October 2017

Why everyone should visit Japan

I have been to many countries, also outside of my home Europe, but there's one above all of them: Japan. This is a claim I make and people tilt their heads a bit and ask why. Because it is so different to what I have used to… In a positive way. When you go to Japan, you have to forget everything you know about the world. What you know is not valid there, for the Japanese do things differently. A thing as simple as going to the bathroom isn't quite the same in Japan. Press the wrong button to flush and you will get a spray of warm water directed precisely to your butt hole. 🤣 Book a traditional inn now!  (more…)

Korp and Python. Access corpora from your Python code!

If you have done language technology in a Nordic country, you have probably heard about Korp. And by now, you have probably developed some sort of a love-hate relationship to it. My initial thought was: Korp is nice, but so what 🤷🏼‍♂️, I need to access it programmatically for it to serve any use. The fact that the API description is somewhat hidden online and that not all Korp services are open about the url of their API doesn't really help at all. 😩

Luckily, once again, yours truly has been typing in some code to make your life easier. 🤓 Behold, my very own python library for querying Korp. 😊 (more…)

a leaf

When you hear the word ethics you probably think of things that are considered ethical in the society such as sustainable development, fair trade and all other overwhelmingly world embracing ideologies eco hippies are a bit too vocal about. But there's a lot more to the term than that! Ethics is a set of values that we used in our reasoning. It's closely related to moral which refers to understanding what is right and wrong. As it turns out, ethical thinking can be a lot more than just world embracing handwaving and pretentious strive for anything that is considered ethically desirable in the society. We can actually do ethical thinking from three different points of view covered in this post. 😊  (more…)

Cognitive modelling - bringing computers closer to human brains

Cognitive science's gift to the artificial intelligence development is, by no doubt, cognitive modelling. In short, cognitive modelling is about coming up with some sort of a mathematical or computational model of how the brain operates. These models can then be used in various AI tasks to solve issues the human brain excels at. In this post we will go through three different ways to do cognitive modelling. 😊 (more…)

space colonies: From the ruins of the world by Mika Hämäläinen

To celebrate the first year of Mika likes 👍, I am announcing here that my first book in Finnish From the Ruins of the World is published on Amazon. It's the first in the series named Space Colonies. I am excited that the project I started way back when I still lived in Sweden, some three years ago, has finally come to an end. I am also excited that this is just the beginning of a book series that will know no end! I have no plans to end it after a couple of more books. No. An entire shelf has to be filled by Space Colonies. And maybe somewhere along the road, the series will be translated in English. 🚀

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A lapland reindeer dog puppy named Lunni

To celebrate the first year of Mika Likes 👍, I will share the story of someone I really liked, namely my dog, Lunni. 🐕 Why was she so special as a dog? Well, she was the most stubborn little being I have ever come across in my life, and she was clever to boot. If she wanted to eat something by the road, she would trick me and have her way! She would for example tangle her tether around trees "by accident" to have just enough leash left to eat poop so that I couldn't pull her away. Of course, I learned this very fast and I knew that she was always scanning the surroundings to trick me. 😅 (more…)

birthday cake cake birthday cupcakes

It all started a year ago with my first post about Spanish. That marked a start of me posting something every week on the blog. The year has been eventful and a lot of things have been going on in my life too: graduation with MA degree, new job, loss of my dog, Lunni, who walked by my side for 12 years, being accepted as a PhD student and publishing my first book.

I thank you all for reading Mika Likes 👍 and making this blog possible. The latest addition to this blog are pages in Spanish and Finnish which I am translating myself. Let's make this blog last for many more years to come! 🎉🎉🎉