March 17, 2006
Finished Japanese translations of "Support Denmark" banners
The Dissident Frogman has incorporated my Japanese translations of his popular "Support Denmark" banners into his multilingual contributions archive page.
My thanks to knowledgeable friends Mariko and Garth for their thorough critiques of my pre-final draft. Thanks also for feedback on the issue of translating the original phrase "the legacy of the West", which was problematic, by these people on the honyaku mailing list: Richard Thieme, Peter Durfee, Benjamin Barrett, J.C. Helary, and James Sparks.
March 07, 2006
Quote of the Day
"I wish the eagle had not been chosen as the representative of this country. He is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched in some dead tree where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing hawk and, when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish and is bearing it to his nest for his young ones, the bald eagle pursues him and takes the fish. With all this injustice, he is never in good case."
An interesting view of Yelp
Charles Hudson has written an interesting opinion piece on the potential of Yelp (which I mentioned recently.) Thanks to Matthew P. for the pointer. Excerpt:
Yelp is collecting a ton of data from those who take the time to rate and review restaurants, hotels, etc. In the same way that Junglee/Amazon revolutionized how people find books and other goods by using collaborative filtering, I can see Yelp (at scale) achieving a similar aim. Right now, the "missing lens" is the ability to filter reviews and ratings based on similar interests. I would love the ability to use Yelp to filter reviews and ratings based on how similar other reviewers' scores are to ones that I have entered. This is something that nobody seems to be doing today. Ultimately, this collaborative filtering might prove even more useful than reviews provided by my friends.
March 04, 2006
Allowed myself to accept another social network invitation
Some friends of a friend started a geographically-oriented business review site, Yelp.com, with an apparent emphasis on restaurant reviews (but an ontology supporting very many more categories.)
I've joined on her recommendation, and have been surprised to discover just how useful it's been already: I've found some nearby places I'd never considered before, and am now using to drive some of my purchases at local specialty shops.
Now, whether Yelp is another Next Big Thing remains to be seen. It's a closed system, with no apparent provision for RSS syndication of the content we the users add to the review base, and relatedly, no leveraging of microformat standards such as hReview, a serious issue (thanks to Mike Linksvayer for pointing me to this recently.)
Yelp seems to have purchased a GIS-oriented business database, and coded some Google Maps integration into their interface. Rather nice, but entirely US-oriented, with no indication they're ready to scale into the English-speaking markets of Tokyo (big expat and traveller population) and other locales.
Speaking of which, I just tried inviting a good friend, an American living in Panama who could be a productive member of the Yelp community, and he sent me back this, reprinted with his permission:
'Hi Russell,These morons ask for a zip code and won't accept my sign-up without one. I see this sort of shit all the time. When are US geeks going to get a clue the the US is not the world and that not everyone who has internet also has a "zip" code? So Thanks, but no thanks. I won't sign up with jingoistic idiots. Please feel free to pass along my exact words, if it pleases you.
Regards,
Sandy'
Wow. Well, he does have a point. I see this as one of those "We weren't planning to be so successful" scaling issues. Can't count the number of times I've seen this. I think the Yelpers really should have generalized their GIS integration to allow world-wide registration, from the very beginning. I have lots of friends in Europe, Asia, and South America who won't be able to join due to this and related issues. Maybe agitating in the Yelp forums about this might help; I've noticed they do tend to pay attention to issues of interface (e.g. marking businesses as closed or moved) so they may listen. Of course, they may be planning some kind of world-market rollout, but it would help if they advertised that somewhere prominent.
In the meantime, I'm going to use the hell out of it until and unless it ceases to be interesting. It's a much more convenient place for me to bulk-load all those pictures of food and storefronts I take in my travels, more so than the Movable Type blogging interface I'm using here, and since most of my reviews are locale-specific, it's probably a better place for my rants and raves about local businesses (and ones I visit in other cities.)
March 01, 2006
Another interesting cover from my pulp collection: 1984
Here's another from my collection, a 1960 Signet Books edition of the 1949 classic of George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four:
Testing my OCR (OmniPage SE) on this back cover text:
"Which One
will YOU be in the Year
1984
Proletarian - Considered inferior and kept in total ignorance, you'll be fed lies from the Ministry of Truth, eliminated upon signs of promise or ability!
Police Guard - Chosen for lack of intelligence but superior brawn, you'll be suspicious of everyone and be ready to give your life for Big Brother, the leader you've never even seen!
Party Member - Male - Face-less mind-less, a flesh-and-blood robot with a push-button brain, you're denied love by low, taught hate by the flick of a switch!
Party Member - Female - A member of the Anti-Sex League from birth, your duty will be to smother all human emotion, and your children might not be your husband's!
Unbelievable? You'll feel differently after you've read this best-selling book of forbidden love and terror in a world many of us may live to see!
George ORWELL was born in 1903 and died in 1950. Educated at Eton, career was varied-Burma service the Imperial Police, twoyears in Paris, and teaching in England preceded the war in Spain and Home Guard membership in World War II. A frequent contributor to literary reviews, his books include Animal Farm, Burmese Days and Down and Out in Paris and London.
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY"
More old school book covers: "Strike From Space"
Now that I've wrapped up what turned out to be a surprisingly subtle and difficult volunteer Japanese translation job (which I'm very happy to have done, I should note), I'm going to blog a bit more for fun. Combing my bookshelves, I pulled another several titles with interesting cover copy and art. Here's one: "Strike From Space: A Megadeath Mystery" by Phyllis Schlafly and Chester Ward, 1965, Pere Marquette Press:
Interesting author blurb from the back cover, above: "Phyllis Schlafly... was a ballistics gunner and technician at the largest ammunition plant in the world." This is particularly interesting, since the WikiPedia entry for her doesn't mention this, only her academic bona fides (I'll be correcting this omission later, wearing my WikiPedia Contributor hat.) Now, "the largest ammunition plant in the world" was, at the time of publication of this book - and still remains - Lake City Army Ammunition Plant (LCAAP) in Independence, Missouri... did she actually work there?
