Fishing program outtakes

From the Bill Dance fishing program. Some of these seem a bit contrived, but they're still good for a laugh.

Posted for Doug B., who needs a mental health break while at work...

Via.

Addendum: The embedded video seems to be having problems. There's a similar one here.

Ostracism

Source.

Google Search by Voice Learns Mandarin Chinese

Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Research Scientist

Google Search by Voice was released more than one year ago as a feature of Google Mobile App, our downloadable application for smartphones. Its performance has been improving consistently and it now understands not only US English, but also UK, Australian, and Indian-English accents. However, this is far from Google's goal to find information and make it easily accessible in any language.

So, almost one year ago a team of researchers and engineers at Google's offices in Bangalore, Beijing, Mountain View, and New York decided we had to fix this problem. Our next question was, which should be our first language to address beyond English? We could have chosen many languages. The decision wasn't easy, but once we looked carefully at demographics and internet populations the choice was clear--we decided to work on Mandarin.

Mandarin is a fascinating language. Over this year we have learned about the differences between traditional and simplified Chinese, tonal characteristics in Chinese, pinyin representations of Chinese characters, sandhi rules, the different accents and languages in China, unicode representations of Chinese character sets...the list goes on and on. It has been a fascinating journey. The conclusion of all this work is today's launch of Mandarin Voice Search, as a part of Google Mobile App for Nokia s60 phones. Google Mobile App places a Google search widget on your Nokia phone's home screen, allowing you to quickly search by voice or by typing.



This is a first version of Mandarin search by voice and it is rough around the edges. It might not work very well if you have a strong southern Chinese accent for example, but we will continue working to improve it. The more you use it, the more it will improve, so please use it and send us your comments. And stay tuned for more languages. We know a lot of people speak neither English nor Mandarin!

To try Mandarin search by voice, download the new version of Google Mobile App on your Nokia S60 phone by visiting m.google.com from your phone's browser.

The Bilbao Guggenheim spider

There are a seemingly endless number of pix of this sculpture on the web, but I like the way this photographer seems to have converted all the image to greyscale except for the child on the bike with the training wheels.

Photo credit: Dave Roberts

Pictures from Afghanistan

An Afghan girl stands on a hill at a cemetery... (Paula Bronstein /Getty Images)

...young Afghan day labourers Amin, 13 (R) and his brother Taza, 12 (L) make bricks on the outskirts of Kabul... (SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images)

[Three women] who fled from abusive family members, stand for a picture... (AP Photo/Farzana Wahidy)

An Afghan boy runs with balloons to join his friends in dusty alley in Kabul... (AP Photo/ Gemunu Amarasinghe)

Selections from a remarkable set of 43 photos at Boston.com's Big Picture. The one I most wanted to blog was #20, but out of deference to the sensibilities of some readers of this blog, I'll leave it "under the fold."

Stairway to heaven?

Photo source unknown. Location unknown.*

*Update: Bruno Castello recognized the location as Tianmen Cave ("Tianmen Dong") in China. The title of my post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but now I discover that "tianmen" translates to "gate to heaven."

Although described as a "cave," it is clearly a natural bridge*, which surprisingly formed within recorded historic time (known history for China stretches back an amazing distance - in this case to the "sixth year of the Wuyong Period of the Three Kingdoms" - the year 263) when the wall underneath the arch collapsed.

More history and some additional pix:

The Climbing Heaven Stairs has a total of 999 steps, the number 9 is again referring to the number of palaces in heaven.
From the way the stairs look, it would seem that there would be rest stops with the stairs flattening to let climbers rest, but this is actually an illusion. To my horror, there is no flat surface... little space for resting in the relentless climb up towards the hole. With the amount of people climbing up, you do not want to be in the way either. I would just try to catch my breath ever few minutes and continue in my march to the top...

For comparison, the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. has 897 steps. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis has 1076.

Hat tip to Bruno for making this post more interesting!

Correction: The USGS standards would call this a natural arch, not a natural bridge - the latter term used only when water carves the passageway.

Addendum:  Video of planes flying through the arch to celebrate the new millenium (thanks chorn74).

Lady survives for 60 years using iron lung

June Middleton is a Melbourne, Australia woman who in 1949 contracted poliomyelitis with a high enough residual deficit (quadriplegia) to require ventilatory support from an iron lung. The photo shows her with an abdomional cuirass, which would have allowed her a degree of daytime mobility, but she probably returned to the iron lung for sleep. More details at the Daily Mail.

I contracted polio just three years after this lady did, and I'm thankful that my orthopedic problems have been minor in comparison to what some people have endured. Kudos to this brave lady - and to her caregivers.