Category: miscellaneous

Here are the results of a small study to calculate the distance between words in english and other languages. The way the computation is done is by going through a list of basic english words, using the Google Translate API to get translations into other languages and finally computing a levenshtein between each English/translated pair of words. The final distance is an average.

This only looks at the spelling words, the next step is to look at their phonemes.

Feel free to use the datasets bellow and please let me know what you’re working on 🙂

language	distance from english
Swedish	63.88%
Danish	66.69%
Dutch	66.78%
French	69.31%
German	72.27%
Italian	76.89%
Spanish	82.14%
Albanian	88.61%
Croatian	90.74%
Estonian	91.45%
Polish	92.48%
Hungarian	102.2%

[flv:http://ben.akrin.com//wp-content/uploads/2010/09/trip_of_doom-summary.flv 580 450]

A while back I heard a show about the rise of methamphetamine in rural America. I didn’t make much of it until this trip. Across all the little towns we visited, signs of meth problems were blatant. While in Salt Lake some advertisement campaigns target meth, they are sporadic and other drugs are also addressed. In rural Montana & Idaho, they’ll paint anti-meth murals on the main town buildings. Meth signs are omnipresent, so are meth users to the more observant eye (not me).

I have to say I was pretty shocked by all this, I did not expect such a widespread and sustained presence. Rural America still has its well known charm but it seems to be struggling against the depravity left behind a drug strained social fabric.