The Message

For the past couple years I've been working (sporadically) on a project to be able to produce a high-quality aligned parallel Bible in all languages for which there's a freely-available translation. What sets this project apart from others is that any language pairs can be chosen, and a nicely-typeset book is automatically generated. Here are the languages that I currently have:

1. Afrikaans
2. Albanian
3. Arabic
4. Chinese (simplified)
5. Chinese (traditional)
6. Croatian
7. Czech (2 translations)
8. Danish
9. Dutch
10. English (4 translations: KJV, ASV, WEB, and BBE)
11. Esperanto
12. Estonian
13. Finnish
14. French
15. German
16. Greek (LXX, TR, and WH)
17. Hebrew (BHS, WLC, and modern)
18. Hungarian
19. Italian (2 translations)
20. Latin
21. Lithuanian
22. Norwegian
23. Portuguese
24. Romanian
25. Russian
26. Spanish
27. Swedish
28. Syriac (NT)
29. Turkish
30. Ukrainian

This gives over 400 possible pairings. Adding additional languages or translations is pretty easy.

Below is a sample text. The printed version is not highlighted like the images below.

If you try to read any of the above text samples, you'll receive the gift of knowledge.

(but don't give it away)



Update: I'm delighted that several of you have made an effort to decipher the message.  Here's another sample that might help out:

Second Update:  Some of you have mentioned that the above languages are difficult.  So I'm adding another  pair of languages that are considerably easier to decipher:

:-P

Dublin: UNESCO City of Literature

Dublin was named a UNESCO City of Literature a few days ago. It now joins the ranks of such literary capitals as Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Iowa City. Iowa City??? That's right -- I'll get back to that later.

Here are some of the criteria to become one:

• Quality, quantity and diversity of publishing in the city
• Quality and quantity of educational programmes focusing on domestic or foreign literature at primary, secondary and tertiary levels
• Literature, drama and/or poetry playing an important role in the city
• Hosting literary events and festivals which promote domestic and foreign literature;
• Existence of libraries, bookstores and public or private cultural centres which preserve, promote and disseminate domestic and foreign literature
• Involvement by the publishing sector in translating literary works from diverse national languages and foreign literature
• Active involvement of traditional and new media in promoting literature and strengthening the market for literary products.

Let's look at each of these.

Quality, quantity and diversity of publishing in the city

An Gúm is a government-owned publisher, which prints the high-quality Irish <-> English Foclóir Póca (Pocket Dictionary). They also print other pedagogical textbooks for Irish learners, and many Irish-language novels. There are also several other smaller publishers which aren't internationally known.

Quality and quantity of educational programmes focusing on domestic or foreign literature at primary, secondary and tertiary levels

I'm sure they do a fairly good job with this.

Literature, drama and/or poetry playing an important role in the city

Second-to-none. Historically, Dublin has been associated with Nobel laureates William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, to say nothing of Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce, as well as Seamus Heaney, another Nobel Prize winner.

Hosting literary events and festivals which promote domestic and foreign literature

They do quite a good job with this. The Abbey Theatre was co-founded by W.B. Yeats in 1904 and has been going strong since then. Orson Welles started his career at the Gate Theatre in 1931. There's also the Gaiety Theatre, founded in 1871. I've seen plays at all three of these.

There's also Bloomsday, which celebrates the day that Ulysses takes place (June 16th). A few days beforehand I visited the starting point of the book, Joyce Martello tower, which inspired Joyce to write it (if "inspired" is the right word :-).

Existence of libraries, bookstores and public or private cultural centres which preserve, promote and disseminate domestic and foreign literature

Trinity College Library, home to the Book of Kells, is quite nice, as is the National Library of Ireland. Most local libraries and the DCU library are very underwhelming, however.

Hodges Figgis is one of the best bookstores I've

ever seen. Also around Dawson Street are several other very cool specialist bookshops.

The Chester Beatty Library is a very impressive private collection of Renaissance, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian works of literature and art. I was able to spend about 1.5 hours there, and only saw a fraction of the exhibits.

Involvement by the publishing sector in translating literary works from diverse national languages and foreign literature

Again, An Gúm and related publishers do a pretty good job translating notable works to Irish.

Active involvement of traditional and new media in promoting literature and strengthening the market for literary products

Raidió na Gaeltachta and Teilifís na Gaeilge do an honorable job at promoting Irish language, music, art, and culture.

So, in spite of a few weak spots, Dublin does live up to being a City of Literature.

As for Iowa City, I'll let you be the judge of that!

Gorilla Warfare [sic]

And now for something completely different...

Did you know that you can have a service monkey on a plane? The catch is that "The inspection process may require that the handler to take off the monkey’s diaper as part of the visual inspection." So just don't laugh at the monkey.

Also, from the "Now I've seen everything" file: A Chinese-government-owned news agency is reporting that the Taliban is training monkeys to fight against U.S. soldiers.

I eagerly await your best pun to either story in the comments section. A box of animal crackers goes to the winner (I haven't forgotten about you, Equinox).

Some random pics

Here are a few random pics. I have another batch almost ready. Click on the pics to see the full size.


Even though internationally Ireland is commonly associated with clovers, within the country the Irish harp is the de facto national symbol. They even built a bridge here with that in mind:


A tribute to those who suffered through the great famine:
Including the dogs

And finally...

Very confusing place ;-)

Happy St. Paddy's Day

Happy belated St. Patrick's Day. Here are some pictures and videos from the real deal. Sorry for the large size of the files.

Here's the very beginning of the parade. I was standing on a side street, to get a better view. The main thoroughfare was pretty crowded.

The parade started out fine until a horse decided to add some excitement to the mix.

This made the rest of the parade smell pretty bad where I was standing.

Here's some dude pretending to be a 'cool' St. Patrick I suppose.


They had some weird entries in the parade.


The Austrians had an entry:


As did an India group:

Some Spaniards playing bagpipe:

There was a lot of other really weird new-age crap, along with a few really cool entries. Strangely there were three bagpipe entries but no Uilleann pipes. Maybe they're harder to play while walking.
A few giant mechanical bugs:

Afterwards I headed to Henry street, a main pedestrian shopping area for Dubs. The street below was completely packed from where I was to the tall spire at the end of the street:


I eventually made my way to O'Donoghue's, a pub well-known for their Irish music.

After the blurry start, you can clearly see Uncle E.'s doppelgänger.

While I did get a Guinness glass, no Guinness was in it ;-)

Algebra in Wonderland

Here's another installment of Linus' irregular series on interesting articles. I saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland recently, and overall I thought the 3D graphics were great and the rest of it fine. I should warn you if you haven't seen it that there is some awful popping to hip-hop music in the film.

I came across an interesting discussion of the books, in light of Carroll's (=Dodgson's) mathematical experiences upon writing them.

Here's an excerpt:

The Mad Hatter and the March Hare champion the mathematics of William Rowan Hamilton, one of the great innovators in Victorian algebra. Hamilton decided that manipulations of numbers like adding and subtracting should be thought of as steps in what he called “pure time.” This was a Kantian notion that had more to do with sequence than with real time, and it seems to have captivated Dodgson [=Carroll]. In the title of Chapter 7, “A Mad Tea-Party,” we should read tea-party as t-party, with t being the mathematical symbol for time.

Dodgson has the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse stuck going round and round the tea table to reflect the way in which Hamilton used what he called quaternions — a number system based on four terms. In the 1860s, quaternions were hailed as the last great step in calculating motion. Even Dodgson may have considered them an ingenious tool for advanced mathematicians, though he would have thought them maddeningly confusing for the likes of Alice (and perhaps for many of his math students).

At the mad tea party, time is the absent fourth presence at the table. The Hatter tells Alice that he quarreled with Time last March, and now “he won’t do a thing I ask.” So the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse (the third “term”) are forced to rotate forever in a plane around the tea table.

As with any critical analysis, the author's ideas are debatable, of course. Your thoughts are welcome.
Here's a longer version of the same article, for the interested reader.

Conan vs. Jay: What's the Solution?