Automatic Grammar Learner: Call for testers!

My automatic grammar learner has finally reached a point where I can run my first test(s) of it! Hooray! Silly or promising sentences found so far:

• why lovely ninja brown ones
• yes bob why
• the standing spoon there
• in pie mmm a dog
• yes weebl
• in pie mmm pie
• go us

To participate, just visit http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/cgi/s0092605/grammar.py. Thank you!

Edit: process is now running nohup-ed on DICE, so it shouldn't die again.

Watching the Venus Transit

I stayed up all night so that I could get an early start to watch the Venus transit (Venus passing between the Earth and the Sun). It's cloudy in Edinburgh, so instead of going to the observatory on Carlton Hill, I'm sitting at my computer monitoring webcam broadcasts from around the world. (Trondheim, Norway is quite impressive).

In a way it's remarkable. Captain Cook sailed to Tahiti to observe the transit of 1769, and his results weren't available in Britain for months. Nowadays it's a couple of seconds away (web traffic permitting.)

While I do get a slight feeling of history watching the small black disc of Venus move across the face of the sun (reminding myself that this very event led to the first accurate measurement of the distance from the Earth to the Sun), I have to say that for an event that hasn't occured in 122 years, it is slightly dull...