Sometimes I get this annoying suspicion that the COMPUTER SCIENCE obsession with “validation” and “parsing” is completely misguided, and that it would be much more sensible to deal with probabilities from the ground up.
No, I have no idea what I’m talking about. It just seems incredibly wrong that one misplaced semicolon can make a million lines of code come crashing down.
DNA works, after all.
Is it just me or is U+062A ARABIC LETTER TEH a happy-looking letter?
HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE :: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries
Napoleon says…
Sheesh, “Mein Kampf” and “The Kinsey Report” in the same list?
Riiiiight.
Here’s a translation issue that will probably end up becoming a media circus in New York, if not elsewhere:
The Education Equality Act (Gotham Gazette. June, 2005)
Intro 464: The Education Equity Act was introduced in the City Council by council members Hiram Monserrate and David Yassky. The legislation requires the Department of Education to translate documents, such as report cards and notices, into the eight most widely spoken languages — Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Italian, French, Yiddish, Korean and Polish — and provide interpretation services for parents who don’t speak English.
Hmm, a quick look at Technorati already uncovers some indignation: Multicultural Madness in NYC implies that the “victims” of this legislation would be the students, except that it’s aimed at parents, who are attempting to help the students learn English. The example cited is a parent who doesn’t read English and doesn’t know that their child is skipping class.
Which is in English.
But whatever.
The conversation around this bill should prove interesting. (Granted, it is a pretty vague title, given what the legislation does.)
