One day, translating will feel like rotation

There are some 6,800 unique languages in use today. Not every word translates perfectly, and meaning sometimes falls through the cracks. For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods. Different fields of science, too, […]

Actually, Gen X Did Sell Out, Invent All Things Millennial, and Cause Everything Else That’s Great and Awful – The New York Times

We did not get there by slacking. We just have our own way of enjoying life. “As for our notorious hustle-to-debt ratio, it speaks to a generational lifestyle ambition that often exceeds our career ambition,” Jason Tesauro (b. 1971), the food writer behind the Modern Gentleman series of advice books, wrote in an email. “I’ve published, accomplished, […]

Buggy system

Human cognition, when it is tasked with making a JUDGEMENT ABOUT X, has a bug where it reaches around blindly in the dark for any thing that makes sense and returns the very first thing it arrives at to the user — usually with an unreasonably high confidence flag that seems to be inversely proportional […]