I got hooked on The Office
I’ve been a fan of the SNL Digital Shorts since Lazy Sunday, but this is absolutely something else. It’s a brilliant piece of cross-cultural parody. Many on the associated Hulu page had some questions, however, so I decided to write up a little explanation of what’s actually going on in this short, and why I love it so.[^2]
As Google adds ten more languages to its machine translation service, it seems to be on its way to becoming the most convenient universal translator of the world’s popular languages. Google’s handling of languages of course isn’t perfect, however—in particular, I’ve been complaining to friends for a while about the weaknesses of Google’s handling of queries in Chinese character (漢字/汉字) scripts. In this post, I run some tests using Google’s Language Detection service to try to better understand its handling of Chinese character queries.
Chinese characters have been used all across East Asia, most notably in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (the “CJKV”). Prescriptivist writing reforms in Communist China and Japan have simplified many characters, though. Some characters were simplified in the same way, some in different ways, and some in only one country but not the other. For more information, there’s Wikipedia or Ken Lunde’s CJKV Information Processing.
The issue comes up when you try to search for a word in Chinese characters which clearly came from one Chinese character-using language. From my experience, Google doesn’t consider which language you are a user of, based on the query, and returns many results in other Chinese character-using languages as well.[^1]
Breaking news from the Potomac Primaries:
White Protestants and Catholics backed Mrs. Clinton, but Mr. Obama was strongly supported by voters who frequently attend religious services.
Seeing as backing Mrs. Clinton and supporting Mr. Obama are, in terms of votes, mutually exclusive, this sentence entails that white Protestants and Catholics (the majority of ) are not a part of “voters who frequently attend religious services”, as is demonstrated by the infelicity of the following sentence:
“Group A did A, and Group B did not do A — but Group A is part of Group B.”
Well, that just settles it then.
Yesterday Steve Jobs introduced, among other things, iTunes movie rentals. Rent a movie and download it over broadband. You then have 30 days to start the film, and then 24 hours to finish it before it turns into a pumpkin. A lot of people are complaining about the 24 hours, including some with good reason and apparently many who have kids.
So why rental? Thus spoke Steve: “Your favorite movie… most of us watch movies once… maybe a few times.”1 Currently number eight on the top rentals is one of Paul Sally’s favorites, The Usual Suspects
There are a handful of movies that demand a second viewing—because they’re so good, or because a surprise ending gives every scene a new meaning when it’s watched a second time. The Usual Suspects is both.
23:45 into the keynote. ↩
I just noticed something on the latest Tekzilla Daily: Patrick Norton, host of Tekzilla and former host of the Screen Savers says “there’s a lots to learn here” (1:28) and then later “the site you’re having troubles with” (1:39). While “having troubles with…” is fine, I believe “having trouble with…” is much more common. As for “a lots to learn,” however, that’s definitely out. Is it hyperarticulation? I don’t know.
Wikipedia notes: “Norton grew up in the Midwest, but considers the Jersey Shore his home… He currently lives in San Francisco, California.” So, is this a Jersey Shore or California thing? I have no idea.
As I continue to work on and debug Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and WP-Smartdate, I’ve come across an issue where plugin activation fails, but I get no useful error message.
When I try to activate the plugin, I am redirected to a url of the type /plugins.php?error=true&plugin=...&_error_nonce=.... This redirect just gives me the plugins control panel with my plugin still disactivated, and with no useful error message.1 This apparently is an issue with the Plugin Protection mechanism introduced in WP 2.2. A quick fix (hack) is available on the WP forums.
Here’s hoping this helps some people scratching their heads, and that this behavior is reconsidered/fixed in future releases.
Apparently some people get a message like “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.” ↩
I just saw this logo near Yilan station and felt like I’ve seen it before…
Oh my god, it’s Obama! The banner is actually for the Taiwan Solidarity Union party, one of the third-parties here in Taiwan (but it’s part of the Pan-Green Coalition).
Omniture’s disgusting 192.168.112.2o7 tracking url and Adobe CS3’s use of it has been picking up some dirt recently, starting with uneasysilence, and propagated through DF, ZDnet, and more.1 And then it was discovered that the Apple iTunes MiniStore does the same. But ValleyWag gives you the good news:
Don’t want to be their guinea pig? Omniture lets you opt out.
Oh wait, really? You can? That’s great! This opt-out link gives you a cookie called omniture_optout on .2o7.net with a 1 value. But wait, it’s a cookie? That means…
Omniture opt-out explains (emphasis mine):
…it is necessary to install a cookie on your browser. This cookie identifies that you have opted-out. If you delete the opt-out cookie, or if you change computers or Web browsers, you will need to opt-out again.
That’s right. Cookies are stored in your browser. So if you opt-out in Safari or FF, will you be opted-out in a CS3 app? Um, no. Or in the iTunes MiniStore? No.
In the case of the MiniStore, you can just turn it off. But in the CS3 case (and for any other apps that build such communications in) things are trickier. As a commenter suggests on the ValleyWag, it looks like Little Snitch is the best way of clearly opting-out of communications like this. Unless, of course, you want to switch to Vista.
It’s important to give props to our man John Gruber. The ZDNet article jumps on the John Nack train of “you can’t call this disgraceful without looking into it!” But you clearly can see something is suspicious about a 192.168.112.2o7 url, which was the main impetus for Gruber’s harsh claims. John Nack hath since repented. ↩
I still have yet to find a fix to the dvipng discoloration mystery I ran into back at The Academic Approach, even with the latest MacTeX version, so I’m going to repost the problem here.
In May 2007, I wrote the following to the OS X TeX listhost:1
Hi all,
I’ve recently run into what I believe is a rare bug in
dvipng: here’s the setup. (To play along, you can get my test files: http://mitcho.com/discolor.zip .) I am using MacTeX… in fact, it’s today’s release.The LaTeX source file (
discolored.tex) loads just two packages:colorandgraphicx. The body does two things: an\includegraphicswith a local PNG file (with thebboption to specify theBoundingBoxexplicitly) and a\textcolorcommand introducing some green text, using the green defined there.
pdflatexproduces the expected result: the figure and the green text.
But when you run the following commands…
latex discolored.tex
dvipng -D 200 discolored.dviyou get a PNG (discolored1.png) which shows the text in a brownish color… the green is gone!!
There are two quick ways to fix this that I’ve found: one is to not include the image… if you comment the
\includegraphicscommand out, the color comes out fine. The second is to not specify a-D(output resolution) parameter in thedvipng… this also gives you the expected output. However, in my current project, neither of these are available options…I am frankly not very familiar with the inner workings of
dvipng… does anyone have any thoughts? Can this bug be reproduced?Any hints or suggestions are welcome!
Ditto.
Inline cropped images added to this web version, just to spice things up. ↩
Time to apply for summer 2008 with Concordia Language Villages! I just applied—you should too!
Make sure to read up on the new position descriptions before applying (no more Junior and Senior Counselors… take a look), as well as the important policy clarifications. Good luck to all who apply!
A great example of Taiwanese customer service: I recently bought a hot drink at a 7-11. After paying at the register, the cashier put a hot beverage sleeve on it for me. Very kind.
But then later I looked a the sleeve. It has some non-verbal instructions on one side…
and, just in case that didn’t work for you, there’s an image of the end goal as well:
Recall that the cashier put the sleeve on for me. That’s just crazy.
I just read Clause and Effect (via DF), a great editorial discussing commas in the second amendment and their effects on interpretation of the law. I found this timely as Bailey and I just watched Institutional Memory, the penultimate episode of The West Wing
The funny thing about all of these is that we don’t speak commas. It’s used to graphically represent pauses in speech, but are often used according to certain artificial rules which, when used systematically, aim to help the reader parse the sentence or help disambiguate between different readings.1
I’m surprised Language Log hasn’t picked up this new piece yet. UPDATE: Yup, they got to it. Great coverage, as always.
We use pauses in spoken language to do this too, but not necessarily in the same places that we place commas in “good” written language. ↩
“I’m eating a baby.”
Today at work: the military guy who has quite good English told me that he was very busy as our school is being observed next week by administrators. He then told me, “I’m busy to die.”
While I originally thought he might have mispronounced “today,” he obviously knows that word… I believe he was trying to say “我忙死了,” a Mandarin resultative construction which could be translated “I’m busy to the extent that I will die.” Obviously this is not literal… V+死了 compounds are a common form of exaggeration. It was a neat instance of grammatical transfer, though.
From Gore Derangement Syndrome:
Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.
While I agree wholeheartedly with most of this Op-ed, I just don’t think this statement is valid. Granted, the sentiment is there. From the news, the speeches, you do get the sense that the Party is in this direction and that the conservative populus is. But would an individual Republican politician really feel this way? But then where’s the disconnect. Maybe I should ask a Republican politician. Or have someone ask for me.In addition, the idea of a smaller government and fiscal responsibility in no ways rationally leads to such a conclusion nor situation. Maybe Lakoff has the answer.
