Crushes & Hexes
It’s time for another edition of the Speech Tech blog’s regular feature, “Crushes & Hexes.” Appearing every Wednesday, we highlight companies, places, technologies, or people we deem praise-worthy, or cringe-inducing within the speech/tech/IT world. As always, your feedback is appreciated! Email us at blog@speechtechblog.com if you have a crush or hex item you’d like to see online.
Crush: Speech Tech Pro Translates The Four Questions
Why We’re Loving It: Murray Spiegel and Rickey Stein, friends who met at New Jersey’s Kol Dodi community choir, have translated the four questions of Passover into 300 languages. [That's 1200 questions...but I'm bad at math.] The story of how the two met and formulated the idea is even more endearing:
“[The two] might never have discovered how much they had in common if Stein had not overheard Spiegel talking about translating the Four Questions into Klingon during a rehearsal break.”
Spiegel, who works in the speech technology field, co-authored the book 300 Ways to Ask the Four Questions with Stein. And with Passover coming up (11 days, people!), the book should make a nice addition to anyone’s seder. The book sells for $39.95, and comes with a CD and DVD. And this passage from the previously linked article further indicates why Stein and Spiegel are so awesome:
…[T]he emphasis is on the link between culture and language. For example: How do you translate “leavening” into Gujarati (India) when the language has no word for “yeast,” or into Polish, which has five synonyms for “leavening”?
Hex: Mobile Phones…on Airplanes. Seriously? Why?
Why We’re Hating: Have you ever flown from New York to Florida? Minneapolis to Los Angeles? Anywhere? Great. The actual experience of flying is painful enough [delays, non-edible food, flat soda, movies like I Am Legend], and airlines are about to make it a lot less tolerable. In Europe, officials are beginning a testing phase that would let fliers talk on their mobile phones during flights. Great. Just great. Not only do I have to hang out with screaming babies, but now I get to hear the businessman next to me yelling at some poor secretary, and the 15-year-old boy talking to his girlfriend for three hours (”Baby, I love you…and my retainer…”) And who would I be? That 23-year-old that makes everyone listen to my L’il Mama “Lip Gloss” ring tone every time I get a call. AND, can you imagine if these phones were speech-enabled?! That opens up a whole other can of worms — “I SAID I WANT TO GO TO YAHOO.COM!!!!!” But, if you’re in the U.S., don’t fret. So far France is one of the only countries offering the service.
[Photos from DylanGreene & CartoonStock]
Or, y’know, **fret**:
http://www.gogoinflight.com/ — coming soon to an American Airlines jet near you (assuming the one near you isn’t grounded, that is).
How come no one seems to see that “In-flight WiFi” = “Skype-capable laptops on every tray table not in its full, upright, and locked position”?
Besides: Those seat-back, credit-card-enabled in-flight phones have been around a long time — and the only thing that kept the fat guy in the middle seat from gabbing away for all five hours of your flight to SF was the prohibitive cost of making a call from one of them.
Where, O where, can we score a Cone of Silence?
(Maxwell Smart, we salute you.
Yes, you had a phone in your shoe — something the TSA obviously is on the lookout for now — but you also knew enough to know the value of shutting the hell up.)
j.
Comment by JoshCRM
— April 10, 2008 @ 3:22 am
Dude, this is scary because people will be able to talk freely! No one used those phones because they were expensive — now, no one will care about yapping away on their BlackBerry/iPhone/etc. The apocalypse is surely upon us.
Comment by Lauren
— April 10, 2008 @ 10:09 am
[...] Pope-Mania here in New York today, and, soon, Passover time (Chag Pessach Samaiach V’ Kasher!). Anyway, religion aside, let’s talk about directory [...]
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— April 18, 2008 @ 2:40 pm