i’m always amazed about the level of ignorance in the unix community about what’s cooking in microsoft labs. such as the news that text streams may not be the final word for IPC in the shell. check out these demos of monad (courtesy of jon udell)
Month: July 2004
Cultural transposition
Andrew Wilson has translated harry potter into ancient greek, the longest work to receive that treatment since 400 CE. wilson was very intent to recreate a version of the book which would make sense to a Greek from any era up to the 4th century AD who had managed by some magical process to reach the 21st century.
this led to some thorny problems:
Cultural problems There were many, one of the more obvious being
relationships – the patriarchal Greeks not really concerning themselves with relationships like mother’s sister
Time was another one – Greeks had little interest in “telling the time” although they did have devices for measuring how much had elapsed (water clocks for timing speeches, for example). Nor did they care about minutes, let alone seconds!
And colors – it’s little appreciated how languages divide up the visible spectrum of light in their own way – our red orange yellow etc is of course completely arbitrary- the spectrum is a continuum.
reminds me of douglas hofstadters Le Ton Beau De Marot.
A skilled literary translator makes a far larger number of changes, and far more significant changes, than any virtuoso performer of classical music would ever dare to make in playing notes in the score of, say, a Beethoven piano sonata. In literary translation, it’s totally humdrum stuff for new ideas to be interpreted, old ideas to be deleted, structures to be inverted, twisted around, and on and on.
Facetop
as a regular videoconferencer, i wish i had facetop
a new video conferencing interface, named Facetop, improves the level of collaboration by blending transparent images of the user filmed by a video camera on the computer display. This results in a ‘ghost’ image of the user on the screen. When he points at something, “his video reflection appears to touch objects on the screen.
msn search beta
they need to work on the ranking algorithms, still 🙂
hmm, the yahoo beta has the same problem.
don’t sip. guzzle.
i have been reading the various cocoon lists with a filter to show me all posts by joerg heinicke. if you want to brush up your cocoon skills, he’s the man.