New Year's Eve musings

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

Annoying LotR Article of the Day: Business Day, in the New York Times. The author was talking about New Zealand tourism industry capitalizing off of being the site for the filming of the LotR movie. It was all very fine and nice, or would have been if the author didn't keep using such phrases as "elfin forest" and "elfin powers". -_- Do you know the mile-wide difference between "elfin" and "elven"? The former brings to mind little garden pixies! And Tolkien did very adamantly insist on the "v" in "elves" and "dwarves". I was screaming and jumping up and down and generally throwing a fit. My parents stared and asked each other whether I was sane.

The answer of course is, no.

The article however redeems itself for mentioning that they're considering building a Lord of the Rings museum showcasing over 400,000 of the movie props currently warehoused in New Zealand. ::squeals (for once):: Aaah! I need to get a plane ticket!

My relatives called from Korea today, and Father and I made dumplings. It was a very good New Year's Eve, except for the fact that I still have to write my HUNS paper...

La-di-da...Further progress in Godel, Escher, Bach has proven delightful. There was this dialogue called "Ant Fugue", which compared anthills to brains in a rather charming way. The dialogue preceding this one was called "Prelude...". Makes you wonder at the cleverness of the author in finding an analogy to address a subject that also provides a pun like "Prelude...Ant Fugue". Oh, and in between there was this pun Lierre de Fourmi, a fictional anthill who discovered the converse, so to speak, of Fermat's Last Theorem. That n^a + n^b = n^c has an infinite number of solutions when n=2, but no solutions when n>2. This is of course a Diophantine equation, and Lierre de Fourmi supposedly discovered his Well-Tested Conjecture when reading Arithmetica by Di of Antus, mirroring the way Fermat thought up his theorem while reading Arithmetica by Diophantus. Even more clever that one can create such a pun on Diophantus' name to reflect all the other ant puns going around...Lierre de Fourmi by the way means "bridge of ants", which reflects an actual behavior of ants that illustrates Hofstadter's whole point about anthills. It was really amusing, to say the least.

...Tari

Consequences of procrastination

Ad Mundo Exteriore,

Oh, Minor Demi-Deity of Academic Research, overlook the fact that I am a monotheist and receive my most fervent thanks for letting me stumble across the English translations of the Luxembourg government's foreign policy statements tonight!

Okay, okay. I'm in my sixth year of French, not counting those I spent listening to Berlitz Jr. French tapes in the car before studying it in school. (It may not compare to kaydeefalls's mastery of the language, but I'm supposed to be somewhat competent.) I have a French dictionary, two French grammar books and three French textbooks/workbooks at home. Techically, I should be able to translate the Luxembourg government web site (which is entirely in French, despite claims to the contrary), but is this feasible? Do I really want to spend my time looking up every other word in a horribly official document probably written in French legalese? Or should I say "legalais"?

Yes, I can use Alta Vista or Google or whatever that search engine was that provided automatic translations of web pages. But I don't know how reliable those services are. What happens if the translator overlooks a ne pas somewhere, and I get something along the lines of: "Luxembourg supports state-sponsored terrorist groups"?

Anyway, much praise and thanksgiving to aforementioned Minor Demi-Deity. (Come to think of it, Minor Demi-Deity is sort of redundant. Oh well.)

...Tari