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July, 2008

The unusual Hebrew days of the week

Sun, 2008-07-20 02:16 — Konstantin

When you look at the Hebrew names for the days of the week, יום ראשון, יום שני, יום שלישי, etc., how would you translate them literally?

Most likely, you’d say “first day,” “second day,” “third day,” and so on. ראשון, שני, שלישי are ordinal numbers (מספרים סודרים), and probably serve as adjectives (שמות תואר).

But they’re not adjectives!

How would you say “next Tuesday” (as a noun, not as an adverb of time) in Hebrew? In Hebrew, adjectives match the nouns they describe in definiteness. If days of the week were simple noun-adjective pairs, then you’d say “היום השלישי הבא” — “the next third day.”

But this is incorrect — the actual phrase is “יום שלישי הבא.”

So, you might say, perhaps this is an exception. Perhaps days of the week are fixed expressions in which the adjectives are for some reason not inflected for definiteness. But this is also not the case — we’d have had something like “היום־שלישי הבא,” because that would be the way to make the whole thing definite.

The New York Times gets creative

Thu, 2008-07-17 23:19 — Konstantin

Here's an headline from the NY Times' home page that's open to brilliant misinterpretation:

Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy

 

Who are we dealing with?

Thu, 2008-07-17 00:44 — Konstantin

From Camera.org's article about Samir Kuntar, and identical to synopses in other sources:

On April 22, 1979, Kuntar and three other terrorists traveled from Lebanon to Israel by sea, coming ashore in the Northern Israeli coastal city of Nahariya. According to Israeli sources and the personal account of Smadar Haran, the following events took place:

Having shot dead police officer Eliyahu Shahar, Kuntar and his accomplices headed for a nearby apartment block. Hearing the commotion outside, Danny and Smadar Haran scrambled to protect their daughters, Einat (age 4) and Yael (age 2), by hiding them from the terrorists. Smadar, Yael and one of their neighbors climbed into the small attic of the apartment, while Danny and Einat rushed to the front door in an attempt to reach safety in an underground shelter.

At that moment, Kuntar and his accomplices stormed the apartment and grabbed Danny and Einat. Upon hearing police approaching, the terrorists gave up searching the apartment for Smadar, Yael and their neighbor. Kuntar and the other terrorists then dragged Danny and Einat to the beach, where they shot Danny in front of 4-year-old Einat, so that it would be the last thing that she would see before being slaughtered herself.

After shooting Danny in the back, Kuntar dragged him into the sea and drowned him to make sure that he was dead. Kuntar then turned his attention to the young child. He repeatedly slammed his rifle butt into Einat's skull, smashing her head against a rock. 1

This is the man who returned to Lebanon today a national hero, greeted with a red carpet and welcomed by Lebanese PM Fouad Saniora and Pres. Michel Suleiman (and of course, by Hassan Nasrallah). This is the man whose release was marked by PA President Mahmoud Abbas with congratulations to his family and a Fatah rally in Ramallah.

And this is the man whose own relevance fades as we consider what today's events reveal about the others. It is not any new idea, but an existing fact that gets reinforced: the "moderates" in Israel's neighborhood, the Abbases and Sanioras celebrate the release of a ruthless murderer of civilians and children, and lavish him with praise. It is bewildering that these are the kinds of leaders with whom Israel maintains political relations. It is terrifying that these are the only kind of leaders that are left.

We can only hope that those in the region with remaining shreds of humanity (and they are still, I would hope, a plurality) will not continue to let their voices be extinguished, and perhaps one day will even emerge at the forefront of the political scene. It's a long shot.

  1. 1. Myer-Smith, Maxine. Samir Kuntar: Profiles in Terror. Camera.org. 15 July 2008.

Singing point clouds

Mon, 2008-07-14 19:40 — Konstantin

Google is hosting a Flash app that lets you watch a point cloud of a Radiohead member singing one of their songs.

Click the screenshot below for the interactive 3d app, or see the full details.

Found them

Fri, 2008-07-11 00:40 — Konstantin

Saw an interesting domain name in Harvard Hillel's referrer logs, and that led me to this bunch of nitwits!  Probably the fellows who "broke" into the old site earlier this year. A large part of the forum seems to be devoted to people gloating about sites they've hacked.

If anyone can read Turkish, please do comment and let me know if there's anything interesting in the linked discussion. (Though it looks like they're mostly arguing about whether hacking a subdomain counts as hacking harvard.edu.)

An interesting find, in any case.

They sure work quickly

Mon, 2008-07-07 19:43 — Konstantin

The new Harvard Hillel site has been up for just over a week and I've already logged several hacking attempts. We've had some fine folks from China, Moldova, Germany, and a few U.S. locations try to hit us with SQL, PHP, or even ASP injections.

Drupal's logging system conveniently caught all these, and I've been adding a few IP addresses and blocks to the deny list.