cartoon exercise #1

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

Molly Ivins Remembered

As I witness this defining moment in American history unfolds, the words echoing in my mind are Gerald Ford's 1974 speech: "Our long national nightmare is over." Certainly it's far from over yet, as this time it is longer than Watergate and W's legacy crime is far worse and more consequential than Dick Nixon's, but looks at least we can have hope now. I could not help myself thinking of the late Molly Ivins, who, as a political columnist in Texas, in 2000, long before most Americans have any clue what character George W. Bush is, or will be, wrote the most informative book on then candidate Bush, with revelation like how W was helped every step of the way in his life by wealthy and influential friends of the family, how he has always been good at rounding up powerful players to bankroll a variety of ventures, including political campaigns. It certainly sent chills down to my spine, made you wonder what would happen if such character could ever be President of United States? Well, after 8 long years, most Americans (and the whole world) sadly knew by now, at what New York Times aptly put as "the utter failure of government to protect its citizens".

Here is an excerpt from a review of "Shrub : The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush":

"Behind the down-home style and tasty jokes, Ivins and DuBose (who edits the Texas Observer) lay out plenty of well-documented dirt on GWB's career--though it isn't nose candy they're after: instead, the authors make a case that the affable governor has climbed ladders, traded favors, bent rules and enriched himself, without doing much for the people he governs. W.'s oil ventures "lost more than $2 million of other people's money," netted him $840,000 and tied him to international banking scandals, say the authors."

Molly Ivins died in 2007 at age 62.

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？