Furry Alphabet Q-Z

The toughest part, since no translateable animal starts with Q or X. Still not sure about the Q here...

A QUOKKA once told me: "Oh what a pity!

Maybe it's true that I'm not very pretty...

But I don't deserve this ridiculous name!"

Honestly people! Have you no shame?

-
A RHINO
That I know
Goes out for walks
And clears the sidewalk for several blocks.

I know
The rhino
likes this a great deal
But how do the other pedestrians feel?
-
The SPERM WHALE he lives in the sea
Though he is not a fish
Some people think that it's suspic-
ious, but it's fine by me:

Not everybody understands
How big he really is
Would we have any space on land
With that huge bulk of his?
-
The TAPIR's nose is hanging low
His dreams have been frustrated
He tried to be an elephant
But never really made it
-
The URCHIN told the porcupine
"A back with spines is mighty fine!
But do you know how long it took
For us to come up with this look?"
-
It's ages since I've seen a VIPER
Can't really say I miss them, either
-
The WILDHOG
He is rude and vicious
But he's also quite delicious
Even the most piggish kind
Have their good sides, you will find
-
I'm sure that in some respects
X is a fantastic letter
But there's no animal for X
So I made up the XETTER
-
What's not to love about the YAK?
It's fun to ride upon its back
If I was living in Tibet
I'd want to have one as a pet
-
A ZEBU won't know about blizzards of snow
About hail and ice and other such topics
Because even though he's only an ox
The zebu, my friends, is a child of the tropics

Love Theme from 'Gabriela'

Love Theme from 'Gabriela' [Tema de amor de Gabriela (Antonio Carlos Jobim)]

Won't you come nearer, beautiful lover [Chega mas perto...]
Won't you come nearer, my ray of sun
The house where I live is a desert of darkness
But when you're here it fills up with sun

My lips are thirsty, but they will be patient [Molha tua boca...]
Your lips to me are nourishing spring
But you are the centre of each celebration
And I'm just a clown who waits in the wings

House of shadow, life of seclusion [Casa de sombra...]
And only you can help put out this fire
Of pain and of sorrow, of bitter illusion
And so I long for you, filled with desire

Here's Ney Matogrosso singing it. I can't decide if this is frighteningly good or just plain frightening...

Innokentij Annenskij (and Cladistics!)

Here's a poem that I love. Probably the best poem about a guilty conscience that I know.

Copying out this poem, I noticed I was making some mistakes, mostly in punctuation, but also in words. I corrected the word mistakes - since I don't really want to misrepresent Annensky's poem. But on the other hand, this problem that appears when copying by hand is also very interesting in itself. I went to a talk Mark Collard gave about using cladistics in culture. Although he made some claims that I (as a non-expert, obviously) think were pretty dubious (e.g. that use of cladistic methods in linguistics is a new phenomenon - when Morris Swadesh's word lists were made in the 1940's). But perhaps we can talk about cladistics and the talk later. What I want to point out is that as almost an aside, he mentioned the use of cladistic methods (comparing for similarity by using a list of traits, comparing to an outgroup, defining derived and primitive traits) for ascertaining the treelike relationship between different copied versions of the same text, say a holy book copied and re-copied by monks. That way, you not only can hope to learn what the original text was like, but the variegated relationships between the copiers.

Can you do that, o copy and paste? (Actually, if you can look at which sites I visited, you can, but ignore that).

Anyway, enough of this crap. Here's the poem.

Старые эстонки

Если ночи тюремны и глухи,
Если сны паутинны и тонки,
Так и знай, что уж близко старухи
Из-под Ревеля близко эстонки.

Вот вошли, - приседают так строго,
Не уйти мне от долгого плена.
Их одежда темна и убога,
И в котомке у каждой полено.

Знаю, завтра от тягостной жути
Буду сам на себя непохожим...
Сколько раз я просил их: "Забудьте!..."
И читал их немое: "Не можем".

Как земля, эти лица не скажут
Что в сердцах похоронено веры.
Не глядят на меня - только вяжут
Свой чулок бесконечный и серый.

Но учтивы - столпились в сторонке...
Да не бойся: присядь на кровати...
Только тут не ошибка ль, эстонки?
Есть куда же меня виноватей.

Но пришли, так давайте калякать,
Не часы ж, не умеем мы тикать.
Может быть, вы хотели б поплакать?
Так, тихонько, неслышно, похныкать?

Иль от ветру глаза ваши пухлы,
Точно почки берез на могилах?
Вы молчите, печальные куклы,
Сыновей ваших... я ж не казнил их

Я напротив, я очень жалел их,
Прочитав в сердобольных газетах,
Про себя я молился за смелых,
И священник был в ярких глазетах.

Затрясли головами эстонки:
"Ты жалел их... На что ж твоя жалость,
Если пальцы руки твоей тонки,
И ни разу она не сжималась?

Спите крепко, палач с палачихой!
Улыбайтесь друг другу любовней!
Ты ж, ты нежный, ты кроткий, ты тихий,
В целом мире тебя нет виновней!

Добродетель... твою добродетель
Мы ослепли вязавши, а вяжем...
Ничего, вот накопится петель,
Мы словечко придумаем, скажем..."

Сон всегда откупался мне скупо,
И мои паутины так тонки...
Но как это печально и глупо
Неотвязные эти эстонки

(1906)

In My Life

Fall of 2004. That was the time where I used to stay evenings in cafes reading Nabokov. Actually, I only stayed in a cafe in the evening reading Nabokov once. I was reading Pnin, and was eating one of those deliciously cold lemon squares. I'm sure it wasn't something I did just on a whim either, I probably had to wait at the place for some reason. I'd say the dentist, but that's only cause my teeth hurt now. And besides that would cast an incurably unromantic pall over the whole thing. What I want to say is, isn't it wonderful? I only did the thing once, but now a whole era of my life is associated with being "the time where I'd do" such a thing. This little manoeuvre of extrapolation just saved me hundreds of dollars in melting lemon squares that I'd all remember as variations on the one lemon square. Hours spent in cafes, thinking of what to do next, feeling slightly awkward. And there's only so many times you can re-read Pnin.

It Had to Be You

It Had to Be You [Só tinha de ser com você (Antonio Carlos Jobim/Aloysio de Oliveira)]

And so you say [E só eu sei]
You feel loved
You feel saved
Don't you know
This is my
Love for you

And, darling it had to be you [E só tinha de ser...]
Or else it just wouldn't be true
Or else it would be more heartache
Or else it would be a mistake

And here's what nobody can see: [aquele que o gente...]
Love that has given to you
What you never could have before
Love that has given to you
What you never could have...

And, your love is as blue as the sea [E, você que e...]
Without you I'm blue as can be
But with you here I can feel
A joy and a peace so unreal

If only you could understand [Se ao menos podesse...]
I'm always alone without you
You're always alone without me
I'm always alone...

And here's Elis Regina singing it over a video of umm... something 70's ish going on, I guess. Well, Elis Regina is in the video, too.

Furry Alphabet H-P

More of translations of Zakhoder's Furry Alphabet

If you meet a HEDGEHOG, it is nice to say
"My my, isn't someone sharply dressed today!"
-
"It's hotter here than in a sauna!"
The walrus told the IGUANA
"Why it's so cold I thought I'd freeze!"
Said the iguana with a sneeze
-
The brains of a hare
The tact of a bear
A hyena's good looks
(including the hair)
The JACKAL's an animal beyond compare
The greatest that's ever been seen anywhere
-
Every KANGAROO will vouch
Nothing's better than a pouch
"Its advantage is apparent!"
Says the proud kanga-parent
"It's a lovely hiding spot!"
Says the happy kanga-tot.
-
The LION, as you are aware,
was once the king of beasts.
But these day monarchies are rare
and lion's reign has ceased

The lion wasn't a good king
and he abused his power
so I don't have much sympathy
if now he's feeling sour.
-
Us MONKEYS and you humans share
Ancestors (were you aware?)
Now we're in zoos and people stare
Dear kids: do you think this is fair?
-
In deepest night
It's quite a fright
To meet a great big OWL
But when it's light
They're just about
As scary as ... a towel??
-
The PEACOCK is pretty - I wont pretend
That I can't see what sets him apart
But all of his beauty begins at the end
And that's not the best place to staart

Don't throw out your ball mouse + An idea that will put us out of business?

Once upon a time (when I wasn't being paid for my job, and there may be a correlation), part of my job description was to look at arXiv and see if anything cool was up there. Although my weekly reports thereon were, frankly, incompetent, and would have led to a change of assignment even if our lab didn't start having actual work to do, it was really fun. So, I thought, why not continue doing this and relate what's on there to this blog (yes, I know I'm the only person who reads it, and sometimes not even. "кто ищет смысл..." as Гражданская Оборона says).

So, here are two cool things:

(I) One paper (Gintautas and Huebler) makes an angular motion data logger using a ball mouse with the ball taken out (the paper includes a link to code which converts the movement of the cursor on a screen to angular position data for measuring a pendulum). This is pretty cool, because it seems obvious once you're told that it can be done. Then again, I don't know that nobody came up with this before. Also, my mouse is all-optical.

(II) I have no idea how new this idea is either, but another paper (Hudson) proposes a DC Stark decelerator (for decelerating molecules to become ultra-cold). Stark decelerators work something like this: a molecule is going at some speed, but you turn on a spatially sinusoidal electric field so that some of its kinetic energy is transferred to electric potential energy. This happens because of the Stark effect - say the molecule is in a J-state whose potential increases with increasing electric field. Then, as it is going along, it experiences a stronger and stronger field, thus slowing it down. But just as the molecule is reaching the peak of the spatial sinewave, you flip the field, so now it's at the bottom, and the electric field is again increasing in the direction it is going. This way, your molecule is always travelling into a region of higher electric field, and so is gradually slows down, and all without having to have a really huge electric field.
Trouble is, normal Stark decelerators suck (okay, m'n oud-collegas Rick and Ruth zullen waarschijnlijk niet 't zelfde mening hebben), well I mean, they are inefficient, because they rely on switching electric fields at precisely the right time (ie, exactly when the molecule is in the middle of traversing a region of high field). The idea in this paper is what if, instead of switching the field, we switch the property of the molecule. Again, seems obvious once you're told, which is nice. Since the switching of molecular properties is done by laser-stimulating some transition, you can just have lasers set up perpendicular to the molecule at the spatial peaks of your electric field. Probably hard in practise, but easy in concept!