Tag: language

Meteor vs. Meteorite vs. Meteoroid

If you are not an astronaut  or some other kind of space geek, chances are you have no idea what’s the difference between meteor, meteorite and meteoroid.  If you are anything like, you probably use meteor and meteorite interchangeably.  Apparently, there is quite a specific difference.  Here is an easy to understand description from the Mental Floss:

Say you’re a bit of interplanetary dust or debris trucking through the vacuum of space, minding your own business. You’re not very big. Certainly not big enough to be called an asteroid. In fact, you might just be a speck of dust or even smaller. Congrats! You’re a meteoroid!

But say, for example, a bright blue planet suddenly gets in your way and sucks you in, and before you know it you’re streaking through an atmosphere so fast that you ablate (fancy way to say “vaporize”) and let off a bright streak of light. You are now officially a meteor.

Now, on the other hand, if you started out big enough, then enough of you will emerge from this furnace o’ friction to hit the ground in some farmer’s field, making you a meteorite.

myGengo – human translation service that scales

Via this GigaOm blog post I came across an interesting service – myGengo.  I’ve had plenty of projects that dealt with multi-lingual issues, and professional, punctual translations were always a pain in the process.  So it is nice to see a company that uses, in my opinion, a very correct approach to the problem.

Right now, the translation market has two main segments: a high-end market dominated by full-time in-house translators, and a low-end market dominated by Google Translate. myGengo’s service aims to occupy the space in between the two markets by offering “human translation services at scale.”

Essentially, myGengo is like an oDesk built specifically for translation services. myGengo has assembled a group of more than 3,000 translators worldwide who work on a freelance basis through myGengo’s own dedicated software program. myGengo serves clients directly, and also has an API to let other startups include myGengo’s translation services in their apps. myGengo says it is targeted at people and businesses who occasionally need high-quality, fast translation services, but aren’t in the market to hire an in-house translator for the job.

0.5 USD cents per word, 1 to 16 hours per page (depending on the complexity of the document), human translation with pre-tested personnel, API integration – it sounds almost like a dream.  Of course, for now they only support a dozen or so languages, but given that they just received a $5.25 million Series A funding, I expect the service to expand quite a bit in the nearest future.

How broken is broken?

The Register runs an article with the title “AES crypto broken by ‘groundbreaking’ attack“. Inside the said article they have the following quote:

This technique is a divide-and-conquer attack. To find an unknown key, they partition all the possible keys into a set of groups. This is possible because AES subkeys only have small differences between rounds. They can then perform a smaller search for the full key because they can reuse partial bits of the key in later phases of the computation.

It’s impressive work but there’s no better cipher to use than AES for now.

So, it’s broken, but not really broken? Is that confusing or what? If not, you are probably versed in the field of cryptography. For the rest of us, there is a very useful update at the bottom of the article, which clears up some confusion:

Vulture Central has been deluged with missives from outraged readers complaining about the use of the word “broken” in the headline. “Broken” in cryptography is the result of any attack that is faster than brute force. The biclique technique described here allows attackers to recover keys up to five times faster than brute-force. AES may not be completely broken, but it’s broken nonetheless.

Today I’ve learned something new.

Learn Chinese in 5 minutes

I’ve been looking for this for some time.  I only remembered “sum sing wong”, but I knew there were more.  Today, while on the corporate chat discussing what to order from Chinese for lunch, someone pasted the links to Part 1 and Part 2.  My favorite ones are below:

  • That’s not right : Sum Ting Wong
  • See me ASAP: Kum Hia Nao
  • I thought you were on a diet: Wai Yu Mun Ching
  • Our meeting is scheduled for next week: Wai Yu Kum Nao
  • Give me the money! : Pei Nau
  • Where’s the restroom: Ai Pe Nau
  • Your price is too high: Ai No Bai Dam Ting
  • I am not guilty: Wai Hang Mi
  • Having an early orgasm: Kum Tu Suun
  • Now I understand: Ai See Nau

Share yours in the comments!

P.S.: And if you want to continue along the same line but with pictures, make sure to check out Engrish.