Joshua Bryce Newman

Check out an exceedingly creative web app (though one, admittedly, of rather dubious utility): Lost in Translation. In short, the app uses BabelFish, AltaVista’s online translation engine, to translate strings of text back and forth between English and a foreign language ten times through. As anyone who has ever used an online translation engine might guess, the results are rather interesting. Observe these sample results:

Before: I’m a little tea pot, short and stout.

After: They are a small POTENTIOMETER, short circuits and a beer of malzes of the tea.

or

Before: A cookie is just a cookie, but fig newtons are fruit and cake.

After: Biskuit has expert of biskuit, but Newton von Fig is fruit and hardens.

Honestly, this thing could entertain me for hours.

Postcript: As BabelFish ghost-wrote the majority of my Italian papers while at Yale, this exercise greatly clarify my grades in that class.

Frankly, I miss it. After six months hiatus from this site, spending all of my time just on work blogging (cyanpictures.com), I seemingly can’t resist the vastly more therapeutic personal blogging urge.

Still, as I certainly don’t have the surprisingly large chunks of free time blogging requires, I can’t promise that I’ll be updating this site as regularly as I have on prior blogging stints. And, to that end, I’m keeping this relaunch rather quiet – if I really do get back into the blogging rythm, I’m sure my old readers will gradually rediscover the site. If not, I’ll simply put the hiatus front page back up and pretend none of this ever happened.

Place your bets, and away we go.