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Since the fall of the Byzantine Empire or so, Western education has mainly been concerned with preparing parallel corpora in Latin, Greek and the various modern vernaculars. We've been able to do this very cheaply by employing schoolchildren.

So where, given this huge resource, is the option to translate from or to Latin on Google, or any other search engine?

posted at: 23:11 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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There's only been a small amount of press coverage of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill (hereafter Leg and Reg), I think partly because there's no soap opera element. The press has comprehensive coverage of Tessa Jowell's connections to a foreign executive which is similarly cavalier with the rule of law, but then there's a house and a mortgage involved.

There are some safeguards built into Leg and Reg, but, as far as I can tell, none to prevent the executive using it, if passed, to modify it to remove those safeguards.

This is a Bill to introduce unfettered executive power, and the press is nearly silent. Is anyone willing to, I don't know, sleep with Jim Murphy, pay off his mortgage, buy Lord Falconer some new wallpaper, anything to get it some coverage?

posted at: 11:29 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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There's little risk of finding the sort of research I did by mistake by cursory Googling. If you go searching for terms like "hyperpolarizability" and "wavepacket revival" then you deserve what you get.

It's bad enough that life science papers contain pileups of everyday nouns like

horseradish peroxidase-conjugated donkey antirabbit IgG secondary antibody

but what's worse is that the Google Scholar project and open access pollute completely ordinary searches.

Just now I remembered RGL's Charles Rosen Schlegel quote about a fragment being like a miniature artwork, perfect in itself, wie ein Igel, like a hedgehog. Swa swa Sebastian. So 'fragment hedgehog Schlegel' is a perfectly sensible thing to type when looking for the English translation.

I hadn't counted on Sonic hedgehog. Out of the first ten hits, I get PMID: 12235001 and DOI: 10.1089/107632701753213174. I go home in the evenings to get away from that sort of thing.

posted at: 21:47 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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In Monday's Guardian, Marcel Berlins argued against introducing sharia law to Britain. He cited the status of women as one objection, and another as the wrongness of dividing the country into areas "where different laws may operate, depending on the density of minority groups within [them]."

So far, so fair enough. But in England-and-Wales you may not be subject to the same law (generously defined) as your neighbour. Anyone subject to an antisocial behaviour order (ASBO) has, in effect, their own personal criminal code. I'm allowed to visit petrol station forecourts, stare into my neighbour's garden, approach rivers or railway lines, swear and feed birds, but the next man may not be, and these innovative offences are punishable by up to five years in prison.

The programmer in me sees the antisocial behaviour legislation as a sort of API. All you have to do is to prove that a given behaviour is considered antisocial, and it can become a criminal offence for somebody. Hearsay evidence is admissible. Between 1999-04-01 and 2004-06-30, only 42 ASBO applications out of 3069 were turned down.

This is promising ground for bringing in an alien legal code of your choice. You need Charles Clarke to extend the potential scope of ASBOs from individuals to groups of individuals, say streets or housing estates, and to specify more innovative punishments. Remember that this is a government that views human rights law rather as Rupert Murdoch views tax law, as a set of loopholes embedded in an inconvenient chunk of statute, so don't be shy about corporal punishment.

posted at: 22:46 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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AJAX is the new Flash, apparently. I think this is a subliminal way of encouraging web designers to clean the bathroom more often. Crystallographers have been using CIF for years, of course. But does it make a difference?

posted at: 17:49 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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I used to think that caulielower was a keying error in the dictionary. My device returns "caul?" and gives up.

posted at: 21:13 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

I used to think that the predictive text on my device used trigrams, male sheep capable of simple geometry, to supplement its meagre dictionary, hence Severansmugh, which is the Some of the North, and an important railway junction in the east of England.

I learnt at New Year that Duston, London railway station marked by a empha arch, is Furtmm on a different model made by the same company, apparently using the same algorithm. TMM isn't a valid English trigram.

Out of the single-key words, baccababa is fine, as are feede, nonmomn and uttu. Giggigiigi (GII), jjjj (JJJ) and wwwwy (WWY) are nothing of the sort. Something else is going on, and I couldn't tell you what it was even if my train went all the way to Severansmughadilmruxadiladikoradnonmomnghaccacabanonnededededegiggigiigmom, which might hold a clue.

This press release from the people responsible tells us, with a straight face, that they've now added vlog and ubersexual to a dictionary that doesn't contain cauliflower, broccoli, coriander or Suffolk, and using the phrase "language used in everyday conversation". They've clearly never been to Waitrmsf.

posted at: 20:55 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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I can't solve the three-body problem in my head. I have no feel for whether the moon should pass through all points in the sky, given long enough, but it still surprised me last night to see it quite so high above my eyebrows, even if it was full and nearly midnight at the time.

posted at: 12:30 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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Alex Carlile, who is the ethical beard on the UK government's terrorism legislation, mentioned a variation of the famous ticking-bomb scenario todau when talking about evidence obtained by torture. What if, he asked, on July the 6th, we had obtained information that four young men were going to blow themselves up on public transport in London, and this information had been obtained by a foreign regime through torture? I paraphrase.

We can only answer this from the perspective of the day before a bombing, call it Martober the 31st. On Martober the 31st we hear from Colonel Thumbscrew's regime in Milgramistan that the Harrogate Martyrs' Brigade is planning something tomorrow. So what? People will confess to anything you like given enough help, but the thought experiment here relies on the HMB being incompetent enough to share detailed plans with someone who, whether by going on holiday or rendition, ends up in Milgramistan, and then not change them when he or she fails to get in touch.

I'm not having them in my jihad.

posted at: 22:29 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry

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Double standards have the great advantage that if one of them breaks down, you can still manage with the other one.

posted at: 10:01 | path: /simulations | permanent link to this entry