Daily Archives: November 24, 2009

Machine Translation and the Porpoise Corpus

I might have mentioned that I got to do some world traveling for my work recently. Seeing rural Tanzania was an experience that I still don’t really have good words to describe. But this is not a post about that. This is a post about a sticky idea I got stuck on in some science fiction I was reading during my multi-day to and fro travel.

On my around-the-world-in-4.5-days journey, I read the Jewish feminist sci-fi novel He, She, and It by Marge Piercy. It’s got a classic hard AI theme, about a robot that is so, so human… I’d recommend it. But dilemmas of whether a robot can make a minyon in the reform tradition of 2059 has not stuck in my mind the way this one line about whales has: Continue reading

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