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Showing posts from January, 2016

How to count zombis in Japanese?

``I don't know how to count zombies in Japanese.'' I voluntarily translate mathematics exercises in Khan academy ( https://www.khanacademy.org/ ) from English to Japanese/German.  You can learn anything on Khan academy. When I translate the following question: Liliana used 4 dark power crystals to raise 14 zombie soldiers. She wants to know how many zombie soldiers (z) she can raise with 10 dark power crystals... In Japanese, when you count, you added postfix depends on what you count. I know how to count people: 1人,2人, 3人. But, is a zombie a person? A zombie could be an animal, then, I should count them 1匹,2匹, 3匹.  Wait, is a zombie a dead body? Then I should count them 1体,2体, 3体. A zombie could be a novel ghost, then 1柱,2柱... The question told me they are zombie soldiers. Soldiers are the same as the people, then 1 人,2人, 3人. In the end, I decided to translate them as 1人,2人, 3人, this means a zombie is a person. I like translation work like this, quite interesting. Y

How can we make the quality of social media's article higher?

It's been long time since I left a social media. The reason was I could not use my time well on the social media. I think there could be a good way to use my time on it. Today, I watch the following TED talk, and think about other aspect of the social media. Wael Ghonim: Let's design social media that drives real change http://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_let_s_design_social_media_that_drives_real_change I also felt ``polarization of people'' when I used the social media. People gathered on a theme/page. Most of the people already like. interested in, or know the subject. They are not completely stranger. If people feel this page is not exactly they ware looking for, they would just leave the page. In the end, I am more interested in a talk with friends at a cafe. Usually I and my friends have some different opinions and I could found something new. Even we found a different opinions, we usually continue to talk and both try to know and understand the difference. B

No virtual machine on Oracle virtual box and Avira

December 2015, I suddenly cannot run Oracle VM Virtual Box (5.0.10) on Windows 7, my desktop machine. It failed to create a virtual machine, the error message is the following. VirtualBox - Error In supR3HardNtChildWaitFor --------------------------- Timed out after 60001 ms waiting for child request #1 (CloseEvents). (rc=258) where: supR3HardNtChildWaitFor what: 5 Unknown Status 258 (0x102) (258) - Unknown Status 258 (0x102) I relatively less use the virtual machine on this desktop machine. But when I would like to use Linux, then I need to reboot the machine. This is inconvenient. I have another windows 7 notebook, but I don't have this problem. Today I found the solution. https://avira.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Avira-sollte-das-Ausf%C3%BChren-von-VMs-in-Virtualbox-nicht-blocken/160234-26744#idea-tab-comments The combination of Avira's process protection and Virtual Box cause this problem. Avira announced the real solution will be provided at the release of 9th of Feb

My interesting book: Reading ``Capital'' with the idea of entropy

More than a half year ago, I read ``Capital'' by Karl Marx in Japanese. I read only a half of the volume 1.  This part is talking about the value of things. My first impression was that this is quite complicated and I didn't get well. But, at one point, I thought that he might be talking about entropy. Based on such wild hypothesis, many part of the book became clear to me. He wrote that the value of the thing is defined by human thought. Someone thinks a thing has a value. The value is relative. However, all the values are generated by human's labor. Thus, the labor should be the unit of the value. I understand this book in this way. An example is a value of linen. When a tailor made a shirt by linen, the textile weight or property doesn't change, however, the value (price) has been changed. The value of shirt is generated by labor. Entropy indicates how the state is in order in physics/informatics. Let's think about cleaning a room. You can collect dust i