From C. S. Lewis's journal entry for 15 June, 1924:
M. told us a good story of how H. G. Wells had dined at All Souls and said that Oxford wasted too much time over Latin and Greek. Why should these two literatures have it all to themselves? Now Russian and Persian literature were far superior to the classics. Someone (I forget the name) asked a few questions. It soon became apparent that Wells knew neither Greek, Latin, Persian, or Russian. 'I think,' said someone, 'I am the only person present here tonight who knows these four languages; and I can assure you, Mr. Wells, that you are mistaken; neither Russian nor Persian literature are as great as the literatures of Greece or Rome'.
We have talked about the odd language of spam, viruses, and assorted internet scams in the past. Now a bit of linguistic puzzling over at language log leads circuitously to the same conclusion. (Be sure to read through all of the updates.)
Don't you wish all interviews were this confrontational?
Reviewed but not recommended:
Anyone else have a book to unrecommend?
We discussed Kelo here shortly after the decision, but I don't know if the Horizon readership overlaps with that of property-rights bloggers covering what may well be a sequel. From one of the Volokhs comes coverage of Didden v. Village of Port Chester:
The owners' property was condemned only because they refused to pay Wasser the $800,000 he demanded. Yet what public benefit would follow if they had succumbed to Wasser's threats by putting the big bucks in his pocket, not the village treasury? Wasser planned to build a Walgreens pharmacy on the property-exactly the same type of use as the original owners' planned CVS. The community gained nothing from the change in ownership, while having to bear all the costs of condemnation. Didden and Bologna in effect were forced to turn over all the value gained from their site evaluation to Wasser without so much as a dime in compensation.
Tangentially related to our Kelo discussion, Eric Muller at Is That Legal? has a conversation with an animated German tour guide. Her sense of humor is better than mine would be.
Oliver Kamm has put together a book list that is likely to interest readers of this blog. He includes three books on Truman and the Bomb, one on developments within the modern Left, and some Chomsky/Zinn bashing.
I'd assemble a 2007 book list myself, but German science readers are so timeless that I'm not sure there's much point.
Joel condensed an earlier "short-short" to six words: "In Murphy's bed, everything went wrong."
Here's my first try: "I think I'll keep the house."
Yours?
Apparently there's some sort of handheld toy that plays 20 questions. It's supposed to be some kind of neural net, and you can play with it (i.e., train it for them free of charge) online.
It's always illuminating to get to play around with some kind of AI technology. As good as your ideas might sound, and as impressive as the results might be in a controlled environment, nothing beats unleashing a few million curious people on it for seeing just how useful it really is. It's when people are trying to have fun with something that flaws tend to be the most glaring.
I've heard people say the results are incredible, but I'm not that impressed. You can easily get a clear impression of the program's typical trainer in the questions it asks. Tell it you are thinking of a person involved in music (Monteverdi, let's say) and the program repeatedly asks things like "were you popular in the sixties?" long after you've already told it that "you" lived before 1900.
It also likes to ask things like "do you have blond hair?" when you've already made it clear that you're thinking of someone who is not an entertainer and who lived centuries ago (Gengis Khan, for example).
In short, it repeatedly asks questions which 1) have already been answered in an indirect way and 2) which would be good questions to ask assuming you're thinking of Britney Spears.
These would seem to be artifacts of its training, and maybe it will get better in time. But it also seems fairly easy to break. On my Monteverdi round it got really confused: questions 20 and 21 (right after "Were you popular in the 90s?") were "I guessed that it was a sample?" (it was told right away that it was a person), followed up by the fairly left-field "Are you larger than a pound of butter?", which I am going to use every chance I get in future games of 20 questions.
To its credit, though, it did get Gengis Khan fairly quickly, and though on my Stanley Kubrick round it kept asking me whether the person in question was skinny, it does know about Kubrick -- at the end if it can't guess it gives you a list and asks you to give it the correct answer.
Somehow, handling books brings out the navel-gazer in people. I've been playing around with my gift subscription to LibraryThing and find that entering a mere shelf-and-a-half of books has probably doubled my pomposity quotient.
It's not just me, though. Inside the back cover of my 1896 First Greek Book is this handwritten note, probably by the Leo Budovsky whose name is inside the front cover:
N.B. -
This book is the first one to find its way into my library. It dates back to a very early period of my life. At that time I was still a student in elementary school. It seems to have been obtained for my father by a man (an educated, cultured man, as I recollect) of Greek descent who, like my father, still greatly treasured and heartily cherished the love and noble works of antiquity in which he had been nurtured and inspired by good teachers in his native homeland. Many a time and oft he was wont to come to my father's newsstand and discourse with him on subjects of cultural interest and things that pertain to the mind and soul, and I was frequently near at hand and eagerly drank in what I could. These memories are the dearest and prettiest of my childhood days.I look back to those early days now that I am a grown man, though still young (twenty five and my twenty sixth birthday comes on October 30) and I smile as with my mind's eye I survey these and other childhood scenes. Yes, charming, appealingly lovely, romantically attractive were those early days of boyhood fancy, work, and idle hopes. Yes, truly, I look back and am charmed. Will some chance reader perhaps, in time to come, rummaging among my posthumous writings long years after I am gone, when my mortal remains will long since have found their last earthly rest and I and all I had vainly and fondly hoped and planned to do, am naught but an empty memory, will he too be charmed and even inspired in reading this? Away with thee, silly, empty, transitory thought! And yet, amidst the gloom, the bitterness, the dreary darkness, mortal anguish and dismal travail of these years I still can smile, -- feebly and wanly, it is true, and refresh myself with these early recollections. I shall live with them, love and cherish them forever, and may peace and contentment someday visit my troubled soul.