Tinker, Tailor

Good post on how linguists can contribute to translation. Even covers some Chinese.

After that “mind blowing read”, the little bias in my mind against comics got blown away, I decided to pick up another comic, Persepolis, the story of a little girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq.

Heart warming and touching stuff. Not just a personal (and often humourous) perspective on Iran’s recent history and culture, but an exploration of a psyche of a little girl growing up and experiencing love, rebellion, hero-worship, pop culture in a repressive environment.

This is my kinda art. Check out the gallery.

In a sense, a hole does not exist.

Take a donut hole. The donut hole is not the donut material, although it’s bounded by it. You can’t say that that the air in the hole makes up the hole, for even without the air, the hole is still there. Nor can you say that the space of the hole is the hole, because when I eat the donut, the space is no longer the hole.

Take a drill, and drill a hole in the wood. We see a physical hole, created by a physical process. But the physical hole is not really physical - it’s just defined by a physical boundary.

Take my brain. There’s obviously a hole in it.

In his recent post, Nicholas Liu has this to say about me:

3) Lose the dead wood. For instance, TinkerTailor is doing no one any favours with commentary like ‘dunno how they did the study’ when the answer took up two whole paragraphs of the page linked. RTFA, n00b.

He thinks I’m a n00b! ROTFL!

Can’t blame him - I’ve only been blogging here for a month or so, so I’m obviously a n00b.

我的中文很jialat，所以我一定要多多练习。

P.S. 我爱unicode。

I’m now at the Wheelock Place NYDC, surfing on my beloved ahbook after collecting it from Apple Centre Orchard. The only reason I eat at NYDC is for their free wifi.

Clever. I spend almost 20 bucks on food just to get free wifi.

Anyway, after downing my 3 Amigos, I decide that I can do with some dessert. A menu could come in handy.

A waiter walks by, and I motion to him.

“Can I have the waiter?”

He looks strangely at me.

“I mean the menu!” I quickly corrected.

Luckily he’s not gay.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where-” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

I’ve been reading The Annotated Alice for quite a few weeks already, and it’ll probably be a while more before I finish it. The annotations are edited by Martin Gardner, one author I like a lot. And Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland happens to be one my favourite children’s books, even though it so full of goodies that it takes grownups who are geniuses in their own right like Gardner to make sense out many parts of it.

According to Gardner, on the passage I quoted above,

These remarks are among the most quoted passages in the Alice books.

He goes on to mention some of the more prominent works that have made reference to the quote. As well as a passage in the Talmud that says:

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.

Which reminds me of this girl who was about to complete her polytechnic studies, and she asked me for advice on what course of study she should take when she goes on to uni.

I asked her what direction she wanted to take in life, and she said she didn’t know.

Guess what I told her.

P.S. I quoted from the same book in my post “Down the Rabbit-Hole” which features one of my favourite Alice quotes.

There is a tendency, then, to use only what can be measured as a criterion. That is, the spirit of the man, the way he feels towards things, may be difficult to measure. There is some tendency to have interviews and try to correct this. So much the better. But it’s easier to have more examinations and not have to waste the time with the interviews, and the result is that only those things which can be measured, actually which they think they can measure, are what count, and a lot of good things are left out, a lot of good guys are missed. So it’s a dangerous business and has to be very carefully checked.

I think I still prefer Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, but this is pretty good too, especially his last chapter where he rants about rampant unscientific thinking.

I went through a whole day of lectures/lessons -
- radio news reporting
- the dragon in Chinese culture
- DNA structure
- tension in scriptwriting
- framing in photography
- leadership
- company financing
- introduction to TV studios
and more.

This is fun.

I was reading during lunchtime as usual, when a colleague came by.

“Wah, what are you reading?”

It was clearly a rhetorical question, since he could clearly see what I was reading.

“Ermm… I’m reading a comic book…” I said a little defensively.

“You’re reading comics?!?!”

Everyone knows I read real books. I mean real books.

“This is a comic about comics!” I protested, “it’s serious stuff!”

“I’m sure…”

“It goes into art, history, psychology, philosophy…”

“Hmmm….”

“Take a look.”

10 minutes later.

“Tell me when you’re finished with it.”

This is no ordinary comic book. It explores how the medium actually works - how time is paced, how emotion is represented, and so on. Brilliant, erudite, and totally mind-blowing.

It blew my mind. Read it, even if you’re not a comic fan - you’ll never look at comics the same way ever again.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

Filled with entertaining lists. Great when you need inspiration, or a good laugh.

Was reading a blog post when I came across this statement:

Oh well, as I quote one of my bunkmates:

I couldn’t read on.

Our guys don’t seem to know the meaning of bunk.

Bunk, for goodness’ sake, refers to the bed!

Bunkmates.

*shudders*

P.S. Most of the time, barrack or barracks would be the more-correct term, even though hardly anyone uses it.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.