Obi-Wan Krugman

Ever since I watched Paul Krugman's highly entertaining talk he gave last year at Google about the ensuing financial crisis than I began to read his NYT column regularly. So it was a pleasant surprise to learn this year's Nobel Economic Prize is awarded to Mr Krugman this past Monday, amid the downward spiral of economics calamity now, which made this particular recognition acutely poignant (or even vindictive for like minded Bush-Republican critics). If you never watch it, here it is:



The best lines of this talk:

"(Fed's bailing out Wall Street firms) gives you a feeling of re-arranging deck chairs on Titantic"
"we now have fair trade with China: they sell us poisoned toys and we sell them fraudulent securities"

BTW, if you are like me watching my retirement fund melt away fast in the past weeks and still confused by what the heck is liquidity, solvency, MBS, CDO, moral hazard, debt deflation, TED spread, you can certainly hit wikipedia for answer, but the best explanation about this mess we are in that I've read (technically, heard) so far is from NPR's "this giant pool of money" (here is its transcript)

BTW, Obi-Wan Krugman also have this to say on America's another bubble health care crisis and actually have some nice words about Taiwan's health care system (see also here in his blog)

Update: Charlie Rose interviewed Krugman on PBS at Oct 23

為了忘卻的記念

又是六四了，看了馬英九莫名其妙的感言，只能說 “wtf”。又想起這兩段話來：

"No one may speak for the dead; no one may interpret their dreams and visions. I have tried to fight those who forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.... We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormenting, never the tormented."
--- Elie Wiesel

"If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?",
--- Jewish saying

We must always take sides.

讀張系國部落格有感

如題

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？

May you live in interesting times

本月初台灣媒體有這麼一則「新聞」“823砲戰美軍建議對廈門動用核武”，內容引用 Washington Post 四月三十號的報導 Eisenhower advisers discussed using nuclear weapons in China。老實說艾森豪政府在 1955 和1958 年的兩次台海危機中揚言動用核武已是半個多世紀前的舊聞了，唯一堪稱「新聞」的只是當年的美方相關的機密文件如今逐漸解密，有心人可以上 National Security Archive 去瀏覽。

這一則報導給人一個印象：看起來58年艾森豪英明地裁示「無法接受所謂核武器與高能炸藥都屬傳統武器」從而否決了軍方的瘋狂建議。然而實際上在 55 年第一次台海危機時那也是同一個艾森豪力主動用核武嚇阻老毛解放台澎金馬。艾帥當時的名言是

"I see no reason why they [the nulcear weapon] shouldn't be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else"

當時的副總統尼克森也放話 "tactical atomic weapons are now conventional and will be used against the targets of any aggressive force." 這些狠話讓許多人毛骨悚然，but guess what? It worked，解放軍終究沒越雷池一步。但這一招也把沒有核武的老毛刺激到快要不行，發誓「寧要核子，不要褲子」。十年以後美國經歷過古巴飛彈危機，自己受到 nuclear blackmail 的教訓後，Lyndon Johnson 才有了深刻體會，說出：

"Make no mistake. There is no such thing as conventional nuclear weapon."

冷戰時的人類幾次接近準核戰邊緣而竟能安然度過，不能不算是老天保佑。今天的新新人類大概很難想像當年的氣氛，也許只能從電影 Dr Strangelove 依稀體會 "how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb" 是怎麼回事哩。

互相觀看有感

最近和朋友聊起 Peer-to-peer 的中文翻譯，忽然想到我曾在另一個時空裏也與人扯過一回，老夫還做了一幅對聯呢。於是重回桃花源一索,果然還在那裡。只可惜的是相關網頁文本—台灣經濟部智慧財產局的專有名詞網頁 http://www.moeaipo.gov.tw/dataserve/public/terms.asp
都渺如黃鶴了，不勝唏噓之至。好在古狗大神幫忙，「互相觀看」還是斑斑可考，史有明證的呢。

古狗翻譯大神把 Peer-to-peer 翻成「點對點」，也罷也罷。

One day in the life of Vista land

I have refrained myself from joining the increasingly populous Vista bashing crowd, but looks I can't. It's getting personal. Recently my three months new hard disk in my brand new Dell Inspiron desktop failed to boot even under repair mode after several consecutive crashes, the 2nd time in 4 months. The first disk failure happened only less than 2 months into the life of this new computer. After spending hours with Dell tech support on the phone, they finally agreed to replace my "ceased to be" hard disk. Four months later another disk failure occurred, this time it crashed on the singular occasion in a year when I use Windows for, running TurboTax to do the tax. I'm so mad that I want to choke Steve Ballmer. It's time to chat with Dell tech support again (this time I was talking to Philip, the 2nd Philip I spoke to in two days, guess Dell's tech support this week all named Philip):

Me: This is a brand new hard disk. What could be the problem?

Philip: Do you have the automatic system updates turned on?

Me: Yes. Isn't this recommended by Dell?

Philip: I think your system may be screwed by recent automatic updates. I suggest you turn it off.

Me: Wow! Amazing! So...Dell is actually aware that automatic updates by Microsoft may damage it's customers' systems and yet doesn't have the courtesy alerting it's customers?

Philip: We only make hardware, not software. It is Microsoft, not Dell, who updated your system.

Me: [speechless]

...then suddenly I'm enlightened, I am not so mad anymore, I no longer want to strangle Mr Ballmer, I'm amused, I've an epiphany, I am going to blog it.

[courtesy to phoenixredux for using his image collections]