93

How Europeans say 93
Roya

Denmark's explanation is clear as mud, so I tried to figure just what they saying and I think I have it:

Three plus (five minus a half (which is four point five) and times that by twenty)

3+((5-0.5)*20) = 93

Trust, But Verify

Came across the phrase 'trust, but verify' in David Warren's column this morning, where in he tells me that in Russian, it rhymes. Does it? So I checked, and it does, sort of (follow the link and click on the loudspeaker icon to hear it). Wikipedia even has a page about it wherein we find:

Suzanne Massie, an American scholar, met with Ronald Reagan many times between 1984 and 1987 while he was President of the United States. She taught him the Russian proverb doveryai, no proveryai meaning 'trust, but verify'. She advised him that "The Russians like to talk in proverbs. It would be nice of you to know a few. You are an actor – you can learn them very quickly." The proverb was adopted as a signature phrase by Reagan, who used it frequently when discussing United States relations with the Soviet Union.

Follow the link to Russian Proverbs and we find:

The Russian language is replete with many hundreds of proverbs and sayings. . . . Vladimir Dal was a famous lexicographer of the Russian Empire whose collection was published in Russian language in the late 19th century as The Sayings and Bywords of the Russian People*, featuring more than 30,000 entries.

Google Doodle for Valdimir Dal

I don't remember ever hearing about this Vladimir Dal before, but it seems Google put up a doodle of him in 2017. 

We have numerous sayings / phrases we use in American English, but I don't know that any of them rise to the level of 'proverbs'. But all this reminds me of the Star Trek episode where Captain Picard ends up in personal combat with a man-sized dinosaur because nobody in their crew recognizes that the aliens speak in proverbs.

* the book, in Russian, is available from Amazon.

Whale Song

We FINALLY Understand How To Speak Whale
Dr Ben Miles

He breaks down human language and compares its structure to the patterns found in whale songs. Pretty cool.

Esperanto

This Made Up Language *Almost* Took Over The World
Dis-ambi

Dad burn French, so full of themselves. They are kind of impressive, or at least a large number of people thought so. My parents encouraged me to take French in high school, which led me to taking it in college. I absolutely hated those classes. They were all about conjugation and reading and writing, which I thought was a stupid way to learn a language. Learn something useful first, like learn to speak it. Once you've done that you should be able figure out the reading the writing yourself. Now I know a few French words and phrases, but probably no more than I know of Spanish. My knowledge of Spanish can be summed up in 'uno mas cerveza fria por favor' which means 'one more cold beer please'. I mean, what else do you need to know?

Lusitania

RMS Lusitania departing New York - Ossie Jones

I'm reading a story about the Chinese plan to build a railway across the Andes mountains in South America. Okay, that sounds nuts, but it also sounds like something China might try.

Well, let's see if we can find a map. I found several speculative plans, but nothing definite. I'm reading about one and they mention Lusophones, which is a new term for me. Look it up and it turns out it means people who speak Portuguese and comes from the name of a Roman province which was located where Portugal is now.

Just bugged me that there were so many disparate things that all used the same name.

TrumpSpeak

Excerpt from Learning To Speak Trump, Again by Peter Tchir of Academy Securities:

Babbel For Trump

I checked the Babbel website and there are 13 languages that I can learn, but TrumpSpeak isn’t one of them.

If I was able to train an AI Large Language Model, I’d be trying to train it on TrumpSpeak. The database of things that he has said (and tweeted) has to be pretty large. Then I would try to train that AI to predict what is likely to come out of all of that TrumpSpeak.

One thing I can say with certainty is that taking TrumpSpeak at face value has rarely been effective. Worse yet is taking the worst parts of TrumpSpeak (and there are some worse parts) and extrapolating them, which might generate a lot of clicks, but it is unlikely to help anyone make good decisions. For those of you in markets and running businesses, making the best decisions possible is what it is all about.

We will do our best to try to figure out what is likely to occur, but I do think some more background is helpful.

Two Sides of Trump

I will never forget Donald Trump speaking at a Bankers Trust High Yield Conference (I think it was before Deutsche Bank, and given the topic, I could probably figure it out, but that’s not overly important to the story).

He was speaking to a large audience of bond investors, many of whom had recently lost money on one of his Atlantic City casinos (I think it was the Taj, but I could be wrong). The audience, while not hostile, was far from receptive to his discussion – which, of course, focused on raising debt for his new project in Atlantic City (the Taj II if memory serves correctly). Yet, by the end, there was a buzz in the audience, all wanting to get a good allocation when the new bonds came out. Even after his lawyer/accountant, came out and “corrected” some things and said some other things that might not have been 100% correct, there was still a buzz. So, from my perspective, don’t underestimate his ability to charm a room, and even if not everything said is accurate, that room can remain charmed. You can argue that this shouldn’t be the case, but I think if we are going to figure out TrumpSpeak together, this should always be at the back of our minds, if not the forefront.

On the other side (assuming that the above reminiscence is a positive about Trump), his business organization looks very different (in my opinion) compared to other large organizations. The various businesses are compartmentalized. Unless things have changed, there isn’t a Golf Course Corp that manages all the golf courses. Properties and businesses stand as individual entities or maybe in small groups. There is also no one who stands out as his “trusted lieutenant.” So many business leaders rely on often a handful of people for advice and help. We all know when “so and so” gets promoted or goes to another firm, who they are going to bring with them. Yet Trump never seemed to have that cadre of trusted people who have important and visible roles in his dealings (he likely has some people that are in his inner circle, but they don’t seem to be well known, which after 8 years in politics seems surprising). So, a concern I had was his ability to delegate, which I think hampered his first term, as turnover was high, and a lot of roles were left vacant. Quite frankly, during this campaign, many people plugged into the campaign told me that several people recommended that he tone down some of his rhetoric and choice of words. He didn’t listen. He still won.

So, as I try to think about TrumpSpeak, I think of someone who can surprise people by getting them to agree with him, but who might not like delegation and having others share in the success.

You are free to disagree with that, but in my building blocks of thinking about TrumpSpeak, I go back to these “first principles” consistently, and it served me quite well the first time he was president.

Bart explains Asian languages.

Bart explains Asian languages.
JustKiddingNews

Kind of explains how I can sometimes tell what language is being spoken even though I know none of them.

Fun With Numbers

9,223,372,036,854,775,807 = nine quintillion two hundred twenty three quadrillion three hundred seventy two trillion thirty six billion eight hundred fifty four million seven hundred seventy five thousand eight hundred seven

I've been spending a little time on quora lately, looking at computer programming questions mostly. Most of them are pretty wretched, people who have no idea what they are talking about asking questions that don't make any sense, or people asking how to write elementary programs, questions that you might find in the homework for a programming class, but every once in a while you get a real question that prompts me to reply.

I used to think the requests for elementary programs were from people looking for someone to do their homework for them, but then I realized that a lot of these questions were being answered. Now I wonder if they aren't being churned out by someone looking for points from the quora masters and the people who are answering them are just looking for a little something to occupy their mind. Some people do crosswords, some people do jigsaw puzzles, some people play video games and some people write elementary computer programs.

I write basically useless computer programs, but I have a higher purpose, like I am trying to learn something, or I am trying to explain something, or I just want to see if I can do it. I post them on github, though I don't know if anyone has every bothered to look at them. They're up there if you want to take a look. They are all written in C.

Anyway, one question on quora was asking for a program that could translate a number into the corresponding version written out in English words. This is just my speed, so I set down to write one. It wasn't too difficult and I did learn a few things long the way. Supposedly it will translate an integer up to the largest value that can be held in a 64 bit integer. That's it at the top of the page. Yes, the question only asks for three digit numbers, but you know the old saying "in for a pint, in for a pound" or something like that.

That's a lot of numbers. How can I be sure it is translating them correctly? Well, you write a test program to compute the numeric value from the English words. That one was a little more difficult because I was getting tired and making stupid mistakes, but I got it done. For as much testing as I have done everything seems to check out. I could set it up to test all of the numbers, but I am not sure we have enough time. It took 3.4 seconds to test 1,000,000 (one million) numbers. At that rate it would take an hour to test a billion numbers, a week to test a trillion numbers, 25 years to test a quadrillion numbers, 2,500 years to test a quintillion numbers and 25,000 years to test nine quintillion numbers, and double that if we want to include the negative numbers. Ain't nobody got time for that.

You know, someone has probably already written a library function to do this, but I'd have to Google it, and then I'd have to figure out how to a get a hold of it, and read the instructions on how to use it, and that shit isn't any fun, unless it's something I need in order to do what I want to do. Writing it myself was actually fun.

Many Flavors of Chinese

Languages spoken in China

I only knew about Mandarin and Cantonese. Taking over other countries means you get another language (Tibet) and there is going to be some migration with other countries that will bring in other languages like Mongolia and Korea. But I have never heard of most of the other several dozen languages listed. I suspect the white spot on the map is the Taklamakan Desert.

Kiswahili

Sarah Baartman Hall (formerly Memorial Hall) at The University of Cape Town
[Mike Hutchings/Reuters]

Tafi Mhaka is calling for the adoption of Kiswahili as an official language of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania have already done so. Most Africa countries adopted French, English or Portuguese, the languages of the European colonizers as their official language. At the time, it was probably the expedient thing to do, but times have changed. Note he doesn't say anything about removing the official status of the European languages, only that they add Kiswahili. 

Near as I can tell, Kiswahili is just another one of these respellings of Swahili, Beijing instead of Peking, or Kyiv instead of Kiev. You can call your foreign names anything you want, but why can't they leave the English spellings alone? We aren't going to pronounce it correctly no matter how you spell it, and it just means more time and effort will be wasted on replacing perfectly cromulent words with new and different words that are no better than the originals.

One line stuck out in Tafi's essay:

It didn’t help matters that at the time everyone marvelled at then-Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s impeccable command of English and observers in the West regarded him as “one of the world’s great orators”. 

Robert Mugabe might have been a great speaker (the Wikipedia article uses the word 'speech' twelve times), but I think he was few marbles short of a full deck. In particular I suspect he was missing the economics marble.

---

Sarah Baartman Hall at the University of Cape Town
Look at those stairs. There must be a zillion steps.

I was surprised by the picture of Memorial Hall that accompanied Tafi's essay. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I was. It makes sense that there would be a very English building on the campus, I mean the English ran this place for a long time. On the other hand the images that South Africa brings to mind are either a thriving metropolis or miles of shantytowns, not staid enclaves of academia.

Saartjie Baartman, aka Sarah Baartman, 1810

Which brings us to Sarah Baartman. The University of Cape Town renamed Memorial Hall to Sarah Baartman Hall back in 2018. Sarah Baartman (c.1789– 29 December 1815) was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus. She was exhibited for a few years but was eventually discarded. She died at the age of 26 in Paris.

Dubai Museum of the Future

Dubai Museum of the Future
289 piece jigsaw puzzle

Dubai is just nuts. You have to give these guys credit for not falling down the Jihad rathole, but then they are probably working hand in glove with the CIA. As long as they keep their slave population under control, they'll probably be just fine.

Dubai Museum of the Future

P.S. Stu asked what the writing says. After a little digging I found this on WHAT'S ON:

The Arabic calligraphy consists of three quotes (in English followed by Google's Translation):

‘We may not live for hundreds of years, but the products of our creativity can leave a legacy long after we are gone.’

 قد لا نعيش لمئات السنين ، لكن منتجات إبداعنا يمكن أن تترك إرثًا طويلاً بعد

رحيلنا.

‘The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it’ and

 المستقبل ملك لمن يستطيع تخيله وتصميمه وتنفيذه

‘The future does not wait. The future can be designed and built today.’

المستقبل لا ينتظر. يمكن تصميم وبناء المستقبل اليوم.

 Good luck verifying whether that is what is actually written on the building.

Inscrutable

Hieroglyphics and Emojis

I read a post the other day about how meme's are a new language, and then I came across this meme (above) and then I'm remembering Picard trying to communicate with the Darmok, which is problematic because the Darmok talk in metaphors. Then there was something I vaguely remember reading a while back about how Chinese isn't structured the same was as Western languages and that could make understanding, and therefor translation, difficult.

So now I'm wondering if Chinese ideographs didn't evolve from pictures that illustrated a story, and so they are essentially speaking in metaphors which is why they just seem so alien.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I don't much care for icons. There are a few I have learned through constant exposure and constant use, but there still many icons on many of the programs I use that I have no idea what they are for. I much prefer words. I realize words take up more space, and a poor choice can be worse than no word at all, but good choices are wonderful. Well, that's me, being all superior and literate and shit. I spent a lot of time learning all these words I've got in my head and I don't want to have to learn what a bunch of new symbols mean, especially since the few I've looked at seem to be stupid and worthless.

 

Arabic isn't just for Arabs

Running

Horse

Victor Mair posts a story on Language Log about the numerous scripts used in writing in Indonesia. Seems not everyone uses the same writing for the same language. Some people in China use Arabic script to write Chinese. I think my whole language applecart has been upset. 

When I first learned about Chinese writing way back in elementary school, the idea I got was that each pictograph was a symbol for something, like there could be a symbol for a horse and a symbol for running and if you put the two together they meant 'running horse'.

Sometime recently (like since I retired), I got the idea that pictographs also represented sounds, which was unrelated to the name of symbol. So if you took the sounds from the horse and running symbols you might get a completely unrelated word, like 'dog butt'. 

Now I'm really confused. When someone says 'dog butt', are they talking about a dog butt, or are they talking about a running horse? And how they heck would you know? Well, if you grew up speaking Chinese it would be obvious, well, I hope it would be.

But through all this, I thought Chinese pictographs were used for the Chinese language and Arabic script was used for the Arabic language. But evidently that is not always the case. Could you write an English sentence using Arabic script, and if you could, could anybody understand it? We have English spellings of some Arabic words / names in the news, but they are pretty meaningless as they seem to be full of apostrophes and the apostrophes are all in places that would never show up in an English word.

Me, I think we should call the Northern Capital of China Peking like Hollywood intended.

Let me count the ways

58 and other Confusing Numbers - Numberphile
I have seen a couple other Tom Scott videos and he's not bad. A little too enthusiastic, but then he's young and the young are supposed to be enthusiastic. That's how anything gets done. He's right, number systems are weird, and he doesn't even touch on how European millions are American billions, and trillions are billions. I don't even know which is which. I stick with what I know, and on this side of the pond a million is a thousand times a thousand, and a billion is a thousand times a million.

Much popular science fiction, when it involves aliens, often makes them out to be similar enough to humans that they will have conflicts. I suspect that real aliens will be hard to detect. They will be so weird that we won't even recognize them as life forms, much less intelligent life forms.

Not all videos I see get posted here. I have to be able to watch them. There are a bunch out there that look like they would be interesting, but start playing them and in 30 seconds I've had enough. Mostly it's the voice. Sometimes it's the format (I'm going to tell you all about just as soon as I get done telling all this other stuff). Some people just take forever to get to the point. But that's me.

I'm working on a palindrome program, but I've reached a point where I need to think clearly, and I didn't get enough sleep last night so I can't wrap my mind around the problem, so I think I'll tell you about it.

We are trying to find a number that has the characteristics of a palindrome, where  you get the same number forward or backward, like 1234321, that is smaller or equal to another number. The first thing is to take the first half of the digits of the given number, reverse them and make them the second half of the number. Say you were given 1234567, you take the first half, 1234, reverse it, 4321, and then replace the last four digits of the given number, and surprise surprise, we get the same number as in our example earlier: 1234321. Okay, the four is replaced with a four, which we really didn't need to do. In any case our new number is less than our given number, so we're golden.

But now, say your given number is 1004000. Now it gets a little sticky, and I'm getting hungry, so I'm just gonna leave you with this little puzzle. This is where I need a clear head.

Star Trek R Us

Language Translation Device
This ad popped up on YouTube and I my mind instantly drug up the universal translator from Star Trek. This isn't quite that advanced, I mean we don't have any aliens from other planets we can try it out on, but it apparently works with several human languages.

Redkino, Russia

Police surround a home in the small Russian town where Sergey Egorov shot and killed nine people on June 4. Dmitry Vinogradov / Sputnik / Scanpix / LETA

Babylon Berlin is just amazing. It's got all this weird stuff going on and I'm wondering how much of it is real. I start with Svetlana Sorokin just because she's such a stand out and, no, I don't find an heiress to a secret fortune in gold. I find it's a fairly common name. But wait, what's this at the bottom of the page, a story about a murder? Well, there is plenty of murder going on in the show, let's see what we've got. What we've got is guy losing his shit and killing a bunch of his neighbors. A horrible story, but I don't think I've ever seen a news report of this kind from Russia. I mean I am sure Russian media has horror stories just like we do, but I don't read Russian, so I don't know. But this story is in English, and it's not just a brief press release, it's a real story. Don't think I've ever seen the like. I hear English is common in Western Europe, so maybe it's making inroads to the East.

Streetview Cameraman, Redkino Russia

So I'm looking at a map of Redkino and I wonder if Google has recorded it with the Streetview cameras. It doesn't look like it, but zoom out and we find that a nearby highway has been recorded, and the nearby town of Tver, and hey, it seems a small part of central Redkino has been recorded as well. I zoom back in and find a short stretch of a blue line, so I take a look. It's a section of path a couple of dozen yards long that runs next to a railroad track. Looking around I see an industrial neighborhood, a couple of people walking, and the top of the guys head who is holding the camera. I'll be durned, Russians got hair on the top of their heads just like we do. I was kind of expecting horns.

Desmos Graphing Calculator

I've been hanging out at Quora lately. A fair number of math problems show up there. Many of them are inane, like 'What is 2+2?", or "What is 3+3 x 3?".* But some advanced ones show up as well. Some of them are really ugly, I've never seen the like before, don't know what they're good for, or why anyone would care, but they make me curious so I've taken to plotting them on the Desmos Graphing Calculator.  It would be nice if you could simply copy the equation from Quora and then paste in Desmos. You can, but it doesn't translate properly, so you have to go in and fiddle with it enough for Desmos to understand it. Plus sometimes the equation (or expression) you get from Quora is missing something, or didn't get entered properly, so you have to muck with it to get anything graphable.

The equation for the Middle Green Circle on the graph comes from this question on Quora.




Outer Orange circle    x^{2\ }+\ y^2\ =\ 16     
Middle Green circle    e^{\left(y^2\ +\ x^2\ \right)^{.5}}\ =\ 16
Inner Orange circle    e^{.5\left(y^2\ +\ x^2\ \right)}\ =\ 16

The original equation from Quora.

f(x,y) = e^sqrt (x^2+y^2)

Mucking about with above equation and then typing Ctrl-Z causes the graph above to be redrawn. Actually, it doesn't matter what you were doing before, if you have done anything at all in Blogger's Editor, Ctrl-Z (Undo) causes the graph to be redrawn.

Taking the Middle Green Circle and changing it to a function gives us this
f(x,y)=e^{(x^2+y^2)^{.5}}
but Desmos doesn't know how to graph it.

Note that I have replaced the call to sqrt with an exponent. Desmos treats sqrt as four variables (s, q, r & t) being multiplied together.

Also capital X and capital Y mean something special, so don't use them until you figure out they do.

This post started as a test to see if I could copy and paste the equations, but I can see it's expanded a bit.

About the Math
The difference between the 2nd and 3rd equations is that one multiples the exponent of e by .5 and the other raises it the power of .5 which should be equivalent according to math.com's article on exponents (see the Power Rule). I don't quite understand why the graphs of these two equations should be different, but Desmos evidently thinks otherwise.

I set the expression equal to a constant (16) to get it to graph. Properly, it should be set to Z and graphed using a 3D graphing calculator. I found one that looks like it should do the job, but I've been having some trouble with it, so that's going to have to wait for another day.

* What's even weirder is how many answers the inane questions get. I made some sarcastic replies, but it's just endless. Besides, since some people think these questions are worth answering, I am trying to train myself to Pass on these questions, but it's really hard not to click Answer and just let them have it with both barrels. Gee wilkers pops, everyone knows the answer is 42. I mean it's the answer to everything, ain't it?

P.S. I just discovered that Google has a plot function.

Pic of the Day - Air Niugini

DC-3 P2-SBD (ex VH-SBD) at Port Moresby Airport in December 1974. Photo by peter lea

Port Moresby, that would be in New Guinea. We've been there before, sort of. Niugini, that's a funny sounding name, except how would I know? More like it's funny looking, which kind of goes along with it being from the far side of the world. Then I tried working out how I would pronounce it, and, doh! I'm back where I started: Niu = New, gini = Guinea, Niugini = New Guinea. Wikipedia agrees, sort of.

Small Faces - Itchycoo Park (1967) 0815007

Small Faces - Itchycoo Park (1967)
Beat-Club
Another old rock & roll tune. This one is from 1967. I had been looking for 30 Days In The Hole, except I couldn't remember the name of it. All I could think of was that the lead singer had died of a drug overdose, so I did some digging in that vein, but no luck*. It popped up on YouTube after I finally I finally snapped to the name of the tune.

I remember the tune well (I was in high school when it peaked in the U.S.). The name is kind of dumb, but hey, lots of names are. Wikipedia has a couple of stories about this song.

The song was one of the first pop singles to use flanging, an effect that can be heard in the bridge section after each chorus. . . . Although many devices were soon created that could produce the same effect by purely electronic means, the effect as used on "Itchycoo Park" was at that time an electro-mechanical studio process. Two synchronised tape copies of a finished recording were played simultaneously into a third master recorder, and by manually retarding the rotation of one of the two tape reels (flanges) using the fingers, a skilled engineer could subtly manipulate the phase difference between the two sources, creating the lush 'swooshing' phase effect that sweeps up and down the frequency range. 

It's all in the fingers, man. And then there is this bit about the song's name:

A number of sources claim the song's name is derived from the nickname of Little Ilford Park, on Church Road in the London suburb of Manor Park, where Small Faces' singer and song-writer Steve Marriott grew up. The "itchycoo" nickname is, in turn, attributed to the stinging nettles which grew there.

* Wikipedia has a list of dead rock stars, and while Steve Marriott is listed, he isn't listed as having died from a drug overdose, which is what I remembered. So much for having a reliable memory bank.

Update February 2022 replaced missing video. Screw you Studio Hamburg.

Text, Simplified

Cleartext Demonstration GIF

Cleartext is a text editor for the Mac that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English. Morton Just is the author. XKCD has an online version. Morton references the Turbo Encabulator, so he's cool.

Use it to tell your family members why their computers act up, or tell people at work why they should pay you more.