-ine: Do You See Yonder Cloud...

The English language is rich in adjectives, and some of the most descriptive are those that compare an object (or its attribute) to an animal. I was surprised to see nobody has tried to catalog these terms (or at least not in a way Google can find). So here are the ones that occurred to me:

aquiline (eagle)
bovine (ox or cow)
canine (dog)
caprine (goat)
equine (horse)
feline (cat)
lupine (wolf)
ovine (sheep)
piscine (fish)
porcine (pig)
ursine (bear)

There are surely numerous other animals that have entered the descriptive pantheon (rats, anybody?), but I don't know and can't find terms for them.

Dan Quayle's Secret Occupation

In Yahoo's translation service (formerly Alta Vista's Babel Fish), enter

tomate

and ask for translation from Portuguese to English. It responds with

tomatoe

Given that this problem does not occur when translating from, say, Spanish to English, it suggests that Babel Fish has a separate vocabulary for each pair of languages, rather than an intermediate semantic representation. This would also explain why the set of X-to-Y pairs is fixed.

Google Translate doesn't suffer from this problem. They allow a free choice of source and target languages. From what I can tell, the superior technology they employ to solve this translation problem is to avoid translating anything at all. (Seriously, whether it's their HTML parser or their core translation routine—I haven't invested time to investigate, and I suspect it's the former to blame—their “translator” routinely returns the input unchanged as output.)

Why Spam Will Improve English

As spam increasingly relies on misspellings, poor grammar, and poor punctuation to penetrate our defenses (one of today's message headers: “run don't walk to yuor broker” [sic]), the only email that will get through any longer will have to be perfect.

Resolving Unanticipated What, Again?

My homies Ducasse, Wuyts, Bergel and Nierstrasz have a paper at the upcoming (2007) OOPSLA entitled User-Changeable Visibility: Resolving Unanticipated Name Clashes in Traits. Their abstract, as listed on the OOPSLA Web site:

A trait is a unit of behaviour that can be composed with other traits and used by classes. Traits are an alternative to multiple inheritance. Conflict resolution of traits, while flexible, does not completely handle accidental method name conflicts: if a trait with method m is composed with another trait defining a different method m then resolving the conflict Mayo prove delicate or infeasible in certain cases. In this paper we present freezeable traits that provide an expressive composition mechanism to support unanticipated method composition conflicts. Our solution introduces private trait methods and lets the class composer change method visibility at composition time (from private to public and vice versa), something which is not possible in mainstream languages. Two class composers Mayo use different composition policies for the same traits. [...]

Thanks to Microsoft Word, perhaps? Or the Web-publishing software?

A Useful Neologism

Outsight. (It could've been more inventive, but it'll do.)

Being Flogged to in Multiple Tongues

Well, I never would have guessed, even five years ago, that my Web-based mail program would be showing me ads in...Hindi. But अब मैं हिंदी में advertisement पढ़ सकता हूँ. The first one? हवाई टिकेट, correlated with an article on India's reintroduction of Jumbo passports forwarded from the Deccan Herald. (Well, I hope all that came out right. My fonts are fscked.)

That Must be Why They're Called “Specialized”

I was looking at the Owner's Manual for my Specialized Decibel Helmet, and came across the following line amidst the usual swarm of disclaimers:

Failure to follow this warning could result in serious personal injury, death by strangulation, death.

Mothers by Convention

The Economist's article on Europe's population, June 16th 2007, has a table (page 30) labeled “Family variety”. The subtitle is “% of mothers who have completed their families by number of children”, and the table is as follows:

N	Russia	Sweden	Italy	Germany	France
0	8	14	15	26	14
1	30	16	25	25	20
2	44	40	42	30	32
3+	18	30	18	19	34

Word Equivalences

Here's a strange word equivalence proposal. I typed “scutwork” into my browser's search box, and Google responded with:

Did you mean: diynetwork

Gourmet Dinners? Oh, Fiddlesticks!

The routinely ridiculous New York Times has an article today, Dinner at the Foodies': Purslane and Anxiety, about performance anxiety that hosts feel when inviting guests over to dinner. It has the predictable New Yorkers making the predictable dash about the island (and beyond!) to keep from falling behind in the wars of culinary one-upmanship. It contains the following precious line from a history professor:

There is a specific cachet that only a fiddlehead fern can convey.

It is therefore with the greatest glee that I report that last night, we had a foodie friend over for dinner and the casual meal we tossed together at the last minute consisted primarily of...fiddlehead.

I feel so superior right now.