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What is your plan for self-growth in the new year?
Whether you will start it on January 1st or already doing it, what is it that is going to make you a better person?
For me, I decided to limit my two biggest timesinks, namely, Youtube and Reddit. I started several days ago and won't wisit them at all before I pass all the exams. Before, they were often an excuse for me to spend time basically doing nothing. Time to change that. (And yet, I'm doing the dame thing right now with ~, but oh well, it doesn't have content anyway)
Every time I drive into Seattle, even when it's sunny, it makes me mildly depressed. So I can see why you're ready to move!
And if SLC doesn't work out, consider moving up here to the Boise area. I say "area" rather than Boise proper because there's a shortage of places to rent in the city at the moment.
Good luck with the move! If you're coming down through Oregon, be careful. I-84 between Pendleton and the ID border sees a LOT of ice and snow, to the point where it gets shut down every now and then.
That happens mostly in January and February, I wanna say.
It's a gorgeous drive in June!
Congrats! Big move. 24 years in the same city... I spent 3 in Athens and went nuts, I wouldn't even imagine.
I posted a couple of days ago about social networks and timesinks, you may want to take a look at that: https://tildes.net/~tech/9a6/how_do_you_deal_with_procrastination#comment-2dp9
I think YouTube is one of the better ones when it comes to potential content quality. I certainly have had streaks of "unproductive time" watching endless eg. Numberphile videos but never came out of it feeling worse due to the quality of content.
Anyway, losing weight has been my goal for the past year. I made some progress but clearly not enough. A recent nasal surgery has helped me lose a few KGs more in a short burst, and I'm moving in January, so planning to change lifestyle habits quite severely which should help.
Which reminds me since "losing weight" is a popular new years resolution, I highly recommend the Withings Body Scale. One of the struggles of losing weight is not tracking the long term trend and getting demotivated by spikes when you weigh yourself at a slightly unusual time. The Withings scale tracks every weigh-in, lets you sync it online and shows you the overall trend.
(Sidenote, the fancy models tracking a bunch of other things are useless imo. Get the base Body scale.)
Well, no matter how good the content is, it's still wasting time in the short term. It's not what's needed for the exam, so in effect, it's the same as watching some asshole vlog. Furthermore, I think I've already watched it all: the Numberphile videos, the three VSauces and klicksphilips, Veratasium, and all the others. It just seems that I'm rewatching the same thing for the hundredth time. Lately, I've been watching Pewdiepie more than any of those channels,
I do this with a simple spreadsheet. I weigh myself once a week, on the same day at roughly the same time of day, and I enter that datum into a spreadsheet. I've been tracking my weight like this for decades. I even added a simple line graph to display the data over time. And, most importantly: noone apart from myself can see that personal data.
Of course, this only tells me when I'm gaining or losing weight. It doesn't magically give me the motivation and self-discipline to do something about it!
Having it done automatically does a few things:
As for who sees the data, I was going to post a graph of mine hete anyway so its not like it matters to me. Not that the data isn't private, it is PII after all. I'd be more worried about hospitals than tech companies...
But yeah. If you do it with a spreadsheet that works as well. Keep in mind though losing weight is a constant battle of willpower and reducing friction on these small things helps a lot.
I don't connect weighing myself to losing weight, though. Making it harder or easier to track my weight doesn't change the continual ongoing process of eating right. One is just a weekly ritual that takes a few minutes (less time and effort than putting the bins out every week!), while the other is multiple decisions made every day, day after day, week after week, month after month.
But, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, as they say. The important thing is that people have the ability to choose what suits them.
I can't speak for you or anyone else, but for me it's a tremendous morale boost to see the trend lines go down when I weigh myself. And seeing it day-to-day is also a morale boost even if I know it's all fluctuating.
That's why I recommend tracking the weight over time (which I think you agree with since you're doing it as well!). So my point is that reducing friction on that as well is important.
I imagine if you've been doing it for ten years it's long part of your routine by now, but this stuff matters if you're picking it up fresh. I wanted to track my calorie intake as well and couldn't really ever keep that up because I would constantly miss it/forget since it's actually something that requires me to put deliberate time aside for, and to do it often enough or remember a bunch of things I might have forgotten.
Whoever's going to invent an automatic, passive calorie tracker is going to make bank.
Back in the day, my mother used to work for Weight Watchers, so I know that daily fluctuations don't count, which is why I weigh myself only once a week. I'm looking for a long-term trend, rather than the current moment's data point. (And, sadly, my recent trend has been slightly upward - hence my statement elsewhere that I need to do something about it.)
Wow. That sounds like a lot of work!
I do it differently. I just choose to buy better food. I buy more healthy food when I'm at the supermarket and less unhealthy food, so that when I'm making meals during the week, I don't have the option to make something fattening. I can only use what I bought, and I only bought good stuff, so that's what I'm stuck with.
The hard part is when I'm out & about and want snacks. But that's just a matter of packing some dried fruit in my bag and not buying a chocolate bar. And buying sugar-free soft drinks (or water) instead of sugary drinks. And buying Subway instead of McDonald's. And grilled fish from the fish'n'chip shop instead of fried fish. And so on.
I don't bother tracking the kilojoules in each individual item. I've found that, if I just make the choice to go for the healthier option every time, the kilojoules and the weight will take care of themselves.
I am studying to get into a masters degree in linguistics. My aim is the Boğaziçi University, which is one of the most reputable in Turkey, and has the best linguistics department. A luvky coincidence is that they have an ongoing research project on language variation and contact, which is what got me into linguistics (tho I am appreciating the theory part as I learn more and more about it). The applications will probably be this March, and the admissions exam & interviews around May.
I need to get my sleep right. I am unlucky in that my family's sleep is twisted, and that affects mine too. I want to wake up around 9am. These days it varies as wildly as Bitcoin, between 8am and 1pm.
I want to land a literary translation job. I have written to a couple publishers already, to no avail. But I will try a bit more. Since when my student's loan finished I am penniless, and it started to really get on my nerves. But I don't want something that interferes with my studies, which are the most important thing right now, b/c I want to become a researcher and lecturer. Maybe I learn some PHP and do Wordpress...
I have put on quite some weight in the last couple of years. I'm a 170cm guy, used to be 55-60 kg, now I am nearly 75, which is just about overweight in BMI. I want to go back to 70 and keep it there. I dont want a six pack, but a straight belly, slightly bigger chest, and a tighter butt, and all that happiness hormones, whatever their fancy name was. Get rid of that newly-pregnant dude look, if you will. I got some gear yesterday, a pair of leggings, one of those flappy shorts, and a pair of running shoes. I think I will do a combination of bodyweight excercises, rope jumping, and jogging. But I will start with long walks for some time because I have been immobile for years and need some regular light excercise to "remove the rust".
What languages do you translate, and is it easy?
I ask because I've tried translating a Chinese article to English, and gave up halfway because of how poorly I was doing. The grammar structure still sounded Chinese even though it was in English. It didn't help that the article was about Chinese culture, and was full of words that have no equivalent in English.
I intend to translate from Italian and English to Turkish, fiction and non-fiction books. I don't have much experience yet other than a scientific article of 13 pages I did from English, and the first few pages of an Italian novel. I actually intended to take that last one to completion for practice, but when seeking for advice to find a job with a publisher, people were generally telling me (and some other resources I found agreed) to never start translating unless the translation rights are secured, so I dropped it. I had quite some stuff to study in the past few months anyways.
It is both, it is easy with one sentence, but the next sentence takes half an hour of research. Sometimes a single word is a huge rabbit hole. That is one hard part, but personally I find that part very pleasing. You get to know the text better. You learn a lot of things, mostly trivia. Another hard part w/ books is that they are a hundred or a few hundred pages, so that requires constant effor over a long period of time, so that is a challenge too. That'll be the hardest part for me if I can land a job actually. Apart from these, the thing you're referring when you say
is indeed a serious problem. For me, the key to more natural-sounding translations was reading the Quantum Mechanics and the Theory of Poetry Translation by Grigori M. Kružkov (https://doi.org/10.7202/003356ar). When I applied its principles to my work on the novel, the translations became way better in the target language. Initially, I was analysing sentences and translating phrase by phrase, which resulted in sentences which were not "fluent" and badly connected. But then, I switched to analysing the sentence more semantically than grammatically, and working out the translations as iterations of paraphrases in the target language. I read the paragraph before dealing with the sentences. These improved the results I was getting drastically.
Studying translation theory a bit in general is useful. Not much stuck with me from what I read, apart from certain principles and ideals of translation, which is the "meat" of it anyways.
When you say a sentence takes half an hour of research, what are you researching? Is it that you can't find suitable words, or you don't understand the cultural meaning? Also when you translate by paragraph, if you come upon some clever wording or a joke that references the culture, do you try to preserve that somehow or just skip over it? I find that if I paraphrase, I lose the original author's writing style - it is like I'm telling a friend about a story instead of letting them read the book themselves. Sometimes the missing style is obvious enough that I can tell a work was translated. For example, when I first found Ted Chiang's stories, I assumed the original language was Chinese based on the author's name. But when I found a Chinese copy, it just doesn't read right. That's when I realized the original story was in English.
Also why only from Italian/English to Turkish and not the other way around?
Lemme start with the easiest one:
Generally it's easiest to translate to one's native language. One's own writing skills in the target language is as important as their ability to comprehend and analyse the text in the source language. I've been using English one way or another since 15-20 years, and in the past 6-7 years, I've been using it every day, non stop (there isn't a day where I did not at least read a couple paragraphs of English text). I have quite decent writing skills, but still, I won't be able to produce text as good as an educated native speaker could. That's most important in literature, because you don't want the resulting text to sound "off", it should be just as nice and fluent as the writer intended it to be.
Both, and more. Translation involves lots of trade offs, and I want to be informed before making decisions. I try to identify whether phrases / words / etc have semantic or cultural depth, and when I identify such a phrase and can't really make out a proper translation, I go on and research about it, and then try to fish a word or idiom in the target language. Also, sometimes it's some theme to the book, and it's good to be informed about it beforehand. The current book I've worked on, which I did to test my capabilities and have some practice, for example involved lots of references to the Kalevala. I set aside a day and learned about it and made notes. It helps with clarifying the details, identifying more obscure references, etc.
What I meant by translating by paragraph is that, I take a paragraph to be an "atom" of text. Often, the sentences in a paragraph are tied more closely to each other, both grammatically and semantically, than they are to other paragraphs. I do the actual translations on the sentence level. I did it on the phrase level for a while, but that ended up being too granular and the resulting text was not fluent and was hard to read. So I started reading a paragraph first, then working on the sentences it includes, then control, then the next paragraph and so on.
Whether or not to paraphrase is a major trade off you have to decide on again and again for each sentence. As I said, analysing the context helps. What is the general style of the author is like? What is the style and type of this particular sentence? Are there any puns, significant rhyming, alliterations, other rhetoric that's hard to translate? How do the grammatical structures map to the target language? Should I try recreating all this, or explain in a translator's note? What have others done? For example, there is a book by Georges Perec called La Disparition, in which the letter "e" is never used, and that's an important part of the book. Or in many of Saramago's texts sentences are very long, and proper names, including God, Jesus, etc. are written w/o using capitals, which could be very offensive in some cultures. These and more subtler things require preparation, analysis and trade offs, and I think giving enough care to these aspects and respecting the author is what makes a good translation.
Take everything I say w/ a grain of salt tho, because, although I had lessons on translation for an academic year in the university (I studied Italian literature), my actual experience is not too much.
As I grew more aware of it, it became so that now the first thing I check when I grab a book is the translator, and who is it (sometimes the book has a bio of them, when not, skimming a few pages from the book helps). I've "blacklisted" some horrible translators. You see crazy translation crimes. One thing in particular is that, the translation should be from the original language to the target language unless totally impossible; i.e., if translating a text from Portuguese to Turkish, using English as an intermediary will always produce a bad translation, because so much is lost. I'll be able to spot that w/ authors I know well. Because you come to know whether or not the author would say a given sentence, and in what way they'd do it. Then there are those translators who're so full of themselves, they don't bother adhering to the standard language and to the style of the author, but add in their own stylistic decisions freely. The translation of Ficciones by Borges into Turkish is one such text, which I'm reading ATM. The translators, Fatih Özgüven and Tomris Uyar, the latter being a rather famous one, have utterly and consistently butchered the text. Thus, I have been struggling with this 200 page book for a couple weeks by now. I've lost the drive to read it. I suspect the book was not translated from Spanish, and the translation is infested by the translators' own literary style.
I decided this is going to be the year of taking care of my body again. It's in the same vein as weight loss resolutions, but I mostly think of weight gain as a symptom of a lifestyle that's gotten out of balance rather than a root problem in itself. So I'm going to focus on getting back in balance by cooking more often, eating plainer and more healthy foods, and going back to the regular martial arts training I did back when I was an athlete.
I used to be pretty athletic as an amateur martial artist when I was in my 20s, but ever since I got into a serious relationship and my career started ramping up, my intrinsic motivation to keep training went away. Couple that with the natural slowdown of metabolism and longer recovery times from exercise that come with aging into your 30s, and it's been a pretty precipitous decline in physical capacity. The wake up call was when I injured my back this year and have had to spend the past several months in physical therapy to be fully mobile again.
I decided I'm going to go in for consultation on eye surgery too. I've worn glasses since I was a teenager (in my 30s now), so it will be a pretty big change to have a complete field of view again assuming I'm actually a viable candidate.
2018 was quite possibly the worst year of my life.. This year I was pretty severely depressed as I was between jobs until May after moving across the country in January and short on money and had to rack up a substantial amount of credit card debt, and just when I finally got into a good rhythm with my new job and was getting back on track my wife left me mid October... that was a long time coming and it's a fairly clean split, but still sucked and was a wake up call.
Since then I've decided to turn my life around, spend a lot less time online as is apparent in my tildes/reddit posting habits, trying to get out more in my new city and just trying to do something each day to make me feel like I'm heading in the right direction.
I'll have a new apartment in about a month which is really needed as I'm currently in a half empty 2 bedroom and it's depressing, job is going really well. I don't weigh myself but I've tightened my belt 4 notches since my wife left and look and feel better than I have in years. I'm only 26 so I'll spend a good bit of 2019 dating probably as I definitely feel like I'm in the right state of mind to put myself back out there. For the most part I've just been eating better and walking a lot around work but soon I'm going to head back to the gym and do some real work. I got a state park pass for 2019 that I intend to use the hell out of when the weather gets a bit nicer. Overall my plan for self growth in 2019 is to just keep it one day at a time, not putting things off as much as I have been!
Finding a new, less shitty flat. And do a bit of sport (but I rather need to gain weight than to lose some).
Really want to get good at chess, at least for an amateur.
Started about 3 months ago. Always played strategy video games but this feels like the ultimate game, stripped from all the unnecessary fluff and it's just at exciting with the faster time controls.
Could be unrealistic seeing as most start learning very young, but I want to hit 16 -17 hundred on the online rating, 15 hundred being the average on lichess (the site I play on). It seems reasonable albeit and a bit optimistic but aim high as they say, would need to gain about 500 rating points.
If you love that about chess, you should seriously look at go. KGS is a good place to dip your toes in.
Ah cool, I got interested in Go when there was that match with alphaGo, but I struggled to find a good site to learn on. Thanks for this link.
Also, happy new year!
I'm going to get my first real job.
I'm planning to do a vocational course, starting next year. I'm effectively starting a new career (for only about the 3rd or 4th time in my life), and I need to beef up my resume.
It's also about time I got serious about losing a bit of weight. I need to change my eating habits.
I'm already getting back into exercising, which is long overdue.
Gotta clean up my business processes, too. I'm a one-man publishing company at this point and I've got some rough edges to file off and other things that really need some streamlining.
knowing myself, i can only take one or two steps at a time, if that. i want to be a more social and artistic creature. this means getting out of my house more. beyond that, i don't have wild expectations.