The English Language Sucks - Part 1

For those of you who don't know me, I grew up in America, but often times I spoke German with family when I went to visit relatives overseas at a very young age. Growing up speaking two languages, I now speak them both fluently and without an accent. It's a great ability to have, and I encourage teaching children at young ages like 5-6 to start learning a 2nd language. I'm lucky to have had this chance, my two younger sisters weren't exposed to the foreign language as much, and neither of them is fluent in German now, even after both having taken 3 years of high school classes.

Anyway, these circumstances have really raised my awareness to many of the nuances in the English language. German has some nuances too, but not nearly as many, and almost no spelling nuances. Many of the spelling irregularities in German are from the modern English words like Computer, Downloaded, or Internet. English has this same problem with French words from the time when France occupied Britain centuries ago. So it would seem that modern English is going to slightly degrade the quality of German spelling syntax in the same way that French has degraded English (depot, restaurant, garage, buffet, etc.)

To start off my rant, my friend Chris just pointed out that in English we "take" things. We take "showers", "pisses", "breaks", "rides in cars", "a nap", "for granted", "a shit", "it easy", etc. In German we "make" things. Like "mach's gut" which directly translates to "make it good" which is basically means "take it easy." Waddya know, Americans take things and Germans make things...Germany was the number one world exporter a few years back (2008?) while America has been the number one importer for as long as I can remember. Is there a correlation here??

Maybe someday we'll construct a new language that becomes widely accepted and takes all the best qualities of every language and combines them together. I believe this was attempted before with Lojban, but it failed. I will need to read more about it.

I will be posting many more of these discoveries as time goes on, so stay tuned!

-MasterHD

AI on Jeopardy

I don't know of you have been in the loop with this, but just today I was over at my parent's house and they had Jeopardy playing on TV as usual, except this time I heard some strange computer generated voice coming from the TV. When I looked over I saw a large black box sitting between the other 2 human contestants. Not only did I immediately recognize what was going on, but my eyes glued to the TV in astonishment wondering why I'd not been told about this by anyone! Today was day 3 of this competition. The AI named Watson, built by IBM, was playing against the top human players to ever have dominated in Jeopardy, each winning a few million dollars.

Watch "him" dominate the humans on day 2 here (youtube links):
Part 1
Part 2

This is a HUGE step up from the AI defeating the chess players decades ago. I can just see the uneasiness of the humans as they think about smashing the computer to pieces. "Take that! Bet you wish you had arms huh?!" I get a very uneasy feeling about it too. What if the AI becomes so "smart" that we can just ask it anything? It's definitely passed the Turing Test on this one. It reminds me of the electronic Hitchhiker's Guide. This single computer could contain all of the history of our race and readily spew out the info for any future purposes or archiving! Projecting the possibilities into the future of AI, would mankind then lose its ability to think for itself? I'm talking about a computer like MultiVAX, in the story that Isaac Asimov wrote half a century ago. Read it if you haven't, because **its about to get real.

One day soon we'll see this technology employed in our internet search engines!
What is the AI's prize? Humiliating mankind? Or something scarier...

Scary...

Edit: Also Jon Stewart has something to say about this whole ordeal

Welcome

So this is my first post, I've been wanting to try out an online blog for years now. I'm not sure how often I'll be posting here but we'll see how it goes. Check out my website too!
Expect to see lots of discussions about philosophy/politics/religion/science/etc. those are the things of most interest to me.

I'm annoyed that someone else has already taken my internet alias "MasterHD" but I'll live with it.