"Good gracious," said Alice, "I think I have fallen entirely through the Earth and ended up in the Antipodes! I suppose that must be why I'm da[image]
"Good gracious," said Alice, "I think I have fallen entirely through the Earth and ended up in the Antipodes! I suppose that must be why I'm dark brown and completely naked." She looked down on herself, and, indeed, she was not wearing a stitch of clothing. "At home," she continued, "I am sure they would have thought it most improper; but here it seems to be the thing to do. All the same, I wish I didn't have to say everything in Pitjantjatjara! Why, it's all I can do to pronounce the name of the language, let alone speak it."
"You needn't worry," said the Witchetty Grub shortly, "No doubt someone will backtranslate you into English by and by. They'll lose all the subtle wordplay but that will serve them right. And maybe the editor will add a few footnotes to tell people what they're missing."
Alice had not the least idea what backtranslation was, and for a moment she wondered if she should be alarmed; but so many strange things had already happened that day that one more would hardly make a difference....more
Be it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this presBe it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—
1 Polling days for parliamentary general elections
(1) This section applies for the purposes of the Timetable in rule 1 in Schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983 and is subject to section 2.
(2) The polling day for the next parliamentary general election after the passing of this Act is to be 7 May 2015.
(3) The polling day for each subsequent parliamentary general election is to be the first Thursday in May in the fifth calendar year following that in which the polling day for the previous parliamentary general election fell.
(4) But, if the polling day for the previous parliamentary general election— (a) was appointed under section 2(7), and (b) in the calendar year in which it fell, fell before the first Thursday in May,subsection (3) has effect as if for “fifth” there were substituted “fourth”.
(5) The Prime Minister may by order made by statutory instrument provide that the polling day for a parliamentary general election in a specified calendar year is to be later than the day determined under subsection (2) or (3), but not more than two months later.
(6) A statutory instrument containing an order under subsection (5) may not be made unless a draft has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.
(7) The draft laid before Parliament must be accompanied by a statement setting out the Prime Minister’s reasons for proposing the change in the polling day.
2 Early parliamentary general elections
(1) An early parliamentary general election is to take place if— (a) the House of Commons passes a motion in the form set out in subsection (2), and (b) if the motion is passed on a division, the number of members who vote in favour of the motion is a number equal to or greater than two thirds of the number of seats in the House (including vacant seats).
(2) The form of motion for the purposes of subsection (1)(a) is— “That there shall be an early parliamentary general election.”
(3) An early parliamentary general election is also to take place if— (a) the House of Commons passes a motion in the form set out in subsection (4), and (b) the period of 14 days after the day on which that motion is passed ends without the House passing a motion in the form set out in subsection (5).
(4) The form of motion for the purposes of subsection (3)(a) is— “That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.”
(5) The form of motion for the purposes of subsection (3)(b) is— “That this House has confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.”
(6) Subsection (7) applies for the purposes of the Timetable in rule 1 in Schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983.
(7) If a parliamentary general election is to take place as provided for by subsection (1) or (3), the polling day for the election is to be the day appointed by Her Majesty by proclamation on the recommendation of the Prime Minister (and, accordingly, the appointed day replaces the day which would otherwise have been the polling day for the next election determined under section 1).
(8) Notwithstanding the provisions of (1)(b) above, an early parliamentary general election is to take place if— (a) The Leader of the Opposition is a big girl's blouse, or (b) A girly swot, or (c) Frit....more
I read some excellent books in 2018; here are my top 10. They're all so different and so good in their own various ways that it seemed unfair to compaI read some excellent books in 2018; here are my top 10. They're all so different and so good in their own various ways that it seemed unfair to compare them, so I've put them in alphabetical order:
Albert Einstein-Max Born, Briefwechsel 1916-1955 I am ashamed that I had to wait until now to discover what a truly admirable person Max Born was, both as a scientist and as a human being. This book is supposed to be an edited edition of his correspondence with Einstein, but it's a memoir at the same time. Genuinely inspirational.
An Orchestra of Minorities Just a fantastic novel, completely different from anything I've ever come across. Read it.
La Danse de Gengis Cohn Well, who would have thought you could write a witty comedy about Auschwitz that is at the same time deeply respectful towards the victims of the Shoah? Romain Gary shows you it's possible.
L'enfant perdue The last volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels is as amazing as the others, maybe even more so.
Litli prinsinn I discovered that I could (sort of) understand Icelandic! Not only that, the book got us started on developing an exciting new software tool to help people who are learning to read in a new language. Oliver Byrne: The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid You can present Euclid so that it's fun. Check it out if you don't believe me.
Putin's Russia Brilliant, no-holds-barred reporting from a journalist who wasn't afraid to risk her life to tell you what's really going on. They got her in the end, but her work is still here annoying the evil bastards who are trying to take over the world.
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth The ultimate birthday present for any Tolkien geek. Uppgång & fall This unassuming little comic book is the best shot I've seen in ages at explaining why everything is so totally fucked up, and what we might do about it. Yay Liv Strömquist!
I hope something there made you reach for your credit card. They're all solid gold....more
My attempt to learn Icelandic just by reading continues with the Icelandic translation of Alice in [From Litli prinsinn]
[Original review, Aug 12 2018]
My attempt to learn Icelandic just by reading continues with the Icelandic translation of Alice in Wonderland, another of my favourite books. I've now finished my first pass and am going back to the beginning, copying it out and running it through the little corpus script we're developing. I've combined the texts for the two books. This lets me get a snapshot of how familiar the vocabulary is on the first page of Alice, which I've just finished copying out:
[image]
As you can see, a lot of words are in red, meaning I haven't seen them before. But many are in black, which means that I've seen them more than five times and so probably know them. I'm doing well enough that I'm able to get along and start guessing things. Here's what I can make of the first paragraph:
Lísa var að verða hundleið á því að sitja iðulaus hjá systur sinni í brekkunni. Einn sinni eða tvisvar hafði hún gægst i bókina sem systir hennar var að lesa, en þar voru engar myndir og engin samtöl, "og hvað er varið í bók," hugsaði Lísa, "þar sem hvorki eru myndir né samtöl?"
Alice was at become ?bored of that at sit ?idle with sister hers in ?brekkunni? One time or twice had she ?looked in book which syster hers was at read, but there were no pictures or conversations, "and what is ?worth in book", thought Alice, there which neither are pictures nor conversations?"
As you can see, I think I guessed everything except the mysterious brekkunni. _________________________________
[Update, Aug 14 2018]
I am surprised to see how much I learn from simply copying out Icelandic text, and have been wondering whether I can explain the efficacy of this process in terms of some kind of formal model. Once again, I think that deep learning theory may help me understand what's going on.
First, let's look at a naive argument which claims to demonstrate that copying out text can't teach you anything, and see what's wrong with it. If you haven't tried it yourself, you might think that copying is a purely mechanical operation; you look at each character in turn and hit the appropriate key after each one. That's how a laptop will copy a file. But I am not a laptop. In actual fact, I look at the text on the page that's sitting in front of me and try to remember a small piece of it; then I divert my attention to the editor window and try to type out what I can remember.
If I didn't understand the words at all, this might end up being similar to what the file-copying routine is doing. But I do understand Icelandic to some degree, and the better I understand it the longer the chunk is that I can remember. If I'm copying a long word I've not seen before, I may only be able to hold a few letters at a time in my memory, and I'll need to look at the word two or three times to copy it out. But at the other extreme, if I'm copying a short sentence where all the words are already familiar to me, I may be able to hold the complete sentence in my memory and then write it down without looking at the text again. Since I'm lazy and want to copy as quickly as I can, my mind is tricked into understanding longer and longer chunks of text.
The curious thing is that this is pretty exactly much what an autoencoder does; it's a neural net that's trained on data where the output is the same as the input. If neural nets had a global view of what they were trying to learn, the autoencoder could see that all it needs to do is copy the input one character at a time. But in fact, the neural net learns in a way similar to the way people learn, by making little incremental adjustments in the direction of increased efficiency. They can never make the big jump to the minimal solution; instead, they figure out ways to compress the input into larger chunks. This is what makes autoencoders useful.
Maybe those dumb old rote-learning methods weren't actually so dumb?...more
Canichon dit à la Souris, Qu'il rencontra dans le logis : "Je crois le moment fort propice De te faire aller en justice. Je ne doute pas du succès
Canichon dit à la Souris, Qu'il rencontra dans le logis : "Je crois le moment fort propice De te faire aller en justice. Je ne doute pas du succès Que doit avoir notre procès. Vite, allons, commençons l'affaire Ce matin je n'ai rien à faire" La souris dit à Canichon : "Sans juge et sans jurés mon bon !" Mais Canichon plein de malice Dit : "C'est moi qui suis la justice Et que tu aies raison ou tort Je vais te condamner à mort !"
"But are you really pro-life?" asked Alice. "Because you know, I've heard pro-life people talk before, and they so[Original review, Apr 8 2016]
[image]
"But are you really pro-life?" asked Alice. "Because you know, I've heard pro-life people talk before, and they sound quite different."
"When I use a word," Trumpty Drumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Trumpty Drumpty, "which is to be master — that's all."
Alice was too puzzled to reply to this, so she thought she had better change the subject.
"That is a fine wall, Mr. Drumpty," she said after a while. "It must have cost you a great deal to build it."
"It cost me nothing," said Trumpty Drumpty off-handedly. "Every single cent of it came from my friends in Mexico."
"They must be very good friends," said Alice politely.
"Not in the least," said Trumpty Drumpty. "But they had no choice, you see. First, I sent back all the illegal immigrants; and then I said that if the Mexican government didn't pay for my wall, I'd stop those immigrants from wiring any money home."
"But if you had sent them back," said Alice, who was now feeling even more puzzled, "then how—"
"You ask too many questions, young lady," snapped Trumpty Drumpty. "This interview is now over."
"Nothing is going right today!" Alice said to herself. "Oh, how I wish I hadn't taken that job with Fox News!" ____________________ [Update, Nov 11 2022]
[image]
It's okay New York Post! I like your version too!...more
One of my favorite Lewis Carroll passages is to be found in this undeservedly forgotten book. If you don't already know what Black Light is, read on:
"
One of my favorite Lewis Carroll passages is to be found in this undeservedly forgotten book. If you don't already know what Black Light is, read on:
"Our Second Experiment", the Professor announced, as Bruno returned to his place, still thoughtfully rubbing his elbows, "is the production of that seldom-seen-but-greatly-to-be-admired phenomenon, Black Light! You have seen White Light, Red Light, Green Light, and so on: but never, till this wonderful day, have any eyes but mine seen Black Light! This box", carefully lifting it upon the table, and covering it with a heap of blankets, "is quite full of it. The way I made it was this - I took a lighted candle into a dark cupboard and shut the door. Of course the cupboard was then full of Yellow Light. Then I took a bottle of Black ink, and poured it over the candle: and, to my delight, every atom of the Yellow Light turned Black! That was indeed the proudest moment of my life! Then I filled a box with it. And now - would anyone like to get under the blankets and see it?"
Dead silence followed this appeal: but at last Bruno said "I'll get under, if it won't jingle my elbows."
Satisfied on this point, Bruno crawled under the blankets, and, after a minute or two, crawled out again, very hot and dusty, and with his hair in the wildest confusion.
"What did you see in the box?" Sylvie eagerly enquired.
"I saw nuffin!" Bruno sadly replied. "It were too dark!"
"He has described the appearance of the thing exactly!" the Professor exclaimed with enthusiasm. "Black Light, and Nothing, look so extremely alike, at first sight, that I don't wonder he failed to distinguish them! We will now proceed to the Third Experiment."
I understand that CERN have finally succeeded in duplicating the Professor's results, and will be publishing details in the near future....more
- Thank you for responding so quickly, Mr... Walrus, was it?
- Call me Wally. And this is Carpy.
- Pleased to meet you... Wally. Now...
- Say, where's the O'Brien geezer? The one what talked to 'umpty?
- Mr O'Brien is no longer with us. He had to be, um, liquidated.
- 'Appens, dunnit? Well, what can we do for you?
- We have a problem with Wonderland spies. They're infiltrating our organization. Getting into the chess-sets, everywhere. We've tried to tighten up security, but it seems to be technically very difficult to define a bourgeois move. So, we thought, you're Wonderland characters, you know a bit about, um, final solutions...
- We're Looking-Glass.
- Oh, I'm sorry, my mistake. I'm afraid you all look the same to me. So what I was about to propose...
- Yeah, we get it. Could be up our alley, know what I mean? But we can't talk 'ere. Not secure.
- I can assure you...
- Look, you was the one what said it. Everywhere. We'll be 'appy to talk somewhere else. Say, down the beach.
- I suppose...
- And we need buy-in from the rest of yer organization. We want the whole gang there.
- I'm afraid...
- Look, you want our 'elp or not?
- Oh, alright. You do come very highly recommended. I can arrange it.
- Let's get movin'. Tell the other geezers to tag along.
- Yes, but...
(...)
- Okay, I fink we're far enough out. Now tell me again what you wanted?
- Well, basically, genocide. To put it bluntly.
- Sounds good to me. You 'appy too, Wally?
- Yeah, no problem. Let's start wiv 'im. I don't like 'is tone.
- WHAT?!
- We're gonna eat the lot of yer. Whadyer fink we was gonna do?
- BUT YOU CAN'T! STOP! WE'RE THE RUTHLESS, TOTALITARIAN ONES! HELP! NO! FOR GOD'S SAKE! AAAAAARGH...
- You 'ear that, Carpy? 'e said "God".
- Tsk.
- Almost seems unfair, dunnit? Too easy like. I feel sorry for 'em.
"Let us hear the evidence!" said the King. The White Rabbit opened the letter and began reading aloud:
The Knave of Hearts, he killed some tarts And kept them in his cellar...
"Stuff and nonsense!" interrupted Alice loudly. "That's not how it goes at all!"
"Silence in court!" said the King. "And you, young lady, will go and sleep with Mikael Blomkvist right now!"
"I shan't!" said Alice stubbornly.
"Rule 42," said the King in a trembling voice. "Every attractive woman has to sleep with the Mary Sue character. It's the oldest rule in the book."
"If it were the oldest rule in the book," said Alice, "then it would be number one. And I'll sleep with whom I please."
There was a collective gasp, and all the members of the court threw themselves at Alice. But she was now so tall that she didn't feel the least bit worried, and simply brushed them off.
"You're just a pack of cheap thriller clichés!" she said, and then she woke up....more
"Good gracious!" said Alice, "I do believe I'm inside a review!"
She turned to the Hatter and the March Hare.
"Well, let me see. Here is the title, and"Good gracious!" said Alice, "I do believe I'm inside a review!"
She turned to the Hatter and the March Hare.
"Well, let me see. Here is the title, and here is the date I read it. That must be today. Now I need to explain the plot and the overall point."
"There is no plot," said the March Hare disagreeably.
"And there is no point," agreed the Hatter.
He poured a little hot tea on the Dormouse's nose, making it wake with a start.
"The book breaks new ground," it said rapidly in a high, sing-song voice. "Intentionally eluding easy assignment to any traditional category, it anticipates the twentieth century's fascination with the relationship between the signifier and the signified, and wittily deconstructs the primacy of meaning and the rationality of thought." Then it went back to sleep again, and began to snore gently.
"Whatever did that mean?" asked Alice, surprised.
"Why is a Derrida like a derrière?" replied the Hatter.
"I don't know," said Alice.
"I don't know either," said the Hatter triumphantly.
"It would be reasonable", said Alice, in the grown-up tone she had sometimes heard her sister use, "It would be reasonable for you to explain what the book is about, so that I could put that in my review."
"It would be reasonable," said the Hatter, "to expect hot premarital sex in a Stephenie Meyer novel. But don't imagine you'll find any."
Alice couldn't think of anything to reply to this, so she turned away without another word. When she was almost out of earshot, she thought she heard the Hatter shout something after her that might have been "Foucault!"
God, this is hard. I'm just aiming for two to four paragraphs, and I'm stuck. I can hardly do a thing. And this guy has a solid book, with a plot and God, this is hard. I'm just aiming for two to four paragraphs, and I'm stuck. I can hardly do a thing. And this guy has a solid book, with a plot and all. Smart, no doubt about it. But... what's this book's point? Naturally, you want to know that, and so do I. I think that I can say it in this way. You might lack an important thing, and not know it's missing. Your world looks okay, almost normal. But no, in fact it's not normal or okay at all, if you think a bit.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)...more
"You must read this book!" the Reviewer cried, As he searched for a suitable rhyme But as long as he stole more than half of the words He was sure he wou"You must read this book!" the Reviewer cried, As he searched for a suitable rhyme But as long as he stole more than half of the words He was sure he would get there in time.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)...more
I only discovered this recipe a couple of years ago, but it has already become one of my favorites. It's hard to believe that the different ingredientI only discovered this recipe a couple of years ago, but it has already become one of my favorites. It's hard to believe that the different ingredients go together! In fact, they complement each other perfectly.
French manga with fatal love stories and roasted Sartre
1 medium manga 2 fatal love stories whole early Sartre, including author Lewis Carroll-style wordplay some P.G. Wodehouse ridicule panache brio
Trim the manga, retaining a good part of the extreme violence, sex and nudity, and transpose into French novel form using the method from page 73. Add the love stories, the wordplay and the Wodehouse, and stir well. Set aside in a warm place for an hour until it has risen.
Meanwhile, turn the Sartre inside out and tear it to pieces. Make sure that both the author and La Nausée are completely covered in ridicule. If you do this correctly Sartre will still be a lifelong friend, but be warned that you may not get it right on the first try.
Fold the Sartre carefully into the main plot, then pour into a pot-boiler and simmer until done. Serve immediately with plenty of panache and brio. ...more
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