Brings back memories of reading a short story in a science fiction anthology that my grandmother gave to me as a child, involved a not-so-distant future where fuel is still being rationed, main character's driving along in his boat-of-a-car, smiling at all the people putting along in their miniature Japanese compacts. Gets home and we find the car's electric, the sound of the roaring engine provided by loudspeakers. Twist of the story is that at the end, the guy pulls out a crank and starts manually recharging the car, looking at the million or so revolutions required to recharge it from that brief 10 minute jaunt down the road and reflecting that it was worth it just to see the look on his neighbors' faces.
This means that the system would handle idioms almost perfectly when there are corresponding idioms in the target language, and adequately even when there aren't any (since the hard work of coming up with standard translations for those has already been done by several generations of UN translators).
Somewhat off-topic in some ways, but I was amused by a story I read some years ago in a magazine, some mention made here and here, about a UN translator who, stymied by a Russian idiom which defied literal translation, drew from Shakespeare and translated it to "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark" which of course led to protests from the representative from Denmark, etc. The core idea part of the story stays intact, but the location, date, and details of the Russian idiom vary (I remember the first time reading it, it was "something about a cow and two piles of hay" and the links I've included talk about "an orange tree, a backyard, Moscow" and "an elder-bush in the garden and an uncle in Kiev"), so there's a decent chance this is an urban legend.
Personally, I'm curious less about the idioms than I am about the MT's parsing of grammar. Not all languages use Subject-Verb-Object grammar and the rules from adding adjectives, adverbs, suffixes, and the like vary greatly between languages and often aren't all that consistent. For instance, Russian doesn't have articles like English does, instead relying on order of words in the sentence to indicate whether one is referring to a generic instance of an object or a specific instance. The grammar section of Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit provides several examples of differing grammars in other languages. I'm currently taking ASL courses (which admittedly do not have a written form for this kind of translation) and I will freely admit that learning to express sentences in a "Timeframe-object-subject-verb-time signifier-query word" structure is kicking my ass, despite having done some studying of other languages in the past. Heck, just learning when and where to place adjectives before or after words usually takes years for most people. (That's one place where English does seem to shine. Adjectives are always in front of nouns, as best I can recall. Adverbs, on the other hand...)
Anyhow, I'll be eagerly watching the progress here, inasmuch as my scattered attention span will ocasionally provoke me to check my bookmarks list...
*shrug* Machine translation is always going to require humans to massage the translation algorithms, I suspect. Those translators who get involved early on are more likely to be in the position to be the experts here.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but the software runs fine, right? And the basic idea of the code probably comes through. Essentially the only issue I see here is that some people won't be able to compile the code. *shrug* That's always the risk, particularly if you get people coding with modified compilers and the like.
Religion isn't about finding out how to live, it's about arbitrarily picking a way to live and making sure everyone else lives that way too, whether they want to or not.
Ideally, religion exists to provide a framework for spirituality, to guide people along a path that will better them. Admittedly, this will always cause complaints when people decide that some part or another of the religion is inconvenient. *wry grin* And at that, due to the way human psychology works, we still have a lot of "tying up the cat" holdovers. People will pick up little superstious habits or will hold on to rituals for the sake of tradition.
On the off chance the phrase "tying up the cat" doesn't suggest anything to you, I use it relating to the old joke about the [generic religious leader] and his pet cat. Basically, the [generic religious leader] had a pet cat. The catch is that the cat would try to come up onto the [designated sacred ground] while he was in the middle of his [designated spiritual rituals], so he'd have the cat leashed in another room. Well, the [generic religious leader] died and his underlings continued to leash the cat. The cat died. They bought another cat. Eventually, a series of rules was codified on the proper way to tie up the cat and much was written on the spiritual and symbolic significance of tying up the cat. *shrug* It may seem farfetched, but how many people think that candles in Christian masses are purely a symbolic gesture of light and hope versus a holdover from when masses were held in catacombs? The candles have become a symbol for the people, but their origins were something more practical, relating to a relatively bygone age.
As to religion's effectiveness, I'm reminded of an old joke about democracy, "Democracy is the worst possible system of government, but it's the best one out there." Religion is a crutch, but look at who's not limping.
I've been running into that statistic recently. Effective Cycling makes big of it, along with that what feels "natural," using a high gear, is actually less efficient because it makes more use of anaerobic energy, easily depleted within a half hour of cycling, versus the aerobic energy which is fueled by readily available and replenishable glucose and oxygen. I don't have the book in front of me, but essentially he argues that we're used to carrying some 100-plus pounds of upper torso when walking, so it feels natural to have to push hard whereas on a bicycle, less power needs to be delivered, so one can use higher amounts of revolutions. He quotes 90-110 RPM to be the "sweet spot" of cycling at which one can operate for hours, him quoting 8 hours as not being atypical for a trained amateur cyclist.
Really, it's a fascinating book, if nothing else for his views on the "cyclist inferiority complex" and how it's been perpetuated in our society. I'll admit it certainly made me look closer at how bike training programs in my area worked. For those unfamiliar with the term, he believes that almost all bike laws and safety programs were manufactured not to provide for greater bicycle safety, but to keep bicyclists off the roads. You can tell it's a bit of a holy war for him, but once you get past the rants, there's a lot of solid information on technique with statistics to back it up.
More annoyingly, in Windows XP, Windows Update will always try to have you run the "Express Install" where it doesn't disclose which updates it plans to install. And if that weren't enough, despite me having repeatedly clicked the "Do not send this update again," it's still trying to get me to install SP2. Bleh...
^_^
"So, want to help me with my Calculus? I'd like to you integrate my natural log."
"Hey baby, let's do some math. Add me and you together, subtract our clothing, divide your legs, and multiply."
Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all night. Unless my ex-wife calls, that is.
Actually, what amuses me more are those shows where bringing up this clarification of pictures requires reqpeatedly hitting the enter key. Honestly, wouldn't the process at least be automatic? ^_^ I can just see the job listing: Help Wanted - CIA Computer Operator - No prior experience operating computers necessary. Must be able to attain a high score of over 9,000 on Decathlon
... or "I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me" by Dr. Randy Hazlick. Just to track it further, Hanzlick has admitted to having acquired the line from bathroom wall graffiti at a hospital he was working at. The original quote was "I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy." which carries some fun wordplay as well.
Keep something long enough and it will eventually be worth $10,000 to someone.
Heck, if nothing else, that's probably not too far from the salary for someone like Long Dong Silver... *rimshot* {duck}
Hmmm... almost every service I've subscribed to offered ad-free browsing (presumably because the $10 they get from you beats the 50 cents they'd get from banner ads all year long, particular with all the blocking options). That said, anyone wonder if the amount of people blocking ads has contributed to this trend. I know I've been blocking pop-ups for years.
The Straight Dope Message Board has gone to a subscriber-only setup. I no longer post there. This is a particularly interesting move given that Cyril still states in the Ask a Question submittal form that one should start by posting to the MB. I'm definitely not commenting on the columns anymore even if there are errors. (Which I sometimes wonder was why they implemented subscriptions...)
*wry grin* Having lived in the Bible Belt, I'd also wonder how much bias is being caused by the fundamentalists being the loudest ones. Take, for example, the NRA. Just reading that name, you probably visualized a bunch of paranoid militia members, a hillbilly toting his shotgun, or a slightly-crazed-eyes man polishing his large collection. That is, unless you're actually in the NRA or personally know people in it, in which case you'd realize that the public perception is largely based on the lunatic fringe.
Casually googling for the topic of inteligent design and creationism, it seems somewhat divided. People like me who see evolution as just another trick in God's toolbox seem to about evenly describe themselves as believing in "evolution" or "intelligent design." *shrug* To my perspective, the debates generally come down to whether textbooks are (required/allowed) to (admit/deny) the (possibility/certainty) of (randomness/an intelligent being) guiding the process. *wry grin* For any particularly selection of values for those sets, someone on one side is trying to fight for it. Some people want textbooks to explicitly say that there is no God influencing life. Some people want textbooks to explicitly say God is guiding the course of life. Some people are content with not stating the source of evolutionary drift at all, figuring people will fill in the blanks as they please. And then some want to mention both sides, saying that the source of evolutionary change might be random or it might be caused by a higher power. No position will satisfy everyone involved. To my view, the textbooks should go ahead and just acknowledge the subject without any mention of why it happens. Any parent on either side who cares will teach their children to interpret the information as is fit. *shrug* But then again, I feel the same way about sex education. Give all of the facts and I will teach my child what is right, and show them how to notice when they're being snowed by bad statistics. (Ever notice how sex ed. classes downplay the unreliability of artificial contraception and then use figures from the 1960s for any of the NFP methods? At least they acknowledge abstinence being the most effective method these days.)
When people start talking about quality of life arguments, I always figure they're visualizing having to go on a bran-only diet with the occasional bland diet drink. While I'm sure diets like that exist (probably for the sake of rapid reduction in extreme cases if nothing else, I suspect that the majority of time, there's a perfectly viable diet that is tasteful as well as healthy. It may not be as rapid, but it will work itself over time and, more importantly, it keeps the situation from getting worse. Personally, I'm not about to start counting calories or running marathons, but I do maintain a certain variety of food, don't eat more than I need to to keep from getting hungry, and I engage in moderate exercise, maybe 15-30 minutes per day. I could be living healthier, but in my view, I'm living healthy while still living happy.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. "Most"? 90% of the Christians I personally know tell me that the Bible is the literal word of God, and evolution is one of Satan's attempts to derail good Christians and keep them from the kingdom of Heaven.
I know a lot of Christians.
It's entirely possible that both of you are speaking truthfully here. I grew up in the Bible Belt, Southern Baptists and Fundamentalists and such, and they indeed hold that position. I now live in Newark, OH, which is majority Catholic. When back in Ashland, KY, I could have truthfully said that most Christians I knew believed wholeheartedly in Creationism. Here, I can truthfully say that most of them believe that God uses evolution much like any other tool. {furrows brow} And honestly, isn't the use of evolution by God the whole point of Intelligent Design? You're talking about fundamentalism as regards a policy which accepts evolution. Or are we talking about different values of "Intelligent Design"?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this bears a good chance of allowing targetted bacteria, right? One the plus side, it would allow someone to build bacteria that's keyed to a single person, possibly even a single system, allowing one to devise a bacterium which release medicine or enzymes only for the one person, and possibly expiring after a fixed amount of time, allowing for some interesting medical treatments.
On the other hand, the same ability could be used to key bacteria to a specific person, to discharge a certain enzyme or chemical at a set time or duration, then expire, leading to an interesting way to poison a specific person.
That said, said technology is probably pretty far out in the future. I have not read TFA, but I suspect the "programming" is on the level of creating an adder or coding it to follow the route of a maze.
Probably referring to hydrocephalus, a fairly common cause of mental retardation in which a baby is born with too much intercranial fluid, leading to pressure on the brain.
Huh... just goes to show that no matter how funny you try to be, someone will think it's not a joke. *shrug* Not that I'm knocking the positive karma, of course...
But yes, ginger root is generally the way I cleanse my palate. Wasabi is how I clear my sinuses.
The exercise here was to remind people that the RIAA/MPAA only report inflated absolute worst case (for them) scenarios where something like 1000% of illegal downloads are lost sales.
Impressive... for every download, they claim to lose 10 sales? I'd almost say there was a typo, except that from what I understand, that's not too far from the truth. ^_^ I guess in a manner of speaking it might be too. Download one track from a crappy artist and you're not plunking down the cash for a whole CD. Hmmm...
Heck, in the case of Indy music, that could boost their popularity. Isn't Indy status based upon listening to the most obscure groups, preferably ones no one likes?
{throws hands up in the air}
Right... and while we're at it, no updates on things like space shuttles or Mars missions. It's not relevant until they complete their task after all.
{catches falling hands, stuffs them in his pockets}
That said, I kind of know where you're coming from. The world of media is such a fastpaced world that they dare not sit on a story for fear of being "scooped" by opposition. From their perspective, if this guy flops, they quietly drop the story and no one will remember them. On the other hand, if he succeeds, they can crow "We were there first!" and quite possibly get first coverage of his success. From the mathematician's perspective, he's just commenting on his progress to someone who seems an interested observer. Too, by getting an interview, he's getting publicity which may lead to further funding to his coffers to solve the problem. That's... not wrong, albeit something which does not sing to my soul.
All in all, I think the article is reasonable if perhaps a bit misleading in title.
Slashdot Mirror
Brings back memories of reading a short story in a science fiction anthology that my grandmother gave to me as a child, involved a not-so-distant future where fuel is still being rationed, main character's driving along in his boat-of-a-car, smiling at all the people putting along in their miniature Japanese compacts. Gets home and we find the car's electric, the sound of the roaring engine provided by loudspeakers. Twist of the story is that at the end, the guy pulls out a crank and starts manually recharging the car, looking at the million or so revolutions required to recharge it from that brief 10 minute jaunt down the road and reflecting that it was worth it just to see the look on his neighbors' faces.
Somewhat off-topic in some ways, but I was amused by a story I read some years ago in a magazine, some mention made here and here, about a UN translator who, stymied by a Russian idiom which defied literal translation, drew from Shakespeare and translated it to "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark" which of course led to protests from the representative from Denmark, etc. The core idea part of the story stays intact, but the location, date, and details of the Russian idiom vary (I remember the first time reading it, it was "something about a cow and two piles of hay" and the links I've included talk about "an orange tree, a backyard, Moscow" and "an elder-bush in the garden and an uncle in Kiev"), so there's a decent chance this is an urban legend.
Personally, I'm curious less about the idioms than I am about the MT's parsing of grammar. Not all languages use Subject-Verb-Object grammar and the rules from adding adjectives, adverbs, suffixes, and the like vary greatly between languages and often aren't all that consistent. For instance, Russian doesn't have articles like English does, instead relying on order of words in the sentence to indicate whether one is referring to a generic instance of an object or a specific instance. The grammar section of Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit provides several examples of differing grammars in other languages. I'm currently taking ASL courses (which admittedly do not have a written form for this kind of translation) and I will freely admit that learning to express sentences in a "Timeframe-object-subject-verb-time signifier-query word" structure is kicking my ass, despite having done some studying of other languages in the past. Heck, just learning when and where to place adjectives before or after words usually takes years for most people. (That's one place where English does seem to shine. Adjectives are always in front of nouns, as best I can recall. Adverbs, on the other hand...)
Anyhow, I'll be eagerly watching the progress here, inasmuch as my scattered attention span will ocasionally provoke me to check my bookmarks list...
*shrug* Machine translation is always going to require humans to massage the translation algorithms, I suspect. Those translators who get involved early on are more likely to be in the position to be the experts here.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but the software runs fine, right? And the basic idea of the code probably comes through. Essentially the only issue I see here is that some people won't be able to compile the code. *shrug* That's always the risk, particularly if you get people coding with modified compilers and the like.
Ideally, religion exists to provide a framework for spirituality, to guide people along a path that will better them. Admittedly, this will always cause complaints when people decide that some part or another of the religion is inconvenient. *wry grin* And at that, due to the way human psychology works, we still have a lot of "tying up the cat" holdovers. People will pick up little superstious habits or will hold on to rituals for the sake of tradition.
On the off chance the phrase "tying up the cat" doesn't suggest anything to you, I use it relating to the old joke about the [generic religious leader] and his pet cat. Basically, the [generic religious leader] had a pet cat. The catch is that the cat would try to come up onto the [designated sacred ground] while he was in the middle of his [designated spiritual rituals], so he'd have the cat leashed in another room. Well, the [generic religious leader] died and his underlings continued to leash the cat. The cat died. They bought another cat. Eventually, a series of rules was codified on the proper way to tie up the cat and much was written on the spiritual and symbolic significance of tying up the cat. *shrug* It may seem farfetched, but how many people think that candles in Christian masses are purely a symbolic gesture of light and hope versus a holdover from when masses were held in catacombs? The candles have become a symbol for the people, but their origins were something more practical, relating to a relatively bygone age.
As to religion's effectiveness, I'm reminded of an old joke about democracy, "Democracy is the worst possible system of government, but it's the best one out there." Religion is a crutch, but look at who's not limping.
Really, it's a fascinating book, if nothing else for his views on the "cyclist inferiority complex" and how it's been perpetuated in our society. I'll admit it certainly made me look closer at how bike training programs in my area worked. For those unfamiliar with the term, he believes that almost all bike laws and safety programs were manufactured not to provide for greater bicycle safety, but to keep bicyclists off the roads. You can tell it's a bit of a holy war for him, but once you get past the rants, there's a lot of solid information on technique with statistics to back it up.
More annoyingly, in Windows XP, Windows Update will always try to have you run the "Express Install" where it doesn't disclose which updates it plans to install. And if that weren't enough, despite me having repeatedly clicked the "Do not send this update again," it's still trying to get me to install SP2. Bleh...
"So, want to help me with my Calculus? I'd like to you integrate my natural log."
"Hey baby, let's do some math. Add me and you together, subtract our clothing, divide your legs, and multiply."
Thank you, thank you... I'll be here all night. Unless my ex-wife calls, that is.
Actually, what amuses me more are those shows where bringing up this clarification of pictures requires reqpeatedly hitting the enter key. Honestly, wouldn't the process at least be automatic? ^_^ I can just see the job listing:
Help Wanted - CIA Computer Operator - No prior experience operating computers necessary. Must be able to attain a high score of over 9,000 on Decathlon
... or "I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me" by Dr. Randy Hazlick. Just to track it further, Hanzlick has admitted to having acquired the line from bathroom wall graffiti at a hospital he was working at. The original quote was "I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy." which carries some fun wordplay as well.
Keep something long enough and it will eventually be worth $10,000 to someone.
Heck, if nothing else, that's probably not too far from the salary for someone like Long Dong Silver... *rimshot* {duck}
Hmmm... almost every service I've subscribed to offered ad-free browsing (presumably because the $10 they get from you beats the 50 cents they'd get from banner ads all year long, particular with all the blocking options). That said, anyone wonder if the amount of people blocking ads has contributed to this trend. I know I've been blocking pop-ups for years.
The Straight Dope Message Board has gone to a subscriber-only setup. I no longer post there. This is a particularly interesting move given that Cyril still states in the Ask a Question submittal form that one should start by posting to the MB. I'm definitely not commenting on the columns anymore even if there are errors. (Which I sometimes wonder was why they implemented subscriptions...)
Casually googling for the topic of inteligent design and creationism, it seems somewhat divided. People like me who see evolution as just another trick in God's toolbox seem to about evenly describe themselves as believing in "evolution" or "intelligent design." *shrug* To my perspective, the debates generally come down to whether textbooks are (required/allowed) to (admit/deny) the (possibility/certainty) of (randomness/an intelligent being) guiding the process. *wry grin* For any particularly selection of values for those sets, someone on one side is trying to fight for it. Some people want textbooks to explicitly say that there is no God influencing life. Some people want textbooks to explicitly say God is guiding the course of life. Some people are content with not stating the source of evolutionary drift at all, figuring people will fill in the blanks as they please. And then some want to mention both sides, saying that the source of evolutionary change might be random or it might be caused by a higher power. No position will satisfy everyone involved. To my view, the textbooks should go ahead and just acknowledge the subject without any mention of why it happens. Any parent on either side who cares will teach their children to interpret the information as is fit. *shrug* But then again, I feel the same way about sex education. Give all of the facts and I will teach my child what is right, and show them how to notice when they're being snowed by bad statistics. (Ever notice how sex ed. classes downplay the unreliability of artificial contraception and then use figures from the 1960s for any of the NFP methods? At least they acknowledge abstinence being the most effective method these days.)
When people start talking about quality of life arguments, I always figure they're visualizing having to go on a bran-only diet with the occasional bland diet drink. While I'm sure diets like that exist (probably for the sake of rapid reduction in extreme cases if nothing else, I suspect that the majority of time, there's a perfectly viable diet that is tasteful as well as healthy. It may not be as rapid, but it will work itself over time and, more importantly, it keeps the situation from getting worse. Personally, I'm not about to start counting calories or running marathons, but I do maintain a certain variety of food, don't eat more than I need to to keep from getting hungry, and I engage in moderate exercise, maybe 15-30 minutes per day. I could be living healthier, but in my view, I'm living healthy while still living happy.
BI(P)FTDS [Because It's (Presumed) Funny To Do So]
I know a lot of Christians. It's entirely possible that both of you are speaking truthfully here. I grew up in the Bible Belt, Southern Baptists and Fundamentalists and such, and they indeed hold that position. I now live in Newark, OH, which is majority Catholic. When back in Ashland, KY, I could have truthfully said that most Christians I knew believed wholeheartedly in Creationism. Here, I can truthfully say that most of them believe that God uses evolution much like any other tool. {furrows brow} And honestly, isn't the use of evolution by God the whole point of Intelligent Design? You're talking about fundamentalism as regards a policy which accepts evolution. Or are we talking about different values of "Intelligent Design"?
Well, at least the MASK would be new.
Er... I'm going to hazard that the lava would be new also.
On the other hand, the same ability could be used to key bacteria to a specific person, to discharge a certain enzyme or chemical at a set time or duration, then expire, leading to an interesting way to poison a specific person.
That said, said technology is probably pretty far out in the future. I have not read TFA, but I suspect the "programming" is on the level of creating an adder or coding it to follow the route of a maze.
Probably referring to hydrocephalus, a fairly common cause of mental retardation in which a baby is born with too much intercranial fluid, leading to pressure on the brain.
But yes, ginger root is generally the way I cleanse my palate. Wasabi is how I clear my sinuses.
How else do you cleanse the palate between beers?
Wasabi.
The exercise here was to remind people that the RIAA/MPAA only report inflated absolute worst case (for them) scenarios where something like 1000% of illegal downloads are lost sales.
Impressive... for every download, they claim to lose 10 sales? I'd almost say there was a typo, except that from what I understand, that's not too far from the truth. ^_^ I guess in a manner of speaking it might be too. Download one track from a crappy artist and you're not plunking down the cash for a whole CD. Hmmm...
Heck, in the case of Indy music, that could boost their popularity. Isn't Indy status based upon listening to the most obscure groups, preferably ones no one likes?
Right... and while we're at it, no updates on things like space shuttles or Mars missions. It's not relevant until they complete their task after all.
{catches falling hands, stuffs them in his pockets}
That said, I kind of know where you're coming from. The world of media is such a fastpaced world that they dare not sit on a story for fear of being "scooped" by opposition. From their perspective, if this guy flops, they quietly drop the story and no one will remember them. On the other hand, if he succeeds, they can crow "We were there first!" and quite possibly get first coverage of his success. From the mathematician's perspective, he's just commenting on his progress to someone who seems an interested observer. Too, by getting an interview, he's getting publicity which may lead to further funding to his coffers to solve the problem. That's... not wrong, albeit something which does not sing to my soul.
All in all, I think the article is reasonable if perhaps a bit misleading in title.