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Someone should issue a deck of cards featuring characters from recent investigations. It’s clear who the king is, even clear who the queen is, generally clear who the jack is, and absolutely clear who the ace is!

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Tell me, how can you create a vaccine that initially requires minus 18 degrees, and then suddenly it turns out it can be stored at plus eight degrees? I thought that minus 18 was not just conjured out of thin air, but determined through experimental means, multiplied by an understanding of how temperature affects protein stability. But it turned out, both the understanding was wrong, and no experiments were conducted. In fact, I think the scientists just threw in the towel already.

https://meduza.io/news/2021/01/20/dlya-sputnika-izmenyat-temperaturnyy-rezhim-vaktsinu-mozhno-budet-hranit-pri-temperature-do-8-vmesto-18-eto-pomozhet-reshit-problemu-s-ee-dostavkoy

2016 year. Inauguration.

— Here are three envelopes for you. If things go bad – open the first envelope. If things go very bad – open the second envelope. And if things go really bad – open the third envelope.

And he places the envelopes in his presidential safe. Several months pass. The newcomer is failing at everything. He worries about being impeached. And he remembers about the safe with the envelopes. He opens the first one. It reads: “Blame everything on me”. Twitter is in full swing:

— It’s not my fault, gentlemen. It’s all your previous president. It was like this even before I came.

People believed and calmed down.

Some more time passes. Things again start to go wrong. The president starts worrying – it’s definite, they will kick him out. He opens the second envelope. It reads: “Initiate modernization”.

— And what have I been saying, gentlemen. What existed during the past president’s time— it’s outdated. Everything needs to be updated.

And then, things started to go uphill again. New innovations began to improve the situation.

And now, four years are coming to an end. Everything began to completely fall apart. Fearing that he would definitely be kicked out, the president opens the third envelope. And it reads: “Prepare three envelopes and leave them to your successor”.

Today is precisely that day.

Surely everyone has seen this already 🙂 These are actors Albert Ibragimov, Anisa Murtaeva, Karen Arutyunov. http://moviemood.ru/ru/voice.html

But I’ve always wondered – why don’t map makers enhance the voice interface to enable contextual dialogue? Technically, it’s not that complicated, right? I don’t know about Yandex.Navigator, but Google seems to be the same as it was about seven years ago. On the iPhone, when Google Maps is running, it’s unclear how to talk to the maps, and Siri doesn’t speak to Google. You could ask all sorts of complex things – like “how much faster will it be if I turn on toll roads?” or “Where are we passing?” or “What’s interesting ahead?”. I wouldn’t mind if the navigator would tell me something interesting about the places I am passing by and not repeat itself. Or about events that are happening right there and now, which we might visit.

I came across an interesting study on phonetics.

There is a recommendation for English pronunciation to lengthen the vowel before the last consonant if it happens to be voiced. For example, knees (kneees) or eyes (eyez), and not extend it as much when it’s voiceless, as in niece (neese) or ice (ice).

So, in the study an English-speaking announcer read out the non-existent word theep. It was slightly edited. They trimmed the [p] at the end to make it sound barely there, without a strong puff of air. And they cut [i] from one recording so that they got fragments of different lengths. As if the announcer read theep, theeep, theeeep, theeeeep, etc.

But at the same time, the final [p] was the same everywhere,

i.e., the announcer did not read it differently. They played the recording to Poles who were beginning to learn English. In Polish, as in Russian, voiced fricative consonants become voiceless at the end of a word.

90% of the novice Poles thought that it ended with the sound [p]. Regardless of the vowel length.

But when the same recordings were played to native speakers, in the case of a shorter [i] 100% of the natives said that it ended with [p], while in the recording with the longest [i] 90% of the native speakers heard [b].

Although there was definitely no voiced [b] there.

It turns out that we lack such a clever algorithm for analyzing vowel length, which also imagines things that aren’t actually there, while native speakers possess it. Russian speakers find it hard to learn to distinguish these subtle nuances of length.

Partly for this reason it is sometimes quite difficult to understand why it seems to us that we pronounce the word correctly – just like a native speaker, but for a native it’s two different words. Their ears are “tuned” to very subtle aspects of a specific sound, and anything slightly off — already sounds like an accent.

(I highly recommend googling PhoneticFanatic for those interested in the topic. The study can be searched by “Preceding Vowel Duration As A Cue To The Consonant Voicing Contrast: Perception Experiments With Polish-English Bilinguals” by Arkadiusz Rojczyk)

#English #pronunciation #notes

Is it just me, or has Siri become a bit hard of hearing? Could it be because I’ve had my iPhone X for three years and it’s getting a bit old? I say “Set an alarm for seven fifty today.” It sets it for one thirty. I repeat it. It sets for seven thirty in the morning. Stupid thing, seven thirty in the morning has already passed today. Half the time, I can’t even get a response with the standard Hi Siri. Yet, the microphone is in excellent condition, the recorder shows perfect sound quality.

Maybe it’s the coronavirus? Or is it the age? Or did my pronunciation lessons mess something up? Why isn’t she talking to me?

By the way, seriously, has anyone heard about any improvements to Siri in the last few years? Is this topic even being developed at Apple? Why, for crying out loud, can’t I set a simple alarm in a million different ways, especially given that millions of users worldwide have been trying for many years? With so much data, she should be understanding from half a hint by now.

Siri doesn’t support any music service other than Apple Music (while Amazon Alexa supports everything). When Siri first appeared, Apple announced an App Store for AI, so where is all this? Why, roughly speaking, doesn’t installing Facebook teach Siri to understand its terminology and respond to typical questions? It would be logical – install an app, get voice support; uninstall, it goes away.

I have been receiving scans of all envelopes that arrive in my mailbox for a long time.

And today, I found out that USPS offers a free service to forward mail to a new address. That is, you move to a new city, and all your mail follows you while you leisurely update your address across a million services.

Unbelievable.

I often drive past such places, they always bring a smile to my face 🙂 To the right there’s a mountain with little houses on it, and in order to connect this road to any other in that direction, you’d need to tunnel through one and a half kilometers

And, most importantly, this crossing has a pedestrian traffic light!