Here is a belated picture of yesterday’s solar eclipse, taken by my friend David in New York City:
His equipment is (semi-)professional but the solar filter that he used wasn’t. Still, it is a heck of a lot better than anything I was able to see (or project with a makeshift pinhole camera). I suggested to him to obtain a quality solar filter by 2024. Who knows, we may meet in Watertown to watch totality.
Machine translation still leaves a lot to be desired.
I was watching a cute YouTube video this morning, about a tiny kitten kept warm by a chicken.
The title of the video was in Spanish. My Spanish being nonexistent (in fact, at first I thought the title was in Italian) I used Google Translate. When I used Google Translate most recently, I was tranlating something into Hungarian, so that was the default target language. And Google dutifully translated the sentence, “gallina cuida gatito del frió”, into “Sült csirke cica-ellátás”.
Which means, literally, “Fried chicken kitty-supply”.
Not sure how Google managed to produce this gem of a translation. It offers a reasonably decent English translation: “Hen cares cold kitty”. But the French (“soins chaton de poulet frit” – “kitten care by fried chicken”) and German (“gebratenes Huhn Kätzchen Pflege” – “fried chicken kitten care”) versions are just as atrocious. And the Russian version? “Fried Chicken уход за котенком”… Google didn’t even deign to translate the “Fried Chicken” part (but where did it come from in the first place, when I am translating from Spanish to Russian?) although the rest of the translation (“care for the kitten”) is acceptable.
As I said… machine translation still leaves a lot to be desired.
Here is the kind of news you do not usually expect to see as the lead item of the noon newscast on a local channel in a G7 capital:
I’ve seen stray cats, stray dogs, maybe even stray ferrets… but a stray bull?
I hope it finds its way home soon.