Air Canada to order 45 CSeries jets

Well this is a big relief: Air Canada has decided to buy 45 CSeries jets, with an option for 30 more. For those who don't know the CSeries is a jet that Bombardier probably shouldn't have made because it was too ambitious, but since they have managed to pull it off by the skin of their teeth the world is better off for it, because it really is a fantastic jet.

The short explanation for it is this: you know those small regional jets you sometimes fly at the end of a long trip, when you're feeling at your worst? At those times the plane itself just happens to fit with your mood, with the cramped quarters and overall regional, tired feel. This jet makes even these flights a treat. Not that I've flown one yet, but the reviews say it all, and it's basically the Dreamliner or the A350 of regional jets. Even has a window in the bathroom.

This order brings the number of planes ordered to some 300 or so, and is their first one in a long time.

It's especially important because Bombardier seems to be so bad at sales, at least in the environment where Boeing and Airbus are so keen to undercut them or do whatever they can to sell their planes instead.

Let's hope Iran decides to buy a few of them too.

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360 degree video inside Google's self-driving car

A reporter from the Sacramento Bee took a ride in Google's self-driving car a few days ago, one of their converted Lexus vehicles. This video is a bit different from others in that it's 360 degrees, so you can change the angle and watch whomever in the car you want as they drive around.

You'll notice how assertive the car can be now compared to a few years ago. It's now capable for example of seeing a car coming as it merges and deciding that it's going to go first, followed by a quick acceleration.

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Using Google's Ngram viewer to trace the decline of English long S

(Note: this post is from late 2010, and I found it in my drafts today. No idea why it was never published.)

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In case you haven't noticed, a few days ago Google put out a new tool that shows the results of keyword searches starting back as far as 1700, and yes it's as addictive as it sounds. It has also let me solve something that I was thinking of doing some looking into myself: frequency of the United States is vs. the United States are. I had suspected that the latter would have been more common during the country's early history when the country was not as quite as tight a union as it is today, and it looks like my suspicions were correct. Starting in 1800 the United States is begins to grow, and as the Civil War happens it grows at an even greater rate.

One other particularly interesting use of the tool is tracking the usage of the long s in English, as this chart shows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_usage_of_long_s.svg

Since the software recognizes a long s as an f, all you have to do to track this is to find a word using a long s that doesn't look like any other English word when you replace it with an f. Paradise Lost wouldn't work then as loft is a real word. Street and ftreet does though.

Also note that the tool is available for other languages besides English: French, German, Russian, Spanish, etc.

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Air Canada gets its first Dreamliner

Air Canada just got its first Dreamliner today, one that will be used for Toronto - Tel Aviv, and Toronto - Haneda. As a smaller plane than the 777 but nearly the same as a 767, the 787s Air Canada gets will be mostly used to replace 767 routes that cost the carrier too much money in fuel and can't fill up a larger 777 either.

The plane itself is more comfortable, a tiny bit faster (a trans-Pacific flight would take about 30 minutes less), but Air Canada has added an extra row making each seat in economy smaller than its other configurations. So try to book ahead and get at least Premium Economy if you can.

Air Canada will have something like three of these by the end of the summer, and six by the end of the year.

In total this makes about 160 787s in the world now, compared to around 40 or so when I flew on one last October. Still about 800 left to make with orders as they currently stand.

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Personal opinion on self-driving cars is largely irrelevant

Google released a video the other day showing some of the advances they've made in city driving, including the ability to recognize the hand signals made by bicycle drivers. City driving is much harder for a machine than cruising down the highway (pylons apparently are quite tough to fully comprehend), but resolving this is only a matter of time.



The update has led to a surge of articles about the advancement and the future of self-driving cars. One page here from the Guardian has a poll- that interestingly shows 64% of respondents saying they are comfortable driving in a self-driving car. I had expected something higher but I suppose I tend to frequent more sites that are for them.

In the end though, personal opinion will be irrelevant. During the transition phase (let's say mid-2020s to be safe) where we will start to see more and more self-driving cars on the road, driving one's own car will probably begin to be seen as a selfish act, one that tangles up traffic and has the potential to maim or kill, for no real benefit.

City planners will very likely begin to ban human drivers on certain congested roads, because a three-lane road with human drivers and the extra space they need could potentially become a four-lane road with self-driven cars keeping perfect spacing from each other. No real reason to allow a human driver in such a situation. The same will likely take place in the construction of new roads as well. Why not make the road narrower, ban human drivers from the road, and use the extra money and land for something else?

One big potential downside to these cars is more sprawling cities. If one is now able to sleep in the car, why not live an hour outside of town instead of 30 minutes, get a bigger house and nap on the way in to work and back? On the other hand I suppose such a commute into work will no longer be a stress-filled endeavour, simply a bit stuffy. More cars will have seats that convert into full beds, those long-haul commuters will come into the office a bit rumpled and will use the shower before going to their desk, taxis of course will be a thing of the past, children and the elderly will 'drive' cars on their own, and so on. The next decade is going to be very interesting, and the change it brings may even be comparable to that of the internet itself.

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Boeing 787 Dreamliner similar to 777 in the first year and a half of service

This article addresses a question I've wanted to see answered for quite some time now, namely whether all the news about Boeing Dreamliners being grounded for this or that reason mean they have problems at this stage that other Boeing models did not have in their infancy. Since the Boeing 777 was first introduced in 1994 when the Internet still looked like this:

it did not have the same 24/7 scrutiny this new model has.

We have our answer now to the question above:

As part of their work, team members compared service reliability data from the time the aircraft first started service with similar data from other Boeing airplane models. They found that it had the same reliability performance in the 16 months of service as that of other new Boeing models over the same time period, including the Boeing 777.

Which is nice to know.

I've flown a Dreamliner twice now, both times on United in between Denver and Seoul, and found the following:

-- The plane feels rather 'bendy' compared to others.
-- It is somewhat quieter (sound during cruising feels like another plane during taxiing), windows are larger, lighting is interesting, etc. However:
-- It is not worth an extra layover. I chose a route with an extra layover just so I could see what a Dreamliner is like on the inside, and it's nicer in the sense that a newer bus is nicer than an older one. But it's still a bus.

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How to fix language hotkeys not working in Windows 7 and 8

One problem I've had since I switched to Windows 7 a year and a half ago and Windows 8 a few months after that was this. Namely, that hotkeys to switch from one language to another would simply disappear. In XP I had about seven input languages set up for just about every number on the keyboard, that were activated with ctrl + shift + number, and in the newer versions of Windows they would simply vanish, though oddly enough some languages would always remain. Eventually I just began using Windows key + space to switch from language to language, which works fine but takes a bit longer.

But then a few days ago someone came along on the thread with the solution. It involves applying language bar settings to the welcome screen. I tried that, and now my hotkeys are working perfectly again. English (Dvorak) is 6, Korean is 2, Chinese is 3, Japanese is 4, Persian 5, Portuguese 8, Bulgarian 9. Everything is as it should be once again.

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Most used languages on Twitter (late 2013 edition)

A link I've been meaning to mention for about a month now - according to a new study Portuguese is in fifth place in terms of tweets. This one seems to have combined languages that should be combined, showing Malay (plus Indonesian I assume) in 4th place.

The rankings are:

English - 36%
Japanese - 16%
Spanish - 12%
Malay - 8%
Portuguese - 6%
Arabic - 6%
French - 2%
Turkish - 2%
Thai - 1%
Korean - 1%


French at 2% seems rather low though. This link places it at just under 4%, which feels more right to me. Hopefully the study in the first link did not simply assume all tweets from certain countries were sent in that language.

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Real Google News in Serbian, almost real Google News in Bulgarian and others

Here's an interesting discovery I made today - while looking at the supported languages/countries for Google News I noticed that Serbia was now one of them, and since Serbian was there I looked for Bulgarian as well...no luck. After a bit of searching around though I did find this blog post from 2009, according to which Google has a number of beta languages / countries on Google News and one can find them simply by changing the url. That gives us Bulgarian, and a number of other languages too.

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Link roundup, 29 June 2013

• Playing with papal tweets, and more playing with papal tweets.
• I think this is the first Esperanto-related job I've ever seen arrive in my email account.
• Esperanto in two weeks, by a 16-year-old guy who only knows English.
• Dallas Police Department to offer an all-Spanish police academy.
• Portuguese could be an Olympic working language.
• Dawn is now 52 million km away from Ceres. For comparison, Venus can get as close as 41 million km to Earth. Still quite a ways to go.
• A discussion on the language used in Brazil:

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Link roundup for 19 June 2013

• Google Drive is now available in 18 more languages, up to a total of 65. The new ones are: Afrikaans, Amharic, Basque, Chinese (Hong Kong), Estonian, French (Canadian), Galician, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Malaysian, Nepali, Persian, Sinhalese, Spanish (Latin America), Swahili, Urdu, Zulu.
• A video by the late Claude Piron discussing Esperanto in French is just as interesting for the Italian subtitles as it is for the subject matter.

• Tim Kaine gave a speech in the Senate in Spanish about a week ago, and his Spanish is very good:

• A letter from Guesnet to Peano in Ido from 1922,
• Not sure if Pope Francis is as much a Latin fanatic as Benedict was, but his Latin twitter account has over 114,000 followers and has tweeted as recently as 12 hours ago. NPR has written on it too.

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New Pope Twitter follower numbers

The last time we took a look at the number of papal Twitter followers there was a total of about two million followers across all the languages offered, and now, after closing for a bit and reopening with Pope Francis, the number is 4 million. Let's compare the number of followers by language compared to last time to see which language is showing the most growth.

English: 1,262,000 -- 2,060,000
Spanish: 483,000 -- 1,040,000
Italian: 206,000 -- 437,000
Portuguese: 54,000 -- 122,000
French: 48,000 -- 92,600
German: 40,000 -- 76,700
Polish: 21,000 -- 55,200
Latin: 44,400 (new)
Arabic: 15,000 -- 38,300

Two changes in the rankings from last time: French has moved up a bit compared to German, and Latin has displaced Arabic.

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Link roundup, 10 February 2013

여러분 새해 복 많이 받으세요! 올해도 더 많은 언어를 배우시고 나로호를 또 발사하시고 점점 길고양이를 사랑하는 한국이 되길 바랍니다.

--- The 10th of February means we're just five days away from the closest approach of asteroid 2012 DA14, and the articles on the close approach are continuing to increase in number. The real eye candy will come a bit after, as Goldstone will begin radar observations just after closest approach. On the 15th we'll see a lot of videos though showing this asteroid as a tiny, rapidly moving streak in the sky.

--- A new analysis of red dwarf stars has lead to a preliminary conclusion that the nearest earth-like planet may be 13 light years away, around a red dwarf. The nearest one could actually be 4 light years away around a sun much like our own, but about 13 is our best roundabout guess at the moment. For a good layman's paper on the habitability of red dwarf stars, see here.

--- The MAVEN probe has finished construction. This one will be going to Mars to study the upper atmosphere, in particular the rate at which it is lost to space. I'm not the biggest Mars fan out there but the results from this will be interesting, both for the ability it will give us to trace backwards to estimate the previously held atmospheres of not just Mars but other planets, and also to estimate how terraforming would work on a terrestrial body.

--- A review of Tesla's Model S.

--- Apparently Italy is going to begin promoting a proficiency test called CLIQ (Certificazione Lingua Italiana di Qualità): "Le nostre ambasciate, i consolati e gli istituti italiani di cultura sono gia' pronti per assicurare la massima diffusione della CLIQ in tutti i Paesi e in tal senso e' stata sottoscritta una specifica convenzione tra Ministero e Associazione CLIQ".

--- Esperanto: an international auxiliary clusterfuck. Kind of reminiscent of this often referenced page called learn not to speak Esperanto, except the author of this post (who knows Esperanto very well) still concludes that it is worth learning:

"To learn it and take part in its culture of 1.5 million speakers, and read its uniquely rewarding literature is an experience worth having. As such, it is worth learning: if only to become part of the community of its speakers, many of whom are among the coolest people I've ever met."

There's a lot to get at in the post and the comments below show others beginning to do so, and a small mention of Interlingua is at the end as well. Considering how much of the post is devoted to derivation I'd like to see his opinion of Ido as well.

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Fresh Prince of Bel-Air through Google Translate 64 times

The title explains it all:



Edit: in case anybody is wondering where apricot comes from, it's the word maxing:

In west Philadelphia born and raised
On the playground where I spent most of my days
Chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool
And all shooting some b-ball outside of the school

在西部费城出生和长大
在操场上，在那里我度过了我的天
冷，杏，放宽所有酷
所有拍摄部分B球外的学校

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Instituto Cervantes: Spanish second largest language on Twitter

The Instituto Cervantes has said that Spanish is the second largest language on Twitter. Their numbers show Spanish to be second after which come Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Italian, French, and German. Are these numbers accurate? Note that Indonesian and Malay do not even appear on the list in spite of being in fourth place in 2010.

And the Instituto Cervantes is well known to display data in its preferred fashion:

"El español, que con casi 500 millones de hablantes es, tras el chino, la segunda lengua del mundo por número de usuarios..."

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Windows 8 now available in Cherokee

Cherokee, a language with one of the most famous and innovative scripts to exist, is now available as a language in Windows 8. Apparently this is the largest translation made in the language since the New Testament in the 19th century.

On a related note, I also changed to Windows 8 two weeks ago. Since I do everything on a 11.6" Asus, hearing that the new OS is much faster than 7 is what won me over, and upon installing and trying it out the rumors are true and it feels as if I had doubled my RAM. Nor do I miss the start button - any program, file or setting can be found by hitting the Windows key and typing out the name. Plus I hated Aero.

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Pope's Twitter to add Chinese and Latin

Two new languages are planned for the Pope's Twitter feed, Chinese and Latin. Neither is too much of a surprise in that Chinese is a no-brainer for PR and Latin is basically a must. Latin is particularly nice to see, however, given the lack of places to read and use it. Latin students and revivalists should follow that Twitter account, along with any other 100% Latin Twitter account around.

While we're at it, let's see how the number of Twitter followers has changed since those I wrote on December 7th. Dec 7 numbers will be on the left, today's numbers on the right.

English: 523,000 -- 1,262,000
Spanish: 119,000 -- 483,000
Italian: 62,000 -- 206,000
Portuguese: 20,000 -- 54,000
German: 14,000 -- 40,000
French: 12,000 -- 48,000
Polish: 6,000 -- 21,000
Arabic: 5,000 -- 15,000

All the standings are the same except for French which has moved up one place.

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Google Translate wants to improve its Spanish

Check out what happens now when you select Spanish to English in Google Translate:

When you click on answering some questions it takes you to this page, where one is presented with two possible translations from English to Spanish that Google doesn't know which is better and wants the user to help out.

The url is pretty simple:

http://translate.google.com/question?sl=en&tl=es&hl=en

so I thought perhaps changing en to fr or de or something else would bring up questions for other languages, but it seems not: doing that gives you a Sorry, we don't have any questions in that language pair for you to answer right now.

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Number of papal Twitter followers, by language

An article here gives us the numbers for the Pope's current Twitter followers by language. Easy enough to find out without such an article, but the idea never occurred to me to lurk the Pope's Twitter feed. So here they are:

Total: 700,000

English: 523,000
Spanish: 119,000
Italian: 62,000
Portuguese: 20,000
German: 14,000
French: 12,000
Polish: 6,000
Arabic: 5,000

The total number of followers is expected to reach a million by around Christmas.

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More spam in German than ever before

That's the gist of this article in German, which states that almost a quarter of malicious emails in Germany are now in German. The actual number is 21.3% which is closer to a fifth than a quarter. The article states that: "For a long time internet users in Germany could feel half safe given that most spam emails were in English. But now there is a lot more spam in German, with a lot of it coming as an alleged mobile phone mill or mail from Deutsche Post."

That's good news!

This sounds like a good if unusual metric to rate the strength of a language: the more spammers believe a language is being used the more they will resort to sending out messages in the language. The metric could also be compared by total volume worldwide, as well as within each country.

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