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Three Swimming Elk: Telling Lessons in Swedish

I’ve been slogging my way through a Swedish course on Duolingo. I don’t know whether the French course, say, uses the same examples. But I suspect not. The nature questions are heavy on Swedish flora and fauna – pines and spruce, wolves and elk. The supernatural ones are lousy with trolls and gnomes. Vi såg tre simmande älgar (“we saw three swimming elk”). Ett fullt troll tittade in genom…

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#Duolingo #Swedish

Serenity When? Serenity Now?

I started writing this post ten days before the US election. The premise was that it’s massively unproductive to worry about things we have no control over: football results, Brexit, that US election I mentioned. … worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due… – Ian Fleming, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” The aim was to quit the “read the entire internet” impulse that…

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#Brexit #disengagement #election #football #referendum #serenity

Google Translate and Plato

So you’ve seen this news [New Scientist/Wired], right? That the Google Translate AI has supposedly invented a new internal language to help it translate language pairs it hasn’t learnt. Having been taught English Japanese and English Korean, it can then do the job for Japanese Korean. The headlines position this as the AI inventing its own internal language, or interlingua, to handle those…

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#AI #Google #Google Translate #New Scientist #Plato #Skynet #technology #Wired

Why Am I Reading Bond?

Why Am I Reading Bond? [blog]

Not ‘why (you should) read Bond’, but ‘why (on earth) am I reading Bond’? They’re as dated as you might expect. Bond is a terrible spy, mainly achieving his goals by stumbling into coincidences or being invited to work for the villain (at least once once in an admin role, of all things). Dei ex machina all over the place. The sexism and racism are indefensible, a product of another age maybe, but…

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#British #cover art #covers #English #Ian Fleming #James Bond #Saul Bass #thrillers #typography

The New Parent's Terrible Powers of Invention

The New Parent’s Terrible Powers of Invention

“Give me strength…” Our child is 18 months now, and making small but significant inroads into bilingualism. It’s been painfully obvious that her speech will be influenced by the shortcomings of our own, ever since she said her first English word, “yeahyeahyeah”. She already had a few Swedish words under her belt by then, but any pride I felt at her first English utterance was swiftly overwhelmed…

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2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Every few years I’ll think that I don’t read enough science fiction, and that I should dive into some hard SF opus or other, have my mind expanded by all the intergalactic worldgalaxy-building, quantum-powered futurology, and whatnot. My effort for 2016 was 2012’s 2312. And boy was it an effort. This well-reviewed, Nebula-award winning novel from Kim Stanley Robinson is stuffed with plausible…

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#2312 #Kim Stanley Robinson #sci-fi

The Surmountable To-Read List

[blog] The Surmountable To-Read List

Nearly all read. How many books do you have lying around, waiting patiently to be read? Those once-exciting, -intriguing, or at least -mildly interesting titles that for a brief moment in time, convinced you that you had to own (and then read) them. I like to think I’m reasonably conscientious about clearing my backlog, but over the years there are plenty of books that have fallen through the…

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#Don DeLillo #Edward St Aubyn #Gillian Flynn #Haruki Murakami #Ian Fleming #James Joyce #Jon Ronson #Jonathan Franzen #lists #Naomi Klein #Seamus Heaney #second-hand #Sheila Heti #to-read #VS Naipaul

42+1 Songs and Answer Songs

Here’s a playlist of 42+1 songs and their notable answer song counterparts. A few knock-offs, a couple of pastiches, and a bunch of well-crafted tunes that take a more considered and artistic approach to their inspiration. Spotify web / Spotify app Answer songs, or response songs. A phenomenon that’s surely always been with us, but which in pop terms reached a peak in the quick-fix,…

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#answer songs #blues #creativity #folk #funk #hip-hop #indie #playlist #pop #r&b #reggae #response songs #rock #Spotify

The 33⅓ Greatest Covers Of All Time

Presenting a labour of love – a mini-labour, or labourette if you will – a duet of Spotify playlists: The 33⅓ Greatest Covers Of All Time (Spotify link) The 33⅓ Greatest Originals Of All Time (Spotify link) After stumbling across Ron Sexsmith’s I Don’t Like Mondays, I started to keep a playlist of great covers. Also, Tears for Fears doing My Girls – OK, so I initially thought that it was Animal…

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