phantom scare

午後三時辦公樓忽然警鐘大作，這是全員疏散的信號，大伙只好跚跚來到停車場作鳥獸聚。據說是一樓門口有個來路不明的箱子，裏面還有液體哩。來了一堆警察，好像也沒人敢動那個箱子，看來都看過 Die Hard 第二集什麼的。大家都埋怨這恐怖份子也太無聊了，放著對街人潮川流不息的大Mall不去，看上我們星期五下午人可羅雀的寫字樓有啥搞頭？警察如臨大敵折騰了半天，發現原來又是虛驚一場。

猜猜箱子裏到底是什麼玩意呢？原來是個模型人頭，法號 drive test phantom head 是咱公司用來作in vehicles for over the air mobile device performance 的測試用的。假腦袋裏還灌了膠質來模擬人的 tissue。測試組的同志行街回來還沒收拾家伙呢就被不曉得哪位警覺性特高的路人舉報到911去了。Osama bin Laden 先生的頭七還沒過，類似的虛驚恐怕還要在各地繼續上演好一陣子哩。

對了，你假如對這款phantom head有興趣的話可以去這裏選購典藏
http://www.indexsar.com/drivetest.html

Fun with Google Translate

昨天一時興起，考一考 Google Translate。（假如你不知道的話，根據公評古狗翻譯大神是目前最棒的自動翻譯機）

先來簡單的：「壓扁」，答曰「crash」，so far so good。

那麼「壓不扁」呢？ 要不要猜猜答案是什麼....Ready?
"Pressure is not Chen Shui-bian"

這個很有意思。那「壓不扁的」呢？
“Chen Shui-bian's no pressure”

那麼，楊逵的小說「壓不扁的玫瑰」呢？
"Chen Shui-bian did not pressure the roses"

唔，單吊一個「扁」字呢？呵呵，果然是
"Chen Shui-bian"

先別說 WTF... Google Translate 用的方法叫 statistical translation models，根据古狗的說明，

we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We've achieved very good results in research evaluations.

看來問題出在古狗的語庫 (corpus) 上，古狗翻譯用Internet上的中文語詞做為其模型的輸入，而阿扁執政八年以來網路上的「扁」這個字有很大的比例指向「陳水扁」，古狗翻譯用這個 heavily skewed 的詞庫來規訓 (train) 它的翻譯機，「差之毫厘，失之千里」也就難怪了。

又：「差之毫厘，失之千里」的古狗翻譯是 「Hao Li of the poor, suffer from a thousand miles」，挺有禪的味道，是不？

news (and no news) on Taiwan

Here comes a funky news:

(WASHINGTON) — The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that it mistakenly shipped non-nuclear components for an intercontinental ballistic missile to Taiwan from a U.S. Air Force base in Wyoming.

It said the items have been returned to the United States.

At a Pentagon news conference, Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne said the misshipped items were four nose cone assemblies for ICBMs. He also said they were delivered to Taiwan in March 2005 and had been sent instead of helicopter batteries that had been ordered by Taiwan.

Guess there would be no tips for the delivery?

BTW, in this week's printed issue of TIME magazine (US edition, vol 171, no 14), there is not a damn single word about last week's historical presidential election in Taiwan and yet there is a full page dispatch about Bhutan's election, can you believe that? Guess this itself is a piece of news.