Misspelled Words

Today I saw--after a long time--a word that is often misspelled, and by implication, mispronounced.  Why?  Because people (or is it mainly women?  Haha; don't hate me unless you must!) often spell their words somewhat influenced by their pronunciation.

The word of the moment is arctic.  In other words, things and happenings described as in The Arctic.  The Arctic is a sea surrounding the North Pole.  But there is (or used to be, anyway; who knows what's going on now?) a thick layer of snow and ice over the water, which meant that many folk thought it was a continent.

The (wrong) spelling I saw, and which has kicked off this tirade (or Rant, if you prefer,) was artic, which is one letter short.  The missing letter is 'c', which is often not pronounced by our (American) fellow-countrymen--and -women--and so the word is frequently misspelled.

I wish I knew the etymology (the derivation and origins) of the word, because knowing that usually makes it easier to remember the correct spelling.

There was another instance of a horrible substitution, a wrong word that sounded vaguely like the right one.  But I can't remember what it was, so I have to reluctantly let it go.

Also, added to the end of 'Homonyms' : glimpsed vs. glanced.  I forgot to say, though, that glanced needs an extra preposition, like glanced at, or glanced through.  Glimpsed doesn't need an extra word, but you might want to use one for some extra purpose.  (I need to add some italics to this post; hope I remember!)

K.

Not in Our Stars

The fault is not in our stars, but in Amazon.  The time has finally come, for me to abandon (literally walk away, which I guess from the musical term andante, which means at a walking pace) Goodreads.

Goodreads was initially quite a reasonable idea: to be a website where readers reviewed the books they read.  But, inevitably, Amazon bought the site, and now it is powered by the online bookseller, whose programmers are less interested in making the site (and its software) robust and easy to use, than it is in driving up the reviews of books that Amazon sells.

I headed up to Goodreads earlier today, hoping to leave a glowing review of Nancy Springer, the author of the Enola Holmes series of books about the younger sister of the fabulous Sherlock Holmes, the first two of which were adapted into a fine movie on Netflix, starring Millie Bobbie Brown.  But I could not even find a reference to Ms. Springer, who is a celebrated author of fiction for young adults (and even their older cousins and aunts).

I suppose it could be that I was trying to navigate the site on my phone, rather than on a computer.  Amazon's programmers write such clunky software that it's hard to believe that it's ineptness.  No, they're trying to pull off some dastardly sneaky tricks on both their shoppers, and on these reviewers.

For years, they hosted reviews of their books right on their site.  But now they vet the reviews, and remove both the insulting ones (in line with 'hate speech' principles coming out of Washington) and unflattering reviews, which discourage sales.  All their books just cannot be excellent; at least some have to be clunkers.

I'm not clever enough to argue the case against allowing Amazon to police it's own reviews, but Goodreads is no longer any use to me.

Robotic Art Creation: AI

I'm finally talking about something that's been around for a year or two, namely art using Artificial Intelligence.  The basic principle--as far as I can understand it--is to give a program lots of images to 'eat' and digest, after which you can ask it to make a picture of a certain kind.

Obviously, it isn't enough to just shove a pile of images down it's throat.  The images have to be categorized.  For instance, if you're giving it geometric shapes, you've got to tell it: these are triangles, these are squares, and do on.  (This is an explanation for complete laymen; if you're an AI insider, you can stop reading now!)  So after digesting enough shapes, you would have succeeded in teaching it what the names of these shapes are.

This was back in the old days; modern AI Programs can be taught--what is the most exciting word for the guys who wrangle these programs--a girl!  (For some obscure reason, all the images of girls these programs are familiar with are those of girls with very ample chests, so naturally if one of these programs is requested to supply a picture of a girl, it's going to be one of a woman that appears to have been breast feeding for a while.)

The amazing thing about these programs is how they are able to combine different elements together.  Spitting out an image of a girl is not going to be a problem for a program that has access to a file with a few dozen pictures of various girls; similarly for an image of a tree, if it has a database of a few score of trees.  But you can see that it isn't simple for it to make a picture of a girl and a tree in the same picture!  The designer of the program must give it rules about how to combine images together in a satisfactory way, and they have certainly done this; this is why AI art is such an immense achievement.  Clearly, people have worked on the problem for a long while, and it isn't all the achievement of a single individual.

A while ago, I posted an image of a face I wanted to use as a selfie.  In the interests of complete disclosure, I made it clear that the image wasn't exactly me.  How did I pull it off?  Well, there's a free online app that combines faces, to produce a single face.  You give it two or more jpegs of faces, and it somehow averages them.  How does it do that?  It distills each face into a sheaf of numbers.  (For the moment, let's imagine that these are measurements, e.g. height of the nose, etc.)  Then, when it's given two faces, it just averages the numbers together.  Just as it can boil a face down into a vector of numbers, so it can "reverse-boil" the numbers back into a face, and that's what it did.  Now, I don't know exactly how all this is done; in fact, it's quite possible that some of the numbers aren't lengths, but angles, or ratios.  As you can imagine, averaging ratios might not work as easily as averaging simple lengths.  I'm just making sure we don't oversimplify the problem, and the solution.

Kay.

New Word for our Collection of Homonyms

 I have been reading an (incidentally, very interesting) lesbian retelling of the Robin Hood story, called Heart of Sherwood.  It isn't easy to get enough of the idiom right, to convey a feeling of distance in time, without confusing ordinary readers who may be unfamiliar with the speech of medieval England.  This author does an amazing job of it, but she confused the words "might" and "mite", which leads me to believe that she was using a voice-to-text program.  So there's another entry in our Homonyms list.

In addition, she presents some of the interesting historical characters of the time, including Eleanor of Aquitaine, in addition to the usual suspects of the Sheriff of Nottingham, and Sir Guy of Gisborne, and of course, Prince John.  (But, if I'm not wrong, it was the dastardly John who put in place the Magna Carta, which set out the rights of English serfs.)

The author of this book is Edale Lane, an American author from Mississippi, now living in Canada, reportedly.  She has absorbed the features of the speech of old England very well, at least as found in Sir Walter Scott, and other writers of historical fiction and fantasy of those times.  (Some modernisms have crept in--which I believe should be weeded out--but even with those minor flaws, this book is a remarkable achievement.)

Finally, I must place on record that Edale's characters have a vitality and a realness that are amazingly convincing.  It seemed to me that her depictions of Robin Hood, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian and Little John are all true to various types I have encountered.  Robin and Marian, in particular, seem to be the sort of women we would like to have known, but rather uncomfortably modern!  Marian's sunny disposition was exactly as I had imagined it all these years.  When I wrote an alternate Bronze Age story a decade ago, I too had to compromise my firmly anti-anachronistic stance, in order to permit a little of the intimacy that would drive the story along.  The story was Prisoner, though a more accurate title would have been "Slave".)