Everyone says that Achron (that RTS with time travel) isn’t actually well-made enough to be worth playing, despite the cool mechanic, but given that the cool mechanic apparently works (and doesn’t inherently destroy game balance?), it ought to be used in other things

Like, it’s actual non-trivial time travel!  It sounds like an RTS where you control an army of Homestuck time players!  How cool is that?!?!  (For details, see here, and also this part further down the page)

The lighter charms of Danish television include high cheekbones and excellent lighting. I was particularly taken by a copper pendant lamp in the shape of an upside-down artichoke, which, I later learned, while reading an article about how “Borgen” has “excited new interest in classic Danish lights,” was designed in 1958 by Poul Henningsen.

Immediately after reblogging the previous post I got the verbal brain noise “#1 warlock blogger in the UK”

paranormalthread:

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furioustimemachinebarbarian:

nostalgebraist:

I want to get more experience doing data science on large data sets with Spark.  I tend to learn something best by attempting a project I have intrinsic interest in.

So I’m looking for some large, publicly accessible data set that I could do interesting things with.  It has to be large enough that distributed storage and processing is actually necessary – I want experience using Spark for its intended purpose, not just familiarity with the Spark APIs.  Any suggestions?

Amazon has a bunch of public large data sets in their cloud services: https://aws.amazon.com/public-datasets/

A lot of interesting stuff here, thank you!

(via furioustimemachinebarbarian)

I want to get more experience doing data science on large data sets with Spark.  I tend to learn something best by attempting a project I have intrinsic interest in.

So I’m looking for some large, publicly accessible data set that I could do interesting things with.  It has to be large enough that distributed storage and processing is actually necessary – I want experience using Spark for its intended purpose, not just familiarity with the Spark APIs.  Any suggestions?

lovestwell:

nostalgebraist:

invertedporcupine:

nostalgebraist:

Going through an old notes file I’d forgotten about.   Found a part where I seem to be noting down things I didn’t like in Anna Karenina in preparation for some never-written screed:

AK top of p. 400 – seeing things in faces (wood), non-insightfulness (?) etc. of this

AK p. 496 – views on death: dull, sexist (?), etc.
AK p. 671 first paragraph: example of awkward writing?
AK p. 707 ‘the greatest event in a woman’s life’ tolstoy…….
AK p. 709 ’… as it seemed to him’ – good example of typical awkwardness
AK p. 739 ‘For her, all of him … amounted to one thing: love of women’ whoa there…

Awkward writing seems much more likely to be a criticism of a bad translation, because that is not an especially common criticism of Lev Tolstoy.

I eventually wrote a more positive if kind of contentless review, in which I blamed the awkward writing on the translation.  Although years later I got an interesting comment which made me less sure of that.

Pevear&Volokhonsky translations of Russian classics (the AK you read is one of them) are hugely controversial among literary critics, especially those who can read the original Russian. I harbor an intense dislike towards them myself, ever since I tried to compare different translations of Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” into English many years ago and was appalled by P&V’s choices. The final comment to your goodreads review links to one article critical of P&V translations, but in my opinion, the objections raised there (all of them can be categorized as “tin ear” problems) aren’t the most important ones. 

The chief problem with P&V translations is that they routinely take ordinary Russian idioms and translate them word-by-word into English, and they then become weird-looking examples of what the reader can only surmise must be the artistic expression of the author’s style. This is quite intolerable to look at if you know both languages well. In Russian we say “spit on smth.” to mean “nevermind smth., don’t worry about smth.”, this is a very common phrase that doesn’t really suggest an image of spitting (unless subverted or played with in humor or poetry of course). So in a P&V translation, instead of “nevermind the rug” [i.e. don’t take your shoes off, said to a guest] the host says “spit on the rug”, which fails to carry the intended meaning. 

There are numerous examples of this. Suppose you meet somebody you know and you notice something, like a bandage maybe, that makes you want to ask if they’d visited a doctor. If you want to emphasize your surprise, you might ask “Wait… have you been to a doctor?” In Russian, the colloquial device to produce the same feeling of surprise is to insert a [what] inside the phrase, with a particular intonation. So literally it becomes “you’ve, what, been to a doctor?” which is how P&V render it. A completely natural colloquial Russian sentence becomes, at best, stilted and awkward English that doesn’t fit the situation. More examples, and a more eloquent restatement of the principal objection, in Timothy D. Sergay’s long comment in this old NYTimes blog discussion.

I’d guess that most of your misgivings about the style of A&K were due to the unfortunate choice of a translation.

Very interesting!  I had read the “Pevearsion” article long ago, but this adds to my wariness.

In response to that commenter on the review, I mentioned that I had been reading Explosion in a Cathedral, a book originally written in Spanish which only exists in English as a translation of a translation (Spanish –> French –> English).  Despite (or because of?) its thirdhand nature, the English translation reads very well as English literary prose.  This isn’t the same as “reads naturally,” since there are plenty of unusual turns of phrase, but in exactly the same way there are unusual turns of phrase in literary original-English writing.

By contrast, a lot of translations I’ve read have this pedestrian quality, where (in Sergay’s terms) virtually everything is unmarked, outside of some “spit on the rug”-type glitches.  Everything is described in this blank, normal, procedural way, which in English comes off either as bad writing or as some Hemingway-like deliberate strategy (and I doubt that such a strategy is as pervasive in world literature as this pedestrian style is among translations).

Some of this difference clearly has something to do with the source language – the translations that can “hold their own” as literary English tend to have a Romance language as the source, while the pedestrian translations that come to mind are from Russian, Chinese or Japanese.  I feel wary of this as a rule, though, and I want to think more closely about the translations I’ve read and see if I can come up with exceptions.

(German to English is an interesting case, both for linguistic reasons and because the examples I can think of are mixed – the Kafka translations I’ve read have been frustratingly pedestrian, but John E. Woods’ translations of Thomas Mann are in the Explosion in a Cathedral category)

(via lovestwell)

A nicotine vapor inhaler (Jacobson, Jacobson, & Ray, 1979) has been tested and found to produce only negligible levels of nicotine absorption when puffed on as one might a standard cigarette (Nemeth-Coslett, Henningfield, & MacBride, 1987; Sepkovic, Colosimo, Axel- rad, Adams and Haley, 1986). However, in what has been described as a “heroic” puffing procedure (USDHHS, 1988), significant amounts of nicotine were absorbed when a subject inhaled “as hard and frequently as possible” four of the vapor inhalers in sequence over a 20-min period (Russell, Jarvis, Sutherland, & Feyerabend, 1987).