Language Log

Their legions grow with each passing day.  This post is about what they are called in Chinese (see below).

The Chinese people were fascinated with Trump even before he was sworn in as POTUS:

"Year of the cock" (1/4/17)

See also the references in the second half of the third post cited below.

Now that Trump has been President for more than four months, he is all the more popular among certain segments of the Chinese population.  Even top politicians who are jockeying for power at the 19th Party Congress to be held this fall are modeling themselves after Trump:

"China’s Leadership Reshuffle 2017: Rising Stars; How China’s regional chiefs use Trump tactic in race for top" (Choi Chi-yuk, SCMP, 6/3/17)

One mentioned Communist Party chief Xi Jinping’s name 26 times in a speech, another mentioned poverty 90 times

The covfefe fun continues.

My personal favorite is the covfefe recipe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfIKEuUhpm8

And then there's  Riane Konc, "Covfefe…For Her", The New Yorker 6/1/2017:

Covfefe is for the flat-earthers. For the woman who doesn’t just believe what she’s told. We salute you, freethinker. We see you on the basketball court, trying to dribble a Frisbee. You’re a Covfefe woman.

If you've got a spare hour or two, check out #covfefe on Twitter. Or just read a news summary or ten.

Some say the administration will end in ICE, some say in FOIA/from what I know of corporate lawyas, I hold with those who favor FOIA….

— Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) May 26, 2017

Mythili Sampathkumar, "Donald Trump and Mike Pence approval ratings hit new low in latest Fox News poll", The Independent 5/26/2017:

Voters polled were also asked “do you think America’s best days are ahead of us or behind us?” A majority – 62 per cent – said yes, they are.

[h/t Michael Glazer]

If you haven't done so already, read Andrej Karpathy, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks". And then Janelle Shane, "New paint colors invented by neural network".

[This is a guest post by the inimitable satirist, S. Tsow]

[1.0 is this: "BARF (Belt and Road Forum)" (5/19/17)]

In May of 1859, Charles Sanders Peirce was 19 years old, and graduating from Harvard College. Graduates were invited to describe their life for the "Class-Book" — and what Peirce wrote in response stands as the first entry in Volume 1 of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition:

I must admit to having enjoyed the series of savage similes about quality of computer program code presented in three xkcd comic strips. They show a female character, known to aficionados as Ponytail, reluctantly agreeing to take a critical look at some code that the male character Cueball has written. Almost at first sight, she begins to describe it using utterly brutal similes. In the first strip (at http://xkcd.com/1513) she announces that reading it is "like being in a house built by a child using nothing but a hatchet and a picture of a house." But Ponytail is not done: there is more bile and contempt where that came from.

My wife and I used to have a private language that was full of bilingual, cryptic references such as the following:

Yáo Shùn Yǔ 尧舜禹 (the names of three ancient, wise, Chinese rulers) || sānmíngzhì 三明治 ("three wise rulers"), the Chinese transcription of English "sandwich".

Thus, if we wished to ask each other, "Do you want to eat a sandwich?", we might say "Nǐ yào bùyào chī yī ge Yáo Shùn Yǔ? 你要不要吃一个尧舜禹?".  That sort of word play was usually just for fun or to avoid a word that was transcribed into Mandarin from some other language.

…when neural nets are recursive:

Because I like the Chinese term tǔ 土 ("earth; soil; dirt; ground; earthy; rustic; colloquial") so much, I was going to add the substance of the remarks below as a comment to the "Fun bun pun" (4/9/17) post, in which we devoted a lot of attention to one of my favorite expressions, "tǔbāozi 土包子" ("earthy steamed stuffed bun", i.e., "country bumpkin, hick, rube, clodhopper, backwoodsman, boor, dolt, yokel").  But the ramifications grew to such large proportions that they merited their own post.

Recently this video, or a link to it, has been showing up on just about every web page I visit: