Posts by Gordon Guthrie

Vote now for the ultimate 'nom de sex'

Of course all geeks know...

That the only acceptable winner is:

Ada Lovelace

Mars: more evidence of a watery past

Bash-a-yank

Sorry old son, but tonne is a metric measurement meaning a thousand kilos but ton is the old imperial version. As it happens if you are using tons as a generic adjective meaning big you use the imperial ton, not the metric one...

How Google translates without understanding

Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

...the above sentence being Chomsky's famous demolition of Skinnerian theories of language aquisition - Google being Skinner in this instance.

Chomsky demonstrated that humans understand grammer and not positional statistical correlation between words by writing a scentence consisting of pairs of words all of which had a zero correlation in the extant engish corpus:

colourless - green

green - ideas

ideas - sleep

sleep - furiously

Native English speakers comprehend this as syntaxtically correct - albeit semantically nonsensical.

You cannot write a Skinnerian translator!