infundibulum

I’m testing out blogging with Flock… looks pretty sweet so far!

Here is a translation I just did of a blog post by someone who was on the Picadilly Line this morning:
::Hora Cero::: Explosiones en el metro de Londres

When I left the Picadilly metro I was surprised becuase the Picadilly line itself had been suspended. It’s one of the most important lines, and to suspend it there must have been something very serious…

When I arrived at ComSec they told me that there had been an explosion in the metro on Liverpool Street. One of the architects said: “We won the Olympics, and the next day the metro system goes to shit because of… rain,” since that was the first story that the BBC was giving, that several generators had exploded because of the rain.

Now there is general chaos in the city. They have shut down all the metro lines, and rumors about terroist attacks have started to circulate, etc…

Update (10:30):

They just found a device that seems to be a bomb in one of the metros…

It’s for sure that the GSM networks have collapsed…

Update (10:43):

They’re saying that several buses “flew” through the air… the matter is getting more compliacated, although there is a lot of disinformation going around. A few people were just interviewed and describing the situation on television

Update (10:59):

Scotland Yard just gave an order to hospitals that they not accept any emergencies except for critical cases. They are evacuating Liverpool Sreet and Edware Road there are two trains trapped with people inside. Edware Road is one of most problematic cases. You have to enter and leave by elevator, and the service stairs are horrible.

Tags: london

Here’s a link to a rather old article I ran across (from last April) from the Washington Post:

The Africa You Never See

Most of the time, Africa is simply not on the map. The continent’s booming stock markets are almost never mentioned in newspaper financial pages. How often is an African country– apart, perhaps, from South Africa or Egypt or Morocco — featured in a newspaper travel section? Even the listing of worldwide weather includes only a few African cities.

The result of this portrait is an Africa we can’t relate to. It seems so foreign to us, so different and incomprehensible. Since we can’t relate to it, we ignore it.

Blogs are one force chipping away at this unfamiliarity: there are more every day.

The thing is, no matter how hard I try, I just can’t figure out what the hell he’s talking about.

I don’t think it means anything.

Email destroys the mind faster than marijuana - study | The Register

I find this sort of romantic, somehow:
Prototype of Unmanned Airship Is Unveiled (washingtonpost.com)

A communications company unveiled a prototype of an unmanned airship that would function as a relay platform while floating in the stratosphere some 65,000 feet above service areas.

The lighter-than-air “stratellite” has been under construction by the GlobeTel Communications Corp. subsidiary Sanswire Networks LLC at an airport in San Bernardino County.

…

“It’s a rebirth of an era in our minds,” Coleman said. “… We see it as a link to the past.”

I wonder if they will be visible at all? How cool would it be to look up at one of those things with a telescope?

An interesting bit from Wikipedia, The Raven’s Paradox:

When numerous people over thousands of years observe something like the law of gravity, we tend to believe that it is true with very high probability.
This type of reasoning could be summarized by the principle of induction:

• If an instance X is observed that is consistent with theory T, then the probability that T is true increases.

Hempel gives an example of the principle of induction. The theory is that all ravens are black. We go out and examine a million ravens, and observe that they are all black. After each observation, our belief in the theory “all ravens are black” will rise slightly. The principle of induction looks reasonable here.

Now comes the problem. The statement “all ravens are black” is logically equivalent to the statement “all non-black-things are non-ravens”. If we observe a red apple, that is consistent with that statement. A red apple is a non-black-thing, and when we examine it, we observe that it is a non-raven. So by the principle of induction, observing a red apple should increase our belief that all ravens are black!

Chew on that while you’re waiting at the bus stop.

Check out the Wikipedia (well, technically, Wikimedia) Cafe Press Store:

http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia

I’m really tempted to spring for the hoodie…

Actually, I love Linux for lots of reasons.

But here’s one you have to see to believe:

I was about to start a new image in The Gimp, so I opened up the template dialog:

They thought of everything.

That kind of insanity doesn’t happen on those other operating systems.

:-)

LuistxoBlog - Ingelesen Hilerria

I have a story about visiting Bilbao and thereabouts, but I’m out the door in a moment.

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to mention that I often find myself just looking at stuff in Basque and thinking “that looks so neat.”

In any case, I follow that guy’s English and Spanish blogs, where he writes interesting stuff, including i18n and l10n and Python. He also writes about Zope, which I’ve always been sort of afraid of.

I found a really interesting way to look at the distribution of words in text by way of del.icio.us: Parsing the State of the Union.

Aside from the obvious current political interest of this tool, it’s really quite a unique and useful way to look at patterns of words in text.

It would be quite interesting (to me, anyway!) to apply this tool to looking at the distribution of words in translated text, with two columns: the source on the left, and the translation on the right. One should be able to eyeball, to some extent, how well a word and its putative translation corresponded between the two columns.

(On a technical note, it’s also interesting to look at how the tool is constructed: rather than using some complicated image generation package or futzing around with css properties, he just uses a single pixel with a “width” attribute to map sentences. Very clever.)