Happy International Translation Day!

As ever, using Fête St-Jerôme as an excuse to post an Eddie Izzard bootleg*




*(Dear Eddie: Massive, massive respect for your ever-increasing awesomeness and I'mma let you finish, but if you'd bring your tour to Canada we wouldn't need all these bootlegs.)

Teach me eBay etiquette

I emailed an ebay seller asking how much shipping to Canada would cost. Seller quotes an amount, I bid accordingly and win. Then I get a standard "YAY, you won!" email from the seller quoting a shipping price that's 20% higher.

The item ended up selling for close to my upper bid, so this 20% higher shipping price is enough to tip it from "cheaper than retail" to "more expensive than retail."

I already sent the seller a polite email asking WTF, but if they won't lower the shipping price back to their originally quoted amount, is there any way I can cancel the transaction without incurring any sort of penalty? I don't even particularly want the seller to get any penalty, I just don't want to buy the thing if shipping is 20% higher.

Update: Seller corrected it with no drama, all is good.

How to teach financial literacy in high school without changing the curriculum

A recurring theme during this recession is that they should teach financial literacy in high school. Of course, adding mandatory courses isn't that simple. There's only room for so many courses over the four years, there are all kinds of other courses that people want to be made mandatory, and there still has to be room for people to take electives like French and Physics and History all the way through to Grade 12.

So here's what we do: make every single word problem in the textbooks about a financial literacy concept, whenever mathematically possible.

For example, one thing I learned in one of my high school math classes was the formula for compound interest. M = P(1 + i)^n. I still use it to this day when trying to plan my personal finances. However, every word problem we had on this concept was about earning interest on investments. They could quite easily have made some of the word problems about credit card interest. Same mathematical concept, same word problem, but now you've taught how credit card interest works, which is one of the concepts people are complaining that they don't teach in high school.

Apparently calculus is used in economics similarly to how it's used in physics. I don't know enough about economics to know how this works. (And I find it SO WEIRD that so artificial a concept as economics would follow the mathematical laws of the physical universe.) But they could have taught this quite easily with a sentence or two about how calculus is used in economics, followed by some economics-based word problems. Then everyone who takes calculus will know a bit about economics. They did that with physics - I learned about derivatives and velocity and acceleration in Calculus class before I even took the relevant Physics class - so it shouldn't be any harder to do it with economics.

As an added bonus, it will make mathematics seem more relevant to students, because everyone knows you have to do money stuff when you're a grownup.

It will take some rewriting of textbooks, but that's more painless and possibly faster than rewriting the curriculum.

Real-life Things They Should Invent

Voting for Project 10 to the 100 is finally open! You can vote here!

I'm trying to decide which one to vote for. Obviously my first thought is either the one that will give the most help to the most people, or the one that would be most beneficial to me personally. But then I started wondering whether I should also be thinking about feasibility? Which of these projects can actually be achieved (or have significant progress be made) with $2 million? Which of these projects could Google actually make happen (as opposed to being dependent on external factors)? So I'm going to have to give it more thought before I vote.

You should go check out the finalists and vote too!

I had a long, difficult day of translation today

But not nearly as difficult as this guy.

This is why I hope to be able to stick to written translation for my entire career.

Only one person stopped to help

Sometimes in the Star's Acts of Kindness and other good deed stories, you there are stories where someone's in trouble and only one person stopped to help, everyone else just walked by, pretending they didn't see it.

Today I saw a lady fall down, and another lady immediately stopped to help. I didn't see any further need for help (fallen-down lady was getting up, no apparent injuries, they didn't need more people to pick up her personal effects) so I didn't linger and, to protect fallen-down lady's dignity and privacy, did my very best not to stare.

What would they have me do instead? I certainly wouldn't want a whole crowd gathering if I were the one who fell down.

The choreography of spare change

I was walking down the street, wearing a skirt and blouse (no jacket) and carrying a large purse with my raincoat draped over it. Some guy stops me (yes, actually stops me, as though he was going to ask for directions) and asks for spare change.

If I were to give him spare change, I would have to take my raincoat off my purse and shift it to the other arm, open my purse, dig out my wallet, open the change section of my wallet, and decide which change to give him.

I wonder if he seriously thought I was going to do all that?

I wonder if panhandlers ever get money - like at all ever - from people who don't have pockets with change in them?

Things They Should Invent: medical symptom word bank (for patients)

When trying to explain the value of using target language native speaker translators, or of having translation services available even to people who can function on an everyday basis in the target language, I often ask people to think of the last time they experienced medical symptoms that confused or frightened them - didn't know WTF was going on, couldn't google up a cause - and then describe these symptoms in a language other than their mother tongue. Try it, I'll wait. See? You lose nuance and feel less in control of what you're saying, and this is exacerbated when you're confused or frightened or in pain.

One of my favourite reference tools from back in the days when I did more medical translation is this sort of a cheat sheet for student clinicians in psychology. It's like a massive multiple choice test of all the things they need to be diagnosing, listing each factor/indicator, and then the adjectives that can be used to describe that factor/indicator. So mood can be euthymic, affect can be labile, etc. I did rather extensive research when I first started doing this so I am familiar with the concepts, but the vocabulary isn't always right on the tip of my tongue. I read the source text, I grok exactly what they're saying, I know there's a nice psychy word for it, but it isn't coming to me. I do have the tools and skills to look up each term individually, but it's much faster and easier to just scan my cheat sheet and suddenly "Echolalia! That's it!"

I'm thinking a similar tool could be very useful to patients whose first language isn't English (or even to children who don't know what kind of answers the doctor wants). Just a list of words that might be useful, grouped by category. Pain can be: dull, throbbing, burning, excruciating. A wound can be: open, scabbed, weeping, festering, bleeding. The vocabulary would have to be more everyday than my cheat sheet ("How are you today?" "Euthymic, yourself?"), but it would still be a huge help.

You know how it's easy to read in other languages, but really hard to talk at the level you can read at? Like (assuming you're an Anglophone) even if you don't think you speak French, you could totally figure out how to, say, buy tickets on the Juste pour rire website. But even if you do think you speak French, you couldn't get up on the stage and actually perform stand-up in French (unless you're Eddie Izzard, but we already know he's a looney.)

With this word bank tool, coming up with le mot juste to describe pain or symptoms or bodily fluids would be as easy as reading. It would be like skimming the Juste pour rire website, looking for tickets, and thinking "Hmmm, the word for "ticket" is billet so Billetterie looks like a promising link" rather than having to come up with the word billetterie all on your own. Patients could describe their symptoms in a more precise and nuanced fashion plus have a better idea of what sorts of things the doctors want them to tell them about, doctors could give them better care, and all it would take is an hour of brainstorming and a few photocopies.

Things They Should Invent: optional accent sensitivity in search engines

Some of my tools are accent-blind (i.e. they read ou and où the same) and others are accent-sensitive (i.e. they read ou and où as two different words). As a lazy Anglophone, I prefer accent blindness, but sometimes accent-sensitivity would be convenient to filter out interference.

I'd love it if we could have a checkbox to turn accent-sensitivity on or off depending on our needs.

Letter to my 18-year-old self

I just realized that it was 10 years ago that I started university. Here's some things I wish I'd known then:

- Do half an hour of homework or studying per course every day. That's all it takes. You'll be on top of everything.
- Move out of your parents' house. You'll be fine, really. And you'll prove your parents wrong about all kinds of things that they're annoying about.
- Your boss shouldn't be playing mind games with you. Your boss should be protecting you when the customers sexually harass you. Your boss shouldn't be requiring you to cash in and cash out and take out the garbage and clean the bathrooms before and after your paid shift. There are jobs available where they don't do this. You don't have to keep your job just because you have a job.
- Apply for every single on-campus job you think you might possibly be able to do. Apply for every single work placement or translation practicum you can find.
- Apartments don't have to suck. If the apartment you're looking at sucks, say no thank you and look at a different apartment.
- Prioritize living within easy walking distance of a grocery store. You don't need parks, you don't need landscaping or scenery, you don't need in-building amenities other than laundry. You do need to be able to run out and buy milk in the middle of the night if necessary.
- Don't stop reading recreationally just because you're in university. Keep your library card active and add anything that piques your interest to your holds list.
- Read Harry Potter. Read the complete works of Miss Manners. Read the In Death series. Read Introvert Advantage. Read Malcolm Gladwell. Watch Eddie Izzard's comedy and every interview he's ever done. These will all not only entertain you, but help you navigate the world better.
- Contact the second-year-entry program you're after and ask them if they have any suggestions on what you should take first year. They will actually answer your questions, and you'll be better prepared and have met some program requirements ahead of time.
- Be out about your phobias. People will help you. Get insecticide with a paper label, and have someone remove the label for you. That solves the disgusting picture problem and gives you evil death powers over the yucky things.
- Be out about your insecurities in general. Your interlocutors will compensate. In the real world, people want you to feel like you belong.
- Don't try to save money by scrimping on internet service. It will only depress you.
- Make a point of consuming more information about Canadian politics than about US politics.
- People aren't going to think you're weird if you bing off a quick email thanking them for whatever. Seriously.
- Wear skirts. Wear dresses. Wear v-neck shirts. Wear t-shirt bras. Wear teacup eyeglass frames, and buy the best lenses available. Wear necklaces. Worry about heel width, not heel height. Buy every well-fitting pair of black pants you meet. Buy two of every shirt you fall in love with. Buy black cotton knee socks. If a pair of pants fits perfectly except for gapping in the back, any competent alterationist (and often your own mother) can put darts in the back to fix that. If your feet can go all the way into the shoes but they're a bit tight around the toes, any competent shoemaker can stretch them at a very reasonable price.
- When buying a new computer, get more RAM and more disk space than you expect you would ever need.
- You can trust your money instincts. You can trust your writing voice. You can trust your research skills even if you do end up sucking at documentation class.
- If something makes you cry, stop doing/thinking about the thing that makes you cry. Distract yourself. Run up the stairwell until your thighs fill with lactic acid. Sing nasty songs at the top of your lungs. Have a drink. Eat chocolate. Go to sleep. Then revisit the crying trigger later once you've regrouped. You'll save yourself a lot of time that way.

How do minor set-backs affect self-reported happiness?

This post was triggered by, but is completely unrelated to, this Language Log post about self-reported happiness studies.

Last night my glasses broke (yes, again) in what is hopefully a minor and fixable way, yet one that requires immediate attention. So now my plans for things I have to get done this weekend all have to be shuffled around. I'm annoyed and inconvenienced and have looming over me the possibility that they might not be fixable and I might have to replace them immediately and then when I go to a wedding next weekend I'll look like an idiot with suboptimal glasses.

So if you had me do a self-reported happiness study right this minute, my happiness would come out lower than if my glasses hadn't broke. Yes, I know intellectually that they mean a broader, more long-term definition of happiness, but right at this moment the feeling of contentment seems like only a distant memory.

It would be interesting to study if things like this have an affect on happiness studies.

Pure cute

(H/T Poodle)

Currently wondering

The cool kids in high school.

You only ever heard them spoken of as Other (at least in my corner of the world and of the internet). Is there anyone in the world who feels like they actually were one of the cool kids in high school?

So sweet and so cold

I noticed recently that whenever I bite into a peach (even one that has been sitting on the counter at room temperature for several days), the inside is cold. So I tried washing a peach in warm water, but the inside was still cold when I bit into it. It has never been in a fridge, unless the farmer at the market had it in a fridge, but I bought it three days ago and it's been at room temperature ever since.

I wonder why it's cold?

Re: Caster Semenya

Just think about this, quietly and to yourself, for as long as you need to:

Are you, personally, certain that you have all the sexual organs associated with your gender and none of the sexual organs associated with the other gender? Both internally and externally? Are you sure?

Some people are sure, I know. If you've had a tubal or a c-section or exploratory surgery to diagnose the cause of your infertility, you probably know for certain. But not everyone knows for certain. I don't know for certain. I know I have breasts and a vulva, both of which appear within the range of normal to medical and intimate examination. I know I have a vagina and a cervix, or something that resembles a cervix closely enough that no doctor has ever commented upon giving me a pap smear. I know I have something the behaves enough like a uterus that it produces menstruation that is regulated with birth control pills, and stands up to the palpation part of a standard pelvic examination. I can't tell you for certain that I don't have secret internal testes. I can't tell you for certain that my uterus is fully operational (I've never been pregnant). But I'm a woman, there's no question of that. I just...am. Even if I found out I had internal testes, I'd still want to put on lipstick before leaving the house.

Can you say with absolute certainty that you have lady parts, all your lady parts, and nothing but lady parts? (Unless, of course, you have gentleman parts). If so, could you say so with equal certainty at the age of 18? If you found out tomorrow that you have some bits that aren't consistent with your gender, or are missing some bits that are usually found in your gender, would that change you? Would your sexual preferences change? Would your personal behaviour change?

Teach me about the used car market

Apparently the quality of used vehicles is improving.

Interesting! Useful, if you're in the market for a used car!

But why does the used car market exist?

I totally get why someone would buy a used car, but why do so many people want to sell their now apparently perfectly good cars? I can see how some people might want to upgrade and have the very latest thing, but I can't imagine why so many people would do it that a whole used car market would exist, and buying a used car would be commonplace rather than exceptional.

I have no frame of reference here. I've never bought or shopped for a car, my parents have always bought their cars new and used them until they died (the cars, not the parents) and no one I know has ever sold their car. So help me out. What am I missing?

How does the United States of America continue to function with insurance premiums like these?

Via David Olive, a chart of US health insurance premium projections.

The general thesis is "OMG, they're going to get so high!" But my first thought was "OMG, they ARE so high!" $13,000 a year. Thirteen thousand!

Imagine having an extra $13,000 in necessary expenses, on top of your existing necessary expenses. To put that in perspective, that's more than I paid in taxes last year. Could you fit that into your budget? Because I certainly couldn't!

When I run the numbers on finding another $13,000, I've got a two-hour commute and bugs crawling out of the walls, and even then it's hella tight. I've got no savings, I'm wearing cheap men's runners for everyday and improperly-fitting bras, rationing cheese and internet access, hairdressing is not an option, and even then it might not work out. And that's without children, without a car, without travel.

But when you go to the states, you see people with children and cars and vacations. You see people wearing clothes that look like they were purchased new. People have had their hair done. It's normal to have wedding rings made of gold and diamonds. They have tivos and people buy books and DVDs and go to movies and out to dinner...how on earth do they make it work? Seriously. I cannot grok at all how their society as a whole can function with insurance premiums like that.

St. Paul's by-election roundup

1. I don't appreciate this by-election being made into a referendum on the HST. The HST simply isn't important enough to me to make or break my vote. Yes, I very much want them to correct the oversight in the transition benefit, but as for the tax itself? Meh. Any protest vote against the Liberals that I might choose to make would be about their habit of introducing poorly-thought-out legislation (banning plastic bags at the LCBO, restrictions for new drivers that are based on age rather than driving experience, breed-specific legislation against pitbulls when they can't even define the breed well enough). Any vote for the Liberals I might choose to make would be a combination of because they haven't fucked things up, because their candidate is admirable, and because I don't want my riding to turn blue. The HST doesn't come into it, and I don't appreciate my vote be interpreted solely as commentary on this issue that I don't care about.

Normally, elections are my favourite sport. This is the first time that voting felt like a duty rather than a privilege.

2. If this were a "Who has the best advertising?" contest, Eric Hoskins would totally win in my corner of the world. I got multiple flyers from him, all well-targeted to renters' issues. (A couple did dig at the other parties, which I don't much enjoy, but overall they were positive.) From Sue-Ann Levy, I got one flyer with the general thesis of "OMG, the HST is going to raise the prices of [insert list of things I don't even buy ever]." From Julian Heller, I got one flyer with the general thesis of "Hi, I'm not a Liberal and I'm opposed to the HST!" From the other candidates, nothing.

3. Weirdly, I wasn't on the electors' list. I lived at this address the last provincial election (the one with the MMP referendum) and voted then, but this time I didn't get a voter's card. Still voted without a hitch (luckily they accepted my G1 - my new health card (the one with two pictures) doesn't have my address on it!). AND I saw the awesome greyhound that I saw last election was there again! I still didn't pet him, but maybe I should have. We could be election buddies!

Wherein I nag you for the last time to sponsor Eddie Izzard

September 15 (which is just starting right about now in the UK) is the last day of Eddie's run. He's going to end up in Trafalgar Square, where he left way back on July 27.

Donations are still being matched, Eddie's still injured, Eddie's still going for a personal best tomorrow, the kitten still has a home. In just a few hours this complete act of lunacy will be a fait accompli.

Eddie has over a million Twitter followers. If he doesn't manage to raise 100,000 pounds with this incredibly excessive act of human endurance, that will be a blemish on the honour of humanity. Now is the time to stop procrastinating and donate.

You can follow the adventure on Twitter, the blog, the Eddie Izzard forum, and this running forum.

Godspeed Eddie!

Donate here.

Update: HE DID IT! 43 marathons in 51 days, personal best on the last one, and totally upstaged the plinth lady on the way in (here at 31:15). Congrats Eddie!!! Hope you can sleep well soon.

In case you're thinking "Crap, I meant to donate but I missed it!", as of right this minute they still seem to be accepting and matching donations here.