Doctor Okell's Wondrous Beer Translation

Sometimes the automated translation services produce something useful, and sometimes not. This is actually more of amusement value, so it fits nicely with Vappu celebrations. Reading the back label of my beer bottle, I noticed something a bit odd. E.g.: “Contains Malted Barley” is translated into Finnish as “Hillitä ohra maltalainen” (roughly: “moderating barley that lives in Malta”), “Best before: See bottle Neck” is “Parhaiten aiemmin: Hiippakunta pullottaa halailla” (roughly: “Used to be best: the diocese [sic!] bottles with cuddles”). The little text up right that you probably cannot read from the image says “Brewed in the Isle of Man”, which is translated following the same excellent logic as “Oluenpanija kotona The Isle of Man luona” (roughly: “The beer brewer is at home with The Isle of Man near/with”).

Hilarious — thank you very much, Dr Okell’s!

Dice music

Video clip for this Friday afternoon; what you can do with some domino pieces, lots of colourful dice, nice music and some stop-motion work?

bad Maku


bad Maku
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

This could be consired as a warning: this soda, “Maku” (‘taste’ in Finnish) tastes absolutely horrible. 🙂 There was a recent news story about poisonous chemicals being generated in diet sodas; I am sure “Maku” is particularly strong in benzene…

church bells

This is when you know you are having a slow day: I actually became interested in a HS/Yle story about rerecording of church bells. There is a radio ritual in Finland, started apparently in year 1944, to play the sound of Turku Lutheran Cathedral bells at 12 noon every day in main Radio 1 FM channel. There is something smoothing and relaxing in its slow, echoing sound. You can read a story of the bells and listen to the recordings in MP3 files from here (in Finnish only).

what is your dangerous idea, 2006?

Every year the Edge.org asks some scientists and thinkers to ponder on some big question, this year: What is your dangerous idea? The finished 119 contributions are now available, and this is actually an online book in speculative thinking, and very refreshing visit into into our reality from multiple angles.

demonic book, creative commons

Phhw. The 1999 book, Demonic Texts and Textual Demons is finally now online and available (thanks, Laura, once again for all the help!) Since the Tampere University Press edition did not finally reach that many readers outside narrow expert circles, I have now provided the text (not including the illustrations) online under the Creative Commons license. It was such a large part of my life for many years, after all. The url is here:

http://www.uta.fi/~tlilma/Demon_2005/

What do you think (about the book, the project, other issues)? – all comments are welcome. 🙂

too good to be…

Oh well – it was photoshopped, as you probably guessed…

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/vehicles/hello-kitty-ferrari-the-original-029909.php

toys for boys… no, wait…

Heh,

I just have to blog into this — at least one of my readers should be in the target group…

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/vehicles/hello-kitty-ferrari-029793.php

😉

hello world

Hello world! This blog is not meant as a very serious or active undertaking. Rather I see this as my semi-professional diary; and since I am notoriously bad keeper of diaries, we’ll see… 🙂 Anyways, it is good to be able to make and share notes with such a flexible and easy tool. And you are served by the links on the sidebar: DiGRA, Hypermedia Laboratory, Neogames and MindTrek are all communities that I am currently involved with.

[Edit; this was my first post into the original Blogger blog; sidebars and links have changed many times after that — like the associated circles of life, too.]