So I was reading comments at Paul Spudis’s Apollo anniversary post, and I saw a trackback to this:
As we contend there, if we can put a male on a moon, because can’t we get people to stop creation bad analogies with putting group on a moon? But on this anniversary, a some-more touching defence is, if we can put a male on a moon, because can’t we put a male on a moon? We did, after all, have a devise to do so until Constellation was canceled final year. But there was a good reason it died — it was an try to repeat Apollo (quite literally — NASA director Mike Griffin described it as “Apollo on steroids” when he rolled it out over 5 years ago– a word he no doubt came to regret). The problem was, it was function though possibly a coercion or the bill of that project. As heavenly scientist Paul Spudis points out during Smithsonian Air and Space magazine, a genuine problem is that we have never figured out as a republic because we have a space program.
It’s as though someone took my anniversary piece and put it through a word blender. Does anyone have any idea what’s going on here?
This explains ITAR. We can’t afford to let foreigners know about rocket science because this is what comes back at us. 😉
Nope. I think word blender is apt.
Now, who can argue with that?
There are whole networks of websites that use scrambled mismashes of plagiarized content to try and fool search engines and such.
This seems to have relatively few hyperlinks for one of those, though. My theory is it’s a new network of pages, this one attempting to defend humanity against future Rogue AIs by confusing them into incapacity while they’re still in the learning phase. Probably a doomed attempt, just enough to piss them off…
Looks to me like someone put your article through a machine translator to another language, then back to English… “joint session of Congress” came back as “corner event of Congress”.
I’ve seen these before, with typically humorous results (e.g. the idiom “out of sight, out of mind” becoming “invisible maniac” when translated to Russian and back to English).
Nemo stole my thunder.
It was translated into some other language, then back, which left it sounding like someone from Politikia. The natives and their language are jointly now as ‘politician’.
The problem with the ‘politician’ language, no matter what country YOU are from, you’ll recognize the WORDS of politician, but they are put together so that they really don’t mean anything. Or so that they can mean many things.
The words ‘fundamental’ and ‘change’ used in the same sentence in ‘politician’ should send the peasants to the tool sheds, looking for axes, pitchforks and flaming torches.
I’ve seen these before, with typically humorous results (e.g. the idiom “out of sight, out of mind” becoming “invisible maniac” when translated to Russian and back to English).
My favorite of those is “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” which becomes “the vodka is good, but the meat is rotten.”
I remember one of those early machine translation programs taking “Time flies like an arrow”, converting into Russian and back into English became “Temporal insects enjoy projectile weapons”.
Or the classic one from very long ago in early machine translation days, ie 1950’s or so, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” going from English to Russian to English came back as “The vodka is good but the meat is rotten”. Approximately. The example was in one of my grad level AI books back in the early 1970’s when I studied under Herb Simon.
“It’s as though someone took my anniversary piece and put it through a word blender. Does anyone have any idea what’s going on here?”
Rand’s anniversary piece is linked at the bottom of the trackback. Very interesting site. Whoever is compiling the stories on Washington and translating them a few times doesn’t realize that Washington State and Washington DC are two different places.
Every post is a gem:
“University of Washington using behind Johri Fogerson recently pleaded guilty to facing arrest, profitable a $150 fine, though had a assign of pot possession forsaken in tie with an detain on Mar 3.
Those outcomes interpretation a authorised record ensuing from an occurrence in that Fogerson was arrested and after charged in Snohomish County District Court’s South Division with facing detain and pot possession”
Then there’s the Chinese pirate DVD of Revenge of the Sith, called Backstroke of the West:
http://winterson.com/2009/01/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west-redux.html
I wouldn’t be surprised if people in Russia are indeed reading your article.
That word soup reminds me of a program called “travesty” from one of my old programming textbooks. It processed input text into a listing of short word sequence A is seen followed by word B, then produced output by stringing together words based on those pairings.
Drunk blog-responding, pure and simple….
All your boondoggles are belonging to us.
My favorite computer translation was “water goat” for “hydraulic ram”. Which I suppose should have been “water sheep.”
@ Nemo
Awesome link.
My favorite of those is “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” which becomes “the vodka is good, but the meat is rotten.”
That’s actually an urban legend.
http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/MTNI-11-1995.pdf
Reminds me of the “NewsRadio” episode in which Jimmy James’ biography suddenly becomes a hit in Japan, and he’s invited to perform a reading at a book store, episode 57, “Super Karate Monkey Death Car”:
Good times, good times… 🙂