Slashdot Mirror
Making Stuff Out Of Broken Computer Equipment?
Class Act Dynamo writes "Recently, my keyboard stopped working, so I bought a new one (nice cordless number, really excellent). I was about to throw the old keyboard out when I thought it would be interesting to take all the keys out of it and turn them into refrigerator magnets in order to have a simple 'megnetic poetry' type of thing going. As the fumes from the industrial strength glue went to my head during this project, I began to wonder what other types of craft-type projects people had undertaken with their unusable old perpherals and such. Then I began to wonder why there was a purple octopus on my couch. I decided to ask slashdot readers the first of these questions."
I have a purple dino, red monster, and a BIG red dog. But the cat in the hat is still my favorite.
Octopi? Actually, the plural is octopodes.
For further exercise, give plurals of:
o Mongoose
o Virus
o Stadium
o Agenda
o Sheep
o Matrix
o Fish
o Deer
o Incunabula
o Hippopotamus
o Cactus
o Aviatrix
Some of these may be a trick question.
Not exactly computer equipment, but I made a robot out of a toaster. It beeped twice, zipped around the room for five minutes, and ran straight into the wall. Fun fact: The fire department will not respond if you say your robot toaster started a fire. Go figure.
1. English nouns do not have cases (Well, pronouns do, a whopping two of them, but that aside..)
2. English nouns do not have gender.
3. For any given verb, there are very few actual forms that the verb can take. Any other conjugations are handled by helper words that are the same across the board for all verbs.
These are all factors which contribute to English not being too hard on the scale of things. Of course, it also depends on what language you start from. For example, starting from Japanese or Chinese, the concept of articles (a, the, etc..) is rather difficult to master, whereas if you were to start from a language like Spanish which follows generally the same principles for articles as English, it's no problem.
Indeed, Finnish is absolutely crazy as a language, on par with the people who speak it! ;)
;-) More seriously, Finnish is a very thick and extensible language, akin to French when it comes to playing with it for litterary or comic relief, which is nice if you understand it (I can only guess).
I speak English and French fluently and tried to learn Finnish back when I lived in Finland. Oh, boy... And I thought German was difficult. It must be the absolute most difficult grammar I've ever encountered! That and the pronounciation, mixed with local slang (changes everything) make it really difficult to grasp, especially since people seem to enjoy "bending" the language at no end!
Eh, no wonder Finns are good at CS and engineering... You need at least a PhD to master the language! Still, most Finns keep saying it's "easy for them"
Bad pronounciation often triggers general hilarity though, something the locals won't forget. I know four of them who still haven't forgotten when I blurped "Tussula" instead of "Tuusula". The difference? One means "pussy bread" and the other's just a small town North of Helsinki.
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.