Archives for September, 2006

Dvorak expands his bonehead repertoire

John Dvorak is this tech columnist who usually spends his time writing idiotic articles about how Apple is doomed, or Microsoft needs to throw away XP and Vista and go back to Windows 2000, or the future of computers is obviously wearable smart machines shaped like underpants. Great for getting the hits up on his publications, but not exactly informed.

Now, joy of joys, he’s gotten into my game! In Machine Translation: I’m Sick of Waiting (also available here), he writes:

The way I see it, if computers can now play a credible world-class game of chess, then they should be able to translate complex sentences written in the world’s major languages. They should be able to translate to and from English, to and from French, and to and from Russian. I eventually expect a translation to and from Chinese and Japanese, too. Exactly what’s the hangup?

We have the computing power to make this work, so why don’t governments all demand it? Throw $10 billion at the problem, and I bet it is resolved sooner rather than later. $10 billion is less than the cost of one month of the Iraq war, just for comparison.

Yes, John, living human languages are exactly like a game with a fixed set of rules and a finite numper of possible moves at any one time. Er, wait. No they aren’t. They’re flexible, the people who use them can use them incorrectly and still communicate effectively, they’re constantly gaining new words and losing forgotten ones.

If $10 billion is enough to create a machine with the communicative power of a human brain, you can bet that Google or Microsoft or some other big player would have spent that money a long time ago, and would be reaping the rewards right now . . . either that or trying to turn the brain off before it launched the missiles and killed the human parasites on the planet. So you can see how wise that idea would be.

The best part of his article is the final para:

The computer revolution began a half-century ago. We should have been able to solve this problem by now. What we need is government resolve, because private industry can’t seem to manage it.

That’s right folks, you heard it here first! Government researchers can do it. Because when you’re part of a bureaucracy that mandates the concealment of the portion of the anatomy at the “rear of the human body . . . between two imaginary lines, one on each side of the body (the ‘outside lines’), which outside lines are perpendicular to the ground and to the horizontal lines described above and which perpendicular outside lines pass through the outermost point(s) at which each nate meets the outer side of each leg” instead of telling strippers in Pennsylvania to keep their butts covered up then you know all about the innermost secrets of human communication.

09/19/2006 | web | 1 Comment

Cardless

A couple evenings ago I got a call from Citibank about my credit card. “Did you use your card today to buy $9,000 worth of gear from this American computer sales website?” Um, no.

Someone made a 2-cent charge and followed that up with two $4,500 purchases. The “tiny purchase to make sure the card is live” is a common practice among these criminals apparently, and that set off the alarm bells at the bank. They froze the card and got in touch with me.

We went through the list of purchases on the card for the last month or so. A few of them were mine (renewing my JAT membership, an amazon.co.jp book buy) but I had nothing to do with the thousands upon thousands of dollars, pounds, and euros spent in the UK, Germany, and America. That card gets around. I think the total hit about $15,000.

I’m not too worried about things. Citibank cancelled the card while on the phone with me. The card bill comes out of my bank account, but for the transactions that have already gone through, they’re going to credit the account so I don’t end up with my yen balance dropping down to zero. And my next card statement will include a dispute form for me to cancel anything else that slipped through.

Not sure where the number slipped out. Maybe in the UK? I only used the card three times there—at a restaurant in London, at Hertz, and at another restaurant in Edinburgh. Perhaps I’ll blame the rental car agency. They tried to steal my suit, after all.

09/18/2006 | life | 1 Comment

Fighting terror

This is a nice thing to read. I’m ordering the book titled Three Cups of Tea, reviewed in this CSM piece: A gift for an entire village. It’s by a guy who failed to summit K2, got lost in the Karakoram (kind of a bad place to do that), got saved by villagers, and went back to build a school for their children. He’s stuck with his mission and improved the lives of the folks who helped him.

Not without cost, though. The Taliban are powerful there, and they aren’t happy with the fact that girls get lessons too.

But even those impressive accomplishments cannot compare with the hardships and danger he encounters in Pakistan. He survives fatwas issued by angry mullahs. He spends eight days in an airless room after being kidnapped by the Taliban. And he receives death threats in the United States after Sept. 11.

Greg Mortenson has built 55 schools so far. Keep it up!

09/12/2006 | life | Comments Off

Prince born; harms economy

An interesting article in Fortune titled “Oh boy: Prince imperils Japan’s economy.” (Or maybe it’s “Why Japan needed a female heir to the throne,” if you go by the title in the .html doc.)

There’s been no shortage of articles claiming the opposite—saying that this new imperial baby will pump an additional ¥150 billion into the economy, or whatever. I can’t say that I really get that argument. What do consumers run out and buy to celebrate a royal birth? Commemorative coins? Diapers? Cribs? Does this really make people want to have kids of their own?

Who can say . . . The article linked above notes that the economy is hampered by attitudes and systems that are hostile to women’s full participation in the workplace, and sees the “thank the kami it’s a boy, and not another worthless girl-child” aspect of this birth as a sign that those harmful things aren’t going away anytime soon.

If this kid had been a girl, and the country had to change the Imperial House Law to allow women to succeed to the chrysanthemum throne, I don’t think it would instantly push companies to hire women for executive-track positions and local governments to create more robust daycare facilities and other support systems for working parents. But it would have been a sign that someone in Kasumigaseki is actually thinking about matters of equality and recognizing them as more important than tradition for the sake of tradition.

09/08/2006 | Japan | 4 Comments