Subject
Re: Smuggling guns and emeralds
From
Date
Body
> Dear Sergei,
>
> I don't think it would have been legal to carry a gun on one's person
or
> in
> one's luggage in 1959, but smuggling is an ancient art. The question
> recalls
> an incident from about that time. My best childhood friend had an
uncle
> who
> was the first "terrorist" I ever heard of. He told a stewardess that
he
> was
> carrying a bomb. The flight was terminated and he was arrested. I
think
> he
> was drunk.
>
> Carolyn
>
Sergei/Carolyn: there was the statistician who ALWAYS carried a bomb
when
she flew -- based on the plausible idea that the probability of there
ever
being TWO bombs on board is vanishingly small. Of course, this ploy is
plausible but flawed, as are many statistical speculations. Impossible
events are correctly assigned ZERO probability, YET the converse is
false:
events with zero probability occur sans cesse. Trust me -- I'm a
non-Cretan
Goedelerian. Look up, e.g., Paul Cohen and the Axiom of Choice. Or my
song
"Lemma 3 Very Pretty" -- "The Axiom of Choice/ It is very clear to me/
If
you wanna choose a Lemma, boys/ Well don't choose Lemma 3."
To ensure the VN-connection rightly required by our ListMeister:
Before over-knocking the TQ (Translation Quotient), observe that we
daily
use SINGLE numbers to characterize large sets of data. Whenever we use
AVERAGE or MEDIAN (not to be confused), or DOW-INDEX we are assigning a
useful single parameter to whole bunches of whatever (family-size;
share-prices; incomes). However, we shed much information for the
convenience of tracking changes and comparing trends -- and therein
lurks
the danger. Bricks can build house as well as cracking skulls. You'll
recall
the statistician who drowned crossing a stream for which the average
depth
was 2.14159 feet (note the mandatory spurious precision)? Likewise (but
true!), the Member of Parliament bemoaning the fact that half the kids
in
the UK were below the average educational standard. He really meant
'median.' but many voters were alarmed, demanding a remedy. As a former
committee member of the ALLC (Association for Literary & Linguistic
Computing) I met close-up some of the hazards of Stylometrics. A TQ is
just
one of many numbers you can churn out but its value depends on the model
behind your computer program -- and, then, especially, how you make use
of
the TQ. As DN and others have pointed out, judgements such as "X's
translation is BETTER than Y's" depend on subjective, non-computable
evaluations by those fluent (perhaps one should insist on super-fluency)
in
the history/idioms of the source & target languages -- not to mention a
deep
knowledge of the author's genres & zeitgeist. Need I add how uniquely
blessed we students of VN are, enjoying the fruits of Dmitri's close
collaborations with his father?
VN's own THE ART OF TRANSLATION (appended to his Lectures on Russian
Literature, Harcourt, 1981) is essential reading.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
>
> I don't think it would have been legal to carry a gun on one's person
or
> in
> one's luggage in 1959, but smuggling is an ancient art. The question
> recalls
> an incident from about that time. My best childhood friend had an
uncle
> who
> was the first "terrorist" I ever heard of. He told a stewardess that
he
> was
> carrying a bomb. The flight was terminated and he was arrested. I
think
> he
> was drunk.
>
> Carolyn
>
Sergei/Carolyn: there was the statistician who ALWAYS carried a bomb
when
she flew -- based on the plausible idea that the probability of there
ever
being TWO bombs on board is vanishingly small. Of course, this ploy is
plausible but flawed, as are many statistical speculations. Impossible
events are correctly assigned ZERO probability, YET the converse is
false:
events with zero probability occur sans cesse. Trust me -- I'm a
non-Cretan
Goedelerian. Look up, e.g., Paul Cohen and the Axiom of Choice. Or my
song
"Lemma 3 Very Pretty" -- "The Axiom of Choice/ It is very clear to me/
If
you wanna choose a Lemma, boys/ Well don't choose Lemma 3."
To ensure the VN-connection rightly required by our ListMeister:
Before over-knocking the TQ (Translation Quotient), observe that we
daily
use SINGLE numbers to characterize large sets of data. Whenever we use
AVERAGE or MEDIAN (not to be confused), or DOW-INDEX we are assigning a
useful single parameter to whole bunches of whatever (family-size;
share-prices; incomes). However, we shed much information for the
convenience of tracking changes and comparing trends -- and therein
lurks
the danger. Bricks can build house as well as cracking skulls. You'll
recall
the statistician who drowned crossing a stream for which the average
depth
was 2.14159 feet (note the mandatory spurious precision)? Likewise (but
true!), the Member of Parliament bemoaning the fact that half the kids
in
the UK were below the average educational standard. He really meant
'median.' but many voters were alarmed, demanding a remedy. As a former
committee member of the ALLC (Association for Literary & Linguistic
Computing) I met close-up some of the hazards of Stylometrics. A TQ is
just
one of many numbers you can churn out but its value depends on the model
behind your computer program -- and, then, especially, how you make use
of
the TQ. As DN and others have pointed out, judgements such as "X's
translation is BETTER than Y's" depend on subjective, non-computable
evaluations by those fluent (perhaps one should insist on super-fluency)
in
the history/idioms of the source & target languages -- not to mention a
deep
knowledge of the author's genres & zeitgeist. Need I add how uniquely
blessed we students of VN are, enjoying the fruits of Dmitri's close
collaborations with his father?
VN's own THE ART OF TRANSLATION (appended to his Lectures on Russian
Literature, Harcourt, 1981) is essential reading.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm