Unordered, unearthed meanderings:
[Addendum 06/29/04: Sorry, the links to the plays have timed out. You can see them, if you go to the main page for Yiddish Playscripts and browse from there.]
Gordon Rugg, at the School of Computing and Mathematics at Keele University, has an nice article on the Voynich MS in this month’s Scientific American. In it he investigates whether a Cardan grille, an early cryptological technology, could have been used to generate a text like the Voynich’s. (He also has an article in the January 2004 issue of Cryptologia, 28.1.) Anyway you look at it, and lots have, the Voynich MS is just one of those things you keep coming back to or running across in strange contexts. Whether it’s stereo instructions in Martian or Edward Kelley’s hoax to bilk Rudolf II out of some ducats, it’s always be something extra especial to me. [via Erling Wold; note an earlier entry at Language Log on the Economist’s notice of Dr Rugg’s theory; and unfortunately I did not find anything at Languagehat’s]
While looking for something else, I found the Mathematics Genealogy Project website. Find out who studied with whom. I’ve always dreamed of doing something like this for linguistic academics, usually after reading some famous body’s necrology.
A while back, I came across an ESL blog, On English, written by Rethabile Masilo, an African English teacher living in Paris. Well, he also has a blog on his native language, Sesotho, spoken in the Kingdom of Lesotho, formerly known as Basutoland before its independence. Mr Masilo also has a blog on his country. Sesotho is also known as Sotho or Lesotho and is a member of the Niger-Congo language family. It is also spoken in Botswana.
[Addendum 06/22/04: Katiba ea Puo blogged about this back in April. Plagiarism or Alzheimer’s? You decide.]
Zackary Sholem Berger has a nice article [in English] in The Forward [free registration required] about modern secular Yiddish prose. Boris Sandler, the editor of Yiddish Forward, has written an historical novel, called When the Golem Shut His Eyes about the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Mr Berger himself has translated Dr Seuss’ Cat in the Hat [di kats der payats] into Yiddish. Others, among the fifty or so secular Yiddish authors today, to keep an eye on are: Ikhl Shraibman [1913- ], Mikhl Feldzenboym, and Leye [Elinor] Robinson [1955- ], “one of the younger Yiddish women writers, [who] weaves fabulist and psychologically nuanced portraits of the natural world.” There is also a burgeoning religious literature in Yiddish among Chassidim. Though, some of the ultra-orthodox Yiddish authors are writing mystery novels, see for example, the paper by Professor Malka Schaps of Bar-Ilan University (an author herself under the pen-name of Rachel Pomerantz).
Cory Doctorow of the EFF gave this Microsoft Research DRM talk to Microsoft’s Research Group at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004. [via Crooked Lumber (whose permalinks are kind of out of whack at the moment) via Desbladet]
Remember Schneier’s Law? Anyone can come up with a security system so clever that he can’t see its flaws. The only way to find the flaws in security is to disclose the system’s workings and invite public feedback. But now we live in a world where any cipher used to fence off a copyrighted work is off-limits to that kind of feedback. That’s something that a Princeton engineering prof named Ed Felten discovered when he submitted a paper to an academic conference on the failings in the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a watermarking scheme proposed by the recording industry. The RIAA responded by threatening to sue his ass if he tried it. We fought them because Ed is the kind of client that impact litigators love: unimpeachable and clean-cut and the RIAA folded. Lucky Ed. Maybe the next guy isn’t so lucky.
Matter of fact, the next guy wasn’t. Dmitry Skylarov is a Russian programmer who gave a talk at a hacker con in Vegas on the failings in Adobe’s e-book locks. The FBI threw him in the slam for 30 days. He copped a plea, went home to Russia, and the Russian equivalent of the State Department issued a blanket warning to its researchers to stay away from American conferences, since we'd apparently turned into the kind of country where certain equations are illegal.
Read it. It’s fall-on-the-floor funny and scary, all at the same time.
A nice article by Roger Ebert on Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Occasionally Roger drops the annoying character he’s built up over the years with the late Siskel and the current Roper, and writes some good film criticism. [via The Chutry Experiment]
Well, Ian, Kari, V., and I went into Berkeley to see Coffee and Cigarettes last night. I wish I could say I loved it, but it left me disappointed. I kept remembering back to a sultry summer in Bonn in 1985, when I walked a couple of miles into the suburban industrial zone to catch Stranger Than Paradise in an art-film theater. It was one of the few films I saw that year in Germany that was subtitled. At first, I was the only person laughing in a packed theater. Finally the person next to me asked me in English if the film was a comedy. That provoked more mirth on my part, but finally the Teutons started laughing, too, and I went home exhausted. But Stranger Than Paradise is a great film, and Coffee and Cigarettes is painful to watch. I cannot imagine watching it again. It is the first of Mr Jarmusch’s films that I can say that of. The high points, as most reviews negative and positive mention, are the Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan and the Bill Murray-Wu Tang Clan vignettes. The others all fall far below anything we could expect from Jarmusch. I had gone expecting more. For one thing, Turbokitty’s review at The Two Blowhards made me made me think it might be more than it turned out to be. There were some great moments, but it was rather like watching TV: there was so much bad to mediocre stuff in between those select cinematic moments. The linking concept of smokes and java was OK, but strained. In fact in the the best sketch, Molina does not smoke and he and Coogan drink tea. Many seem to like the Iggy Pop and Tom Waits blackout, but I think it’s one of the more painful ones to watch. Somewhere in California, two guys whose music I like, painfully act around one another. The fact that I like Jim and Iggy and Tom does not make this sub-high-school afternoon comedy skit any easier to endure. Part of the problem is what I’d call the paralysis of cool. Too many movies rely on the affectless actor, with burning butt dangling from his lower lip, staring unblinkingly at rather than interacting with or relating to the other character(s) in a scene. Didn’t Godard put this one to rest when Belmondo rubs his lip with his thumb in À Bout de souffle? Belmondo’s character leaks more humanity into that scene while attempting to hide behind his Bogie mask of cool than either Tom or Iggy have in their entire scene together. What is this fear that most independent filmmakers have in having their characters show any emotions? I’m not saying that everyobdy has to be Jack Nicholson chewing up the scenery, but maybe somewhere in between.
Noam Starik posted the following short poem on his Yiddish blog. It so struck my fancy, that I tried to translate it, even though I have other poems to finish translating.
boymer, matseyves ... matseyves un boymer,
un same baym parkan dos fun shoymer.
un oybn, in kep fun akatsien grine—
dort hobn di feygl a freye medine.
zey zeen fun oybn nit zeltn bigneyve,
es kumt vos a mol tsu a naye matseyve.
es kumen oft mentshn un zukhn dort vemen:
di tayere shotns, di hartsike nemen.
un same baym parkan hoybt zikh a bretl:
es ligt dort bahaltn der khote fun shtetl.
[moyshe taytsh a besoylem, lodzsh 1910]
Trees, gravestones ... gravestones and trees,
and close by the fence that of the guard.
And overhead, at the tops of acacias green—
there the birds have a free state.
They watch from above but seldom covertly,
it comes once again to a new gravestone.
[Awaiting translation.]
And close by the fence, a board was erected:
here hidden lies the sinner of the town.
[Moyshe Taytsh A Cemetery, Lodz 1910]
[Addendum 06/20/04: In my haste, I dropped the fourth stanza. I’ve restored it. Thanks to Noam Starik.]
Ever had a problem with do or make? [via an ESL blog, On English, via Reflections in D Minor]
Yesterday, Erling Wold told me about RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, written in 1990, and how it had been implemented by the Bergen Linux User Group in 2001. So, IP really is hardware independent. [via Google and CNET and thanks to Vesta BF]
OK, I just ran across this alleged German word (verwaltungsvereinfachungsmassnahmen), but I just have a suspicious feeling about it. First of all, if you google it you get six hits, all in English. Cute stories about the Austrian government trying to simplify official language, but adopting a word that, to non-German ears, is the antithesis of simple. Sure enough Verwaltungsvereinfachung turns up plenty of German hits. So where did the extra Maßnahmen come from? An article in the Guardian, attributes its coinage to a Viennese Beamtin, Waltraud Rumpel. The Double-Tongued Word Wrester offers the best English gloss: anti-bafflegab campaign. What do you think?
Now this is the kind of linguistic polemics I’d rather read. Seems that Bill Poser over at Language Log posted what I took to be a nice little ironic observation about the use of a seemingly non-standard definite article in a classic of Catalan nationalism, Lo Catalanisme: motius que’l llegitiman fonaments cientifichs y solucions practicas by Valentí Almirall.
Catalan is dialectally diverse, but one tendency in recent Catalan politics has been the promotion of a standard variety to the exclusion of the other dialects. How ironic that the title of the founding work of the Catalan movement is incorrect in the standard, in which lo should be el.
But, I guess he hadn’t reckoned on Trevor over at Kaleboel getting all worked up over it.
Lo was widely used in the names of publications like Almirall’s and in similarly symbolic texts in the late nineteenth century (e.g., Lo Catalanista, Lo Tibidabo). This was not designed to contravene any standard but to create an archaic (and thus politically correct) ring, lo being the conventional usage in front of consonant-led masculine nouns in olden times.
You go, guys! This is the sort of down-and-dirty kind of linguistic warfare that I long to read. Not any of that how many unification grammars can you fit onto a 256 MB compact flash card. The feud boils on over into the commentary, so be sure not to skip those. (Right now, I feel that Trevor is ahead pointswise, but who knows what the morrow may bring.) Perhaps, linguists can take a page from the IT business community, and act like mud-wrestling CEOs did at the Wall Street Journal “All Things Digital” conference. Among the who kissed whom journalism, you’ve got great tidbits like: “Gates hates Google” and “Ellison hates Gates”. [via Laura at Limon]
Just some miscellaneous links:
sic
Has the digital revolution transformed Dada into data? What features of Dada have become important elements in digital art and net culture? To answer these questions we must first take a brief look at the art movement known as Dada, and then examine several of its key features—simultaneous poetry, manifestos, abstract painting, collage/photomontage, chance, cabaret, audience, collaboration—and how they relate to new media.
[Dada2data by Chris Joseph at trAce Online Writing Centre via wood s lot search on dada2data]
& non
Random number generation is used in a wide variety of cryptographic operations, such as key generation and challenge/response protocols. A random number generator is a function that outputs a sequence of 0s and 1s such that at any point, the next bit cannot be predicted based on the previous bits. However, true random number generation is difficult to do on a computer, since computers are deterministic devices. Thus, if the same random generator is run twice, identical results are received. True random number generators are in use, but they can be difficult to build. They typically take input from something in the physical world, such as the rate of neutron emission from a radioactive substance or a user’s idle mouse movements.
[FAQ 2.5.2 at RSA Security]
I’ve run across some interesting photographs in the past day or two:
[Addendum: Sorry about the gender confusion. Bee is a he not a she.]
The national media watch group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) posted this alert about Ronald Reagan. It’s a nice antidote to the current crop of encomia issuing forth from the press.
“Ronald Reagan was the most popular president ever to leave office,” explained ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas (6/6/04). “His approval ratings were higher than any other at the end of his second term.” Though the claim was repeated by many news outlets, it is not true; Bill Clinton’s approval ratings when he left office were actually higher than Reagan’s, at 66 percent versus Reagan’s 63 percent (Gallup, 1/10-14-01). Franklin Delano Roosevelt also topped Reagan with a 66 percent approval rating at the time of his death in office after three and a half terms.
My translation project is going slower than I anticipated, but it’s still under way. A new, typographical twist is that the three letters below in bold as extra wide Hebrew letters in the Yiddish orthography. Not quite sure what to make of them.
un az er hot derfilt, az er hot fargesn ale verter,
hot im a shpar geton a shtrom fun untern lefele:
un az der shtrom hot nisht gekont greykhn tsu di oygn
un geblibn shtekn in zayn tsenoyfgeklemtn haldz —
hot der rov nokh merer nisht gevust vos tsu ton.
az di nakht iz gekumen un hot tsugedekt
di khorevdike shtot mit a groyser finsternish
hot der rov zikh oyfgehaybn funes koymen,
oykh velkhn er iz nokh gezesn,
hot a ker geton zayn ponim tsu mayrev-tsu
un mit di zokhn oykh di fis zikh avekgelozt geyn
mit des braytn shliakh, vos firt in vald arayn.
der brayter shliakh iz geven badekt mit alerlay khfeytsim,
mit biksn un mit hitlen un tsebrokhene reder,
un di erd geven tseakert un tsetramplt
fun koyln un fun granatn,
fun ferdishe kopites un khayelishe fis —
finsternish un shtilkeyt un mer gornisht.
un az der rov opgegangen etlekhe mayl,
hot a kalter vint angehaybn blozn fun tsofn-zayt
un der rov hot derfilt a groyse midkeyt in zayn guf
un a kelt iber ale zayne beyner.
hot der rov zikh avekgezetst oyf der erd tsu opruen,
un dernokh zikh oysgetsoygn oyfn mitn shliakh
mit opene oygn tsum himl.
un der himl iz geven hoykh un tif un oysgeshternt
mit mili-miliasn shtern.
And he felt, when he forgot all the words,
that a stream from the pit of his stomach welled up
but the stream could not reach his eyes
and remained stuck in his grieving throat —
and the rabbi once more did not know what to do.
When the night came and covered
the wasted city with a great darkness
the rabbi stood up from the chimney,
where he was still sitting,
he turned his face to the West
and he let his feet go
along the broad unpaved road, what stirred in woods ahead.
The broad dirt road was covered over with things.
with guns and with caps and broken wheels,
and the earth was plowed up and trampled
by shells and granades
by horses hooves and soldiers’ feet —
darkness and stillness and nothing else.
And when the rabbi went a few miles,
a cold wind blew in from the north
and the rabbi felt a great fatigue in his body
and cold in all his limbs.
The rabbi sat down on the earth to rest,
and afterwards he stretched himself out in the middle of the dirt road
with his eyes open to the sky
and the sky was high and cavernous and marked
with myriads of stars.
The toughest time I had was trying to translate the first stanza. Something’s going on, but I’m not quite sure what it is. I’m hoping one of my readers will have a better idea.
So Reagan died, and it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead. Since when? Somebody on NPR suggested that Ronnie was the best US president of the twentieth century. Say what? Say Contragate. Just another blowing of a hot, ill wind from the so-called Liberal Media. Disclosure: I met RWR in Chinatown, SF, when he was running for governor of California. Even at the tender age of nine, I did not believe anything that issued forth from the “Great Communicator”.
I have been meaning to blog about this for a while but keep procrastinating. I have a friend Paul who I haven’t been much in touch with since he and his wife moved from the Bay Area up to the Pacific Northwest. A while back, John, a mutual friend of ours and an ex-business partner of mine, and I were trading gratuitous emails, when John told me that Paul was recovering from surgery he had to remove a cancerous tumor in his mouth. (Paul had had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma back in his college days and had survived that.) So, Paul and Kimberly decided to start a blog to keep everybody updated on his condition. A couple of weeks ago, I sat down and read the whole thing from back at the beginning of the year until the then present. A breathtaking use of blogging. Damn fine! The Paul saga continues.
What a grand undertaking: Martial blogged. One epigram a day in the original and with English translation and commentary. Keep up the good work, Nick. [via rogueclassicism & Classics in Contemporary Culture]
A while back, V. & I were watching the tail-end of Die Hard (3): With a Vengence, when out of the blue Samuel L. Jackson’s character called Bruce’s character “a melon-farming cracker”. A little bit later, he called somebody else a melon-farmer. At first we were confused, then it dawned us that melon-farmer in all its four syllable glory was standing in for another MF expletive. It stuck. It was melon-farming this and melon-farming that. The inevitable happened, and I uttered the term at work. My office mate perked up immediately from his umpteenth pep rally email from some unknown JAMF Veep of something or other, and soon he was using it, too. Well, imagine my surprise the other day, when he sent me this melon-farming link. How could I have not known that melon-farming was a by-product of Alex Cox redubbing the sublime Repo Man for TV consumption?
