Lost in Translation

If you go here: http://tashian.com/multibabel/  and type in any sentence, it will be translated back and forth between a bunch of different languages. The results are...special:

Original English Text:

I really should be doing homework right now instead of playing with silly internet translation games.

Translated to Chinese:
我应该确实现在做分配虚度光阴与愚蠢互联网转换比赛的变动。

Translated back to English:
I should truly now make the allocation to waste time convert the change of competition with the stupid Internet.

Translated to German:
Ich sollte zur Zulage die Änderung wirklich jetzt machen dem Bekehrten der Rückweisung der Zeit vom Wettbewerb mit dem dummen Internet.

Translated back to English:I should really now make the extra pay the modification for the converted one of the rejection of the time of the competition with the stupid Internet.

Translated to Spanish:
Ahora tendría traer realmente al salario adicional la modificación para aquélla convertida de la denegación del período de la competencia con el Internet opaco.

Translated back to English:
Now it would have to really bring to the additional wage the modification for that one turned of the refusal of the period of the competition with the opaque Internet.

Ancient Alphabet Soup #1

Today's Ancient Alphabet Soup flavour is Cypriot! This particular script originated in Ancient Greece, on the island of Cyprus. It is probably derived from Linear A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A). The alphabet consists of syllabograms and vowels:

Text-based adventures!

Have you ever wanted to create your own text-based adventure game? I recently wrote my own in Python. It's quite primitive. The player can't do much besides collect coins and then buy a useless text dragon, at which point they win the game. I highly recommend Python if you're just starting to learn programming - it's fun and easy! (At first. Then it gets very, very hard. And painful.)

If you want to experiment with a programming language that's dedicated to the creation of text adventures, try Inform. (It's completely free!) From their website: "Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics." Inform's code is written in plain English. It actually parses sentences, so you could write: "The room is in the basement. The room is dark," and Inform will create an object called ' Basement room' with an attribute of being dark. There's a great tutorial on how to create your own game here: http://brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html

The Language Construction Kit

"This set of webpages (what's a set of webpages? a webchapter?) is intended for anyone who wants to create artificial languages— for a fantasy or an alien world, as a hobby, as an interlanguage. It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languages— which can be reversed to create non-naturalistic languages. It suggests further reading for those who want to know more, and shortcuts for those who want to know less.
—Mark Rosenfelder"

Explore the kit here: http://zompist.com/kit.html

Starting the year with a little philosophy...

Where does the meaning of a word come from? Plato believed all things derive their meaning from a metaphysical realm of perfect forms and ideas. Diogenes, a cynic who lived in a barrel, refutes him quite well:

"Plato was discoursing on his theory of ideas and, pointing to the cups on the table before him, said while there are many cups in the world, there is only one `idea' of a cup, and this cupness precedes the existence of all particular cups.
"I can see the cup on the table," interupted Diogenes, "but I can't see the `cupness'".
"That's because you have the eyes to see the cup," said Plato, "but", tapping his head with his forefinger, "you don't have the intellect with which to comprehend `cupness'."
Diogenes walked up to the table, examined a cup and, looking inside, asked, "Is it empty?"
Plato nodded.
"Where is the `emptiness' which precedes this empty cup?" asked Diogenes.
Plato allowed himself a few moments to collect his thoughts, but Diogenes reached over and, tapping Plato's head with his finger, said "I think you will find here is the `emptiness'."