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Tuesday, October 28, 2003 |
TRANSLATING WODEHOUSE..
A paper (pdf; cached version here) by Roger Billerey analyzes some of
the difficulties involved in trying to render Wodehouse's stylistic
idiosyncrasies into French.[languagehat.com]
Yow! Wodehouse is replete with
interjections such as what ho!, really, pip pip, and the like. It's
nigh impossible to imagine what it would look like in French. This
piece is interesting in that it doesn't get to these tropes, but spends
its time on some more subtle mannerisms. Very intertesting stuff.
10:56:29 PM Permalink
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The Elegant Universe
Genevieve and I watched the first 90 minutes of this Nova series on
Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and String Theory tonight. Terrific
production values, Brian Green is pretty dynamic, yet something was
missing. The discussions of Newtonian physics, Relativity, and
especially Quantium Mechanics were very shallow, with virtually no
details about why they worked. He repeatedly talks about how strange
Quantum Mechanics is, its multiple dimensions, its unpredictability.
But there was no explanation of why
things are wacky at the quantum level. What experiments have shown
this, what problems it solved. That makes it a bit harder to see why
string theory is so necessary and why it's such a big step. That said,
it's watchable, but I hope that he gets into a little more detail about
what string theory really is.
10:25:46 PM Permalink
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Gadget may wreak traffic havoc. "In-car device lets drivers change stoplights; officials fear gridlock, seek to block signal:
Tired of sitting at endless red lights? Frustrated by lights that turn from green to red too quickly, trapping you in traffic?
Now anyone can breeze through congested intersections just like the police, thanks to a $300 dashboard device that changes traffic lights from red to green, making nasty commutes a thing of the past and leaving other drivers open-mouthed at your ability to manipulate traffic.
But what if everyone had one?
That's the fear of traffic control officials, who believe chaos would take over the roads. That's also the potential facing communities from Troy to Washington Township as Internet-marketed knockoffs of the device -- originally intended only for police and fire vehicles -- have become available to the public.
The knockoffs have traffic engineers investigating whether lockout measures will work against the copycats and whether hundreds of thousands of dollars in traffic technology investments will become obsolete.
Police are worried about the possibility of intersection chaos if people duel over control for lights. But even more fundamentally, the dashboard device may be impossible to detect even from a police car right next to it, and it may be perfectly legal anyway." [Follow Me Here...]
4:11:23 PM Permalink
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Ancestry Maps from the 1990 census: Using the data provided on 1990 Census question 13, which asked respondents to identify the ancestry groups with which they identified most closely, the State of Minnesota provides us with these nifty Ancestry maps. More info here on 'the ancestry question' from the US Census Bureau. link via ::crabwalk.com:: [MetaFilter]
1:07:08 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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