Blog Archive

About the differences between human and machine translation

Semi-philosophical note 1. Translation is technically sense rendering. 2. Machines are unable to operate senses. Conclusion: machine translation is no translation. “Machine translation” is an oxymoron: translation cannot be done by a machine. If it is performed by a machine, it is no translation; if it is performed by a human, it is not machine […]

Haiti not Tahiti, Dominicana not Dominica 

Linguogeographic notes The country of Haiti occupies a third of the island of Hispaniola, once called Hayti and still called so in many languages, other than Romano-Germanic, due to the confusion of their speakers. The remaining two-thirds is occupied by the Dominican Republic, sometimes also called Dominicana. A highly puzzling region. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the only […]

Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre

An interesting and little-known story about the liter symbol The preamble. There is a general rule: if a unit of measurement is named after a person, its symbol must be capitalized. Example: there was once a lord Kelvin, named William Thomson. The unit of temperature measurement was named after him, kelvin. It is a common […]

Cherokee writing system: familiar but weird 

About using symbols A Native American chief named Sequoyah, also known to the world as George Guess, knew no English but often saw European settlers writing in it. His native language was Cherokee, which at that time (the early 19th century) did not yet have an alphabet. Realizing that sounds could be represented by signs and […]

Everybody paints!

About neural art: DALL-E, Midjourney, Starryai, etc. Neural networks, such as DALL-E, which generate impossible realistic images with a text description have brought dramatic distress among artists, especially illustrators and graphic designers. Why learn to paint if the computer can paint more, better, and more quickly? Today, it is hard to say what kind of future […]

How to watch lots of webinars and stay sane

Chaotic notes from someone who watches lots of webinars * * * Increasing playback speed is a life-saving action. YouTube provides two magical key combinations: SHIFT + → (speed up by 25%) і SHIFT + ← (slow down by 25%). You can speed up a video a maximum of 2 times and slow it down up to 4 times. You tend […]