Additionally the Biden administration and other world governments suppressed the lab leak hypothesis which means that researchers seeking government funding had an incentive to support the official wet market narrative instead…
Sorry but translated works do not mean compromised work. Don’t disrespect translators like that.
Second, Learning a language is not a binary variable. It takes decades to master a language.
Finally, Your ability to appreciate a book is both a function of the text and your ability to comprehend the text. A translated book will give you better experience than the book in a language you are unfamiliar with.
"I want the original language to punch through a bit and be celebrated especially with idioms." is asking for a compromised, incompletely translated work, no?
Not at all. Take the example of the Bible. Most people don't want a Bible with everything translated to perfectly modern English. They have expectations of the work that are better served by using some archaic/historical terms, or even leaving terms like the tetragrammaton intact.
Going into university libraries fills me with awe and purpose.
Seeing a shelf of curated textbooks on a topic (eg non Newtonian fluid flow), gives me a feeling of depth. Each book represents years or decades of an authors life. And they condensed that wisdom into a textbook that could be consumed in a semester.
I would love to be a Knuth type character working in library and writing textbooks.
Yeah, there's a physical copy of my dissertation somewhere in the library system of my old school [1]. On a whim, I went to find it a few years after graduating, and it was (is?) in a special section of the library where there's nothing but shelves and shelves of old dissertations, going back for ~30 years (older than that, and they only have microfilm, IIRC). Thousands of black-bound volumes, with obscure titles on every possible subject.
Being in that space gave me exactly the feeling you describe. Each one is an artifact of years of a person's life, in book form. I guess that's true of any book, really, but it feels particularly acute for something like a dissertation. Every one of those unread volumes was a moment of long-awaited celebration (literally commencement) for a person. Humbling.
[1] I had to pay for that copy, but I digress. It doesn't kill the romance. I'm a sucker.
Unfortunately many universities are storing or downsizing their collections.
On one hand it seems logical that public ___domain books can readily be kept in digital form without taking up shelf space. On the other hand, the experience of browsing and serendipity that many find beneficial will be lost.
He gave up his US citizenship years ago but he explains some of the reasons why he left. I'll also say that the AI research coming out of Canada is pretty great as well so I think it makes sense to do research there.
As someone who grew up in Edmonton, attended the U of A, and had the good fortune of receiving an incredible CS education at a discount price, I'm incredibly grateful for his (and the other amazing professors there) immense sacrifice.
Great people and cheap cost of living, but man do I not miss the city turning into brown sludge every winter.
He's been there since he left Bell Labs, in the mid 2000's, I think. The U of A is, or was, rich with Alberta oil sands money and willing to use it to fund "curiosity-driven research", which is pretty nice if you're willing to live where the temperatures go down to -40 in the winter.
I am surprised at how close cooper became with the stampf family. There were others that found Bills body but only cooper stayed close.
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