AJAX?

@BrianMScott It's basically the technology that allows pages like main's front page to load stuff in (almost) real-time.

"Asynchronous JavaScript + XML"

@JM Ah, okay.

Not exactly something that everyone and his dog actually needs.

Flash is also a serious offender these days, though I distinctly recall watching Flash movies on dial-up.

Well, now that I've finished defending my beautiful city, I think I should do some work.

(Of course, cartoons were way simpler back in the day.)

@TaraB Work? What’s that? :-) (I do like being retired.)

@BrianMScott: That thing I have to do so that anyone will employ me in the future.

@TaraB May I ask what you’re working on/at?

Currently things to do with semigroups and automata.

Before that I did groups and automata.

@TaraB which kind of automata? like Buchi, DFA?

@Ilya: Right now two-tape asynchronous finite state automata.

@TaraB Somehow I’m not altogether surprised, given the questions where I’ve run into you.

=]

@TaraB haven't heard about that :)

@Ilya: You know finite state automata?

@TaraB aha

Well now instead of just a single input word, you input a pair of words.

You still read one symbol at a time, but it can be from either tape.

Non-deterministically? Is that why the asynchronous?

@BrianMScott: In general, yes.

@BrianMScott ah, that's clear

With synchronous two-tape automata, you read alternately from the tapes.

In general terms, what does the second input tape do for you?

@TaraB we do verification of automata specification against stochastic processes

(Or you can think of it as reading one symbol from each tape at each transition.)

Do the transitions know which tape was read? I’m guessing no.

@Ilya: Oh. I don't really know what that means precisely, but anyway, certainly related.

@BrianMScott: You only know which state you end up in.

But I'm not sure I exactly understand the question.

The transitions do specify which tape is being read from.

@TaraB it means that if you have a process $(x_1,x_2,...)$ on a labeled space, it produces some words $L(x_1)L(x_2)...$ where $L$ is a labeling function. You want to know if this word is in the admissible language of an automaton. In our case, we want to know what is the probability of it

So you'd have a transition labelled $(a,\epsilon)$ for reading $a$ from the first tape and nothing from the second.

Ah, okay. Can the tapes use different alphabets?

Yes.

Sounds quite interesting; I may do a little digging.

So if the first tape has alphabet A and the second has alphabet B, what you recognise is some relation on $A^*\times B^*$.

@Zhen: thank you! it works nicely

@TaraB I see that, yes.

This book is supposed to be a good place to start.

I've read very little of it myself so far.

What we're actually working on is semigroups whose word problem is recognised by such an automaton.

@TaraB And at only 1.1M it’s a reasonable download even for me. :-)

Good!

No fancy stuff there.

@Ilya: Oh, right. So which kind of automata do you look at?

@TaraB DFA, separated Buchi

@TaraB are you female by any chance?

I am asking as your name suggests so

@Rajesh: Yes. Tara is pretty generally a female name, I guess.

@RajeshD You should have been told many times here, that it's not the right question to ask here! Finally! I'm sorry to be so direct

(And it is my actual name.)

I guess its an indian name

@Ilya: I do understand that it's not really what people should ask, but I don't happen to object right now. I think the reason I don't mind is that Rajesh and Tara are both Indian names, and so I suspected it was more of a question about my name.

And there we go: downloaded.

@Rajesh: Yes, although it's also an Irish name. But I think my mum was thinking more of the Indian one, since my sister's name is also Indian.

@BrianMScott ah, dial-up? :)

@Ilya Yep.

@Tata: myself, I'm mostly focused on specifications in CTL and LTL. Although any LTL specification can be expressed via Rabbin automaton

@TaraB Isn't it an Irish name? (Hi everybody!)

Hello ymar.

@ymar: Yes, it's both.

@TaraB Oh, I see. :)

Hi ymar.

@Brian: by my last count, that's six people who were surprised that you can still do stuff on dial-up... :)

@TaraB And the funny thing about the Irish name is that it’s actually an Anglicization of an oblique case of the Irish name Teamhair, which in the nominative sounds quite different.

Hey, Matt.

Hi, Matt.

Hi Gigili.

@BrianMScott: How do you pronounce that?

@TaraB Do you read IPA?

Probably something completely unlike the spelling...

@BrianMScott: Not completely, but I could try.

@BrianMScott Do you speak Irish?

@JM I'm not surprised about that - I knew that :) just opened the book Tara cited in a second and didn't realize first, what Brian has downloaded later

@ZhenLin You misspelled "likely"... ;)

@ZhenLin: Yes, although I'm sort of used to how a few Irish names are pronounced, so I have a little familiarity with 'Irish spelling'.

@TaraB Let me not do the IPA, then. Very roughly, something like \t'owr'\, where the \'\ indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant.

Hah, I guessed /tʲaʊrʲ/!

And that is indeed very close.

@BrianMScott: Thanks. And what's the IPA?

@ymar No, I just know something about it.

I have considered learning (Scottish) Gaelic.

@TaraB What Zhen Lin wrote is good, at least for some speakers; I’m not sure how much dialect variation there is.

@BrianMScott Great! Would you mind if I asked you a question from time to time?

OK.

@ymar I can’t guarantee to be able to answer: my knowledge is quite limited.

Then I thought two years wouldn't be long enough to learn much. But now I'm thinking of staying in Scotland longer if I can, so I might start next year if it's looking likely I can stay.

I haven't figured out the principle which determines which letters are silent in a sequence of vowel letters.

Especially about the pronunciation. I've been unable to find any sources using the IPA.

@TaraB You’re certainly not in the worst place for doing so!