Faust, GOEthe, Mann / Ideengang / the Walk of Ideas

Forgive misspelling of Goethe, I really do know how to spell (and pronounce) Goethe, but I was in a hurry to get to the City Dump before it closed at noon.

Here's the guy I just can't pronounce no matter how many times my Dutch-speaking pal pronounces it for me: Huygens. If you're a native Dutch speaker, speak "Huygens" into a .wav file and send it to me so I can practice.

It took me 3 or 4 visits, but I finally mastered pronouncing "Alstublieft." As the Geezer Guide for my nephew's first trip to Yerp, I focused on something I'd made a habit of, and passed it along to Nephew.

Whenever you get to a new city,

1. Immediately put the hotel's business card in your wallet so you can show it to a taxi driver (or police officer).

2. Immediately memorize local words for "please" and "thank you."

Translator Robots are still a laughably pathetic and fairly useless breed, but Jennifer Runner is a human being who has been a huge help and resource to me. If you're on IRC and want to give a heart attack to a Macedonian, just type: Zdravo! (Israelis also think their language is some kind of national security military secret and get all nervous and suspicious when you say "l'hitraot" or "todah.")

Like the Turing Test and CAPTCHA, one of the things that even huge computers continue to be real shitty at is translating back and forth between Natural Languages. Which is very curious, because humans are able to master their own lingo by age 3, and if you want to cram 2 or 3 lingos into a little kid's brain, the little kid has no problem with that, and doesn't even get the lingos mixed up. I imagine CH is lousy with yard apes who speak equally perfect Italiano, deutsches and francais, not to mention Romansch on the side.

Pattern Recognition is also a problem that makes supercomputers seem retarded compared to human children. One famous, specific example is the unambiguous identification of human faces. Infants do this perfectly almost as soon as their eyes start working. Last I heard, a computer wired to a TV camera still can't reliably provide face recognition good enough to open high-security doors.

Another Pattern Recognition difficulty for computers seems like a far simpler task than natural language translation: reading printed material, either alphabetic or ideographic (e.g., Chinese and Japanese). In a city we're bombarded by a million word messages in thousands of different type fonts and artistic styles, but a 10-year-old child knows instantly what all the messages are saying, which ones are about restaurants and food, which ones are road directions, which ones scream at you to buy a Yugo. Computers are still largely lost at identifying and differentiating among A B C D E F G H etc., unless the message is in a specially designed computer-readable type font, like the font they use to print bank account numbers on checks -- it's called OCR or Optical Character Recognition. I know scanning software has made significant progress with comprehending ordinary documents -- but last I heard, computers are still almost totally unreliable at this task.

And then there are handwritten messages -- a computer might just as well be blind, but humans send a huge volume of important messages to one another in handwriting. Your Constitution and Charter of Human Rights are very clearly printed and typeset, but the REALLY important messages, like

meet me in the gazebo tonight at 11

the NSA Supercomputer hasn't a clue.

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patfromch said...

funny, that, i am currently reading Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann. i cant tell you about the ending, otherwise i would spoil the fun but...

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Hmmm, okay, this thread has already collided with Goethe and Mann, both of whom wrote about the legendary thaumaturge Faust. (I just like that word "thaumaturge," don't ask me what it is.)

Then I stumbled across this image of The Walk of Ideas -- „Ideengang“ oder „Spaziergang der Ideen“ -- in Berlin DE, and immediately had two questions:

1. Am I blind? I've been to Berlin twice and can't remember seeing this 12-meter / 40-feet high stack of books.

Fortunately the sculpture was a "temp" for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, it wasn't there when I was. That had me worried for a few moments.

2. PizzaQ! Guess the two authors in this stack of Great Books whom Bob has never heard of before!

If you guess korrekt, please also tell Bob who the heck they are/were.

On my first visit to Berlin, my travel agent booked me into a hotel called The Savoy -- which Thomas Mann stayed in and mentions in one of his novels! (I don't know if they gave me his room. But everything Mann said about The Savoy is true -- it's a wonderful hotel! Rob some gas stations and convenience stores and stay there!)

Then Uwe asked me what the first thing I wanted to see in Berlin was, and I told him, and he drove me right there! It's one of the names in the stack of books. Guess which one!

Hey! What happened to Grimmelshausen? Why isn't he in this stack? Isn't he high-class enough?

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from Wikipedia:
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The Walk of Ideas is a set of six sculptures made for the 2006 FIFA World Cup football event at Berlin in Germany. The set of sculptures was unveiled on April 21, 2006 at Bebelplatz, a square near the Unter den Linden, at the entrance to Humboldt University. The exhibition was part of the event entitled, Welcome to Germany, the land of ideas and the opening of the exhibition was covered by reporters for the international mass media. The sculptures were displayed until September 2006.

Books

The stack of 17 books, shown adjacent, is more than 12 meters in height (40 feet), 35 tons in weight and took almost three days to build on the Bebelplatz; the construction began at the 21 April 2006. The artwork's name is "Der moderne Buchdruck" (English: "Modern book printing") and it commemorates German writers, poets, and especially, Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the modern book printing process c. 1450 at Mainz. Here is the full list of people, which are on each spine, beginning with the topmost:

* Günter Grass
* Hannah Arendt
* Heinrich Heine
* Martin Luther
* Immanuel Kant
* Anna Seghers
* Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
* the Brothers Grimm
* Karl Marx
* Heinrich Böll
* Friedrich Schiller
* Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
* Hermann Hesse
* Theodor Fontane
* Thomas Mann
* Bertolt Brecht
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe