The Penultimate Word

NASA is transmitting Lennon & McCartney’s Across the Universe across the universe on its Deep Space Network on Monday, Feb 4, at 7pm EST. Cosmic.

Rufus Wainwright’s cover is better than the original, I think.

More here. Lots of clever images.

All of the signs above appear in stores and buffets in mainland China. No, the Chinese are not trying to offend their English-speaking visitors, or convulse them in laughter. What is really going is the use of poorly-designed language translation software by people with no knowledge of English.

The confusion comes from several Chinese characters which have been represented in digitally by one character, the one which looks like a “T” with two cross-bars (干). The original characters have many different meanings, such “dry”, “do”, “undertake”, “be rude, impolite”, and many others, including, I guess, “fuck”.

I have never studied language translation algorithms and have no idea how they work, but were I writing one and I had a character or word with many different meanings, only one of which was “fuck”, I would probably cause the algorithm to pick another word.

This, and countless other examples of computerized mistranslations, point up that the human capacity for language is rich, deep and subtle, and for all our advances in modeling the real world digitally and logically in computer software, we are a very long way from doing it well.

(From the Language Log, via Making Light).

Update 14 Dec.:
Hmmm, the Chinese character discussed above displays perfectly on my Mac, but displays as a question mark (”?”) on my PC.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is intended to protect copyright owners from piracy, but is so poorly written (perhaps intentionally) that it makes criminals out of almost all of us.

Wellington Grey put together demo of the law’s absurdity.

(via Making Light)

Brilliant

Was your Turkey Day a total disaster? Was the bird so underdone it jumped off the platter and ran out of the room when you brought out the carving knife? Was it so overcooked it made Death Valley look like a rainforest?

Well, fear not! Jon Singer has the foolproof formula for cooking a turkey:

For a turkey of greater than ten pounds, the roasting time should be equal to 1.65 times the natural log of the weight of the bird in pounds, cooked at 325 F.

Easy as π!

(From Making Light)

Although this incident ended well, it took far too long to resolve.

I use Norton AntiVirus, the subscription to which expires every year around this time, but renewing it this year was just a huge hassle. There is a link to their renewal site on the web, but the link does not include the product you are renewing, you have to look it up and enter it by hand. The list of product names they have on their website does not exactly match the product name I use, so I had to guess which one on their list was the one I had. Then you fill out this form, give them your credit card number, and they email you an order confirmation. This is where things got frustrating.

The email confirmation said that I need to enter the subscription key/renewal code into the Norton software to renew it. But the email I received did not contain the renewal code. I poke around in several place, but can’t find it. So I go to their support website, and it says the fastest way to get support is to do a web chat with an analyst. So I click on the chat link, and it informs me that it does not work with Fireforx. So I open up Internet Explorer, go to the support website, click on the chat link, and it wants to download Symantec chat software. So I download and install the chat software, and now the download process informs me that I have to reboot my computer. Now I’m pissed - this is taking way too long.

But I reboot my computer, fire up IE, go to the Symantec support website, click on the chat link, and then wait around 5 minutes for a support analyst to show up. An analyst named Sanjeev finally shows up. Fortunately, his written English is just fine and there are no language issues. He asks me a bunch of questions, some of them irrelevant (like what kind of internet connection do I have), but he does renew my subscription on Symantec’s servers without requiring me to enter the still missing renewal code. So it ended well, but start to finish this took around an hour and I have neither time nor patience to mess with stuff like this.

It’s this kind of crap that drives customers to competitors.

So I installed Google Earth today, and am now addicted. Google Earth is a program you install on your Mac or PC which connects to vast databases of maps, satellite imagery, documents, and photos of damn near every place on Earth. It is much richer, a lot more detailed, and has far more capabilities than Google Maps.

The screen capture above of Central Park in New York City does not do justice to what you can do with Google Earth. You can zoom in and get almost frightening detail at street level, zoom out to see the entire globe, pan every which way, look at photos people have taken and uploaded, read Wikipedia articles about places on the map, etc. You can also upload your own photos of places you have been and post them to Google Earth.

The blue dots on the map are the locations where people took pictures. When you click on the dot you can see the picture and read and add comments about it. The orange dots are links to posts on the Google Earth Community about those locations, which you can click on and read. The purple dots are links to Wikipedia pages about those locations.

The only criticism I have is that to post pictures to Google Earth, you have to join a photo sharing site called Panoramio, which is a separate site from Picasa, Google’s in-house photo sharing site, and requires a separate login from the rest of Google’s services. Panoramio, the brainchild of a couple of guys from Spain, was acquired by Google in July, 2007, so maybe Google will eventually merge Panoramio with Picasa.

This is going to be a major time sink.

If you are a data geek like me you will find this a real time-sink.

Some examples:

1. Top 101 cities people commute into. Troy is #3 in the nation, Greenville, SC (!) is #1. Southfield is #10, Dearborn #28, Ann Arbor #75.
2. Top 101 stingiest ZIP codes. Texas seems to have the most.
3. Top 101 cities with the most Masters and Doctorate degrees. Few suprises here. Ann Arbor is #7, West Bloomfield is #34.
4. Top 101 cities with highest crime index. East St. Louis, IL is is #1 by a large margin, Detroit and Flint are #13 and #14, respectively.
5. Top 101 cities for drinking. Austin, TX is the place to be. No Michigan locale made the cut.

Photo by J.D. Griggs, March 28, 1983. US Geological Survey

The US Geological Survey has a terrific photo library that is well worth seeing. The above image, of the eruption of Kilauea Volcana in Hawaii in 1983, is one of many spectacular images to be found there. Images are free to view and download, subject to these terms.

(Thanks to my sister for the link).

it would look like this. NSFW

(From Radley Balko)

Artist Adam Roford has created a set of clever illustrations for those annoying error codes that pop up on the web. This one is for the infamous 404 (Object not found!) error.

The complete set is here.

More good stuff from xkcd:

A friend of mine who teaches middle school in the Dearborn, MI district passed this test on to me. It is a demonstration of how people with good test-taking skills can do well on a poorly-designed test even when they know nothing about the subject. See how well how you can do. Bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the terms in the test came from. Answers below the fold. Cheaters will serve detention with Professor Umbridge.

1. What is the primary purpose of the cluss in frumpaling?

1. to remove the cluss-prangs
2. to patch tremans
3. to loosen cloughs
4. to repair plumots

1. The fribbled breg will minter best with an

1. mors
2. ignu
3. derst
4. sortar

1. Why does the sigla frequently overfest the treslum?

1. all siglas are mellious
2. siglas are always votial
3. the trelsum is usually tarious
4. no trelsa are directly feskable

1. Trassig normally occurs under which of the following conditions?

1. when the dissels fruli
2. when the lusp trasses the vom
3. when the balgo lisks easily
4. when the viskal flans, if the viskal is zortil

1. What probable causes are indicated when tristal dos occurs in a compots?

1. the sabs foped and the doths timzed
2. the kredges roted with the rots
3. the rakogs were not accepted in the sluth
4. the polats were thonced in the sluth

1. The mintering function of the ignu is most frequently performed in connection with the

1. arazma tol
2. fribbled breg
3. groshing stantol
4. frallied stantols

Continue Reading »