Siri has a bit of a problem with foreign names.

From the comments on Macintouch:

"How much other Lion functionality depends on guessing that if you wave the rod with the star a crystal bridge will span the chasm?"

Shrinkwrap spacesuits and cockpit-service.

I said, “Find me a picture of Seven of Nine”.

Siri passed the request on to Google, who came back with this:

That’ll do. (source)

Dennis Ritchie has died.

"I feared that the committee would decide to go with their previous decision unless I credibly pulled a full tantrum."
    -- dmr@alice.UUCP

I just finished reading book 9 of the Destroyer series on my Kindle. From inside the book, I clicked to go to the Kindle Store, and my recommendations were:

• Six Easy Pieces, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations, and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, by Richard P. Feynman
• Bad Astronomy, by Philip Plait
• Genius, by James Gleick
• The Faith Healers, by James Randi
• The Varieties of Scientific Experience, Pale Blue Dot, and Billions & Billions, Carl Sagan
• Japanese Hot Pots, by Tadashi Ono & Harris Salat
• The Destroyer volumes 7, 6, 12, 3, 11, 17, 40, 31, 36, 37, 27, 44, 35, 34, 43, 30, 42, 26, 45, 39, 33, 20, 25, 49, 48, 46, 32, 38, 29, 47, 41, 28, 55, 50, 53, 52, 51, 57, 54, 56, and five more un-numbered books related to the same series by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir.

All praise for filling the list with things I’m actually interested in, but do you think maybe you overdid it a bit on the Destroyer novels, especially since the one I’m most likely to want right now isn’t on the list at all?

At a guess, the metadata simply isn’t up to the task of identifying series relationships, and I’m seeing the usual “you just bought a nice watch, so you must be interested in buying a dozen more nice watches” problem.

Also, while I’m pleased that I finally have my Kindle recommendations straightened out, I sigh in despair at the weeks of Android-app-recommendation cleanup I face after buying some apps for my Sony Tablet.

[Update: it seems book 10 is the only one in the first fifty or so that isn’t available for Kindle yet.]

1. Occupy Wall Street (read: “skip classes; someone else is paying for it anyway”).

2. Select generic slogan that would be just as meaningful applied to Congress, unions, or any local school board (“no more corruption”).

3. Use Google Translate to convert idiomatic English into ungrammatical Chinese that means something entirely different (“not corrupted any more”), and scrawl the resulting Hanzi characters onto a poster with a marker.

4. Feel proud of this dubious accomplishment.