Sign of the times

I finished my last final exam today (woo!!!), so now instead of staying up late studying, I get to stay up late sorting through all my junk and packing some of it in boxes with copious amounts of duct tape -- aka 'packing'. I'm moving to a new dorm on the other side of campus next year, and I'm heading back home to California on Saturday, so I have to hurry up and get all my stuff boxed and hauled across campus before then.

Just now, I was making safety sheaths for a set of cooking knives I bought and never used (because they're mediocre quality, and I just used my pocket knife for everything anyway). Take several sheets of paper, wrap around, duct tape, fold the end over, duct tape again, et voila. It works surprisingly well. For day-to-day storage, these sheaths work fine as is; for longer-term storage, duct tape the knife handles to the sheaths so they don't slip out.

Clearly, though, it is a sign of the times, of the era of online publishing, that I used printouts of PNAS papers to do this. It's the rare, rare paper that I'll print out to read, what with PDFs and having an institutional subscription to everything. Anymore, the only papers I print are ones that I need to read and reread in quite a bit of detail -- say, if I've got to write an essay that addresses the content of that paper specifically. (Intro Psych, I'm looking at you!)

Yes, kids, science saves lives! It keeps you safe! Were it not for science, how would I keep myself from being slashed up by kitchen knives??

Stir-fried wikipedia, anyone?

The highly estimable Language Log points out yet another instance of Chinese menu translator ingenuity. Wikipedia: now with even more uses!

For more on this phenomenon, see Engrish.com (marginally NSFW), which is devoted to collecting this sort of unintentionally hilarious bad English, mostly from Japan. Aside from just giggling at the bad translations, it's interesting to occasionally catch a nugget of linguistic insight. Well, I mean, the fine folks at Language Log can catch them all the time, but I'm an amateur, so I have to take what I can get.

A while ago, Engrish.com featured a shirt (which I unfortunately can't seem to find now), bearing the sentence "We are dumb and haven't intelligence apes." And I jumped out of my seat, because it made perfect sense to me. In English, that sentence means "we are dumb and do not possess apes of intelligence." Presumably the shirt-writers meant "we are apes who are dumb and do not possess intelligence." (Perhaps dumb here means mute rather than unintelligent -- a relatively subtle distinction, but I've seen Japanese<==>English dictionaries that do very well at this. Or, y'know, maybe it's just redundant.)

What English handles as a relative clause, "apes who do not possess intelligence", Japanese handles by effectively turning the verb "not possess intelligence" into an adjective. To say "we are apes who are dumb and do not possess intelligence" in Japanese, you say something along the lines of "we are dumb and non-intelligence-possessing apes", which is clearly the origin of the T-shirt.

Of course, there's also the complete nonsense, e.g. "I smell the smelly smell of something that smells smell", and the grammatically-correct-but-thematically-inappropriate text, a la this classic example.

[Links Dump] Braille and lolpostmodernism

Alpha Phi Omega goes to the Braille Press, sticking transparent braille-letter stickers on children's books so that sighted and blind can read together. What a simple, elegant, and effective method!
(I've harbored dreams of becoming a Braille transcriber, but that takes a lot of practice and training, and the Braille Press volunteer work is something anyone can do right away.)
(Also, yes, I am planning to pledge APO next semester, which is now very soon. It's kind of a stupid story why I didn't pledge this semester.)

Meanwhile, Jeph, author of the fabulous webcomic Questionable Content, offers up a great selection of postmodern cat macros and other-noun macros.