Comments on: Who Cares About Old Italian Stuff?

By: Brooke

Brooke — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:48:18 +0000

Ha! I wish. Have fun! jerk.

By: jrsjr

jrsjr — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:35:35 +0000

Here’s a date to remember that’s almost related to the original topic of this thread, WSBK at Miller Motorsports Park – May 29-31. Heh.

By: Brooke

Brooke — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:01:58 +0000

I’m not sure. Firefox just does it for you. I use IE at home for some reason and have to rely on my speling skillz. I can say for sertin, I can always use the extra hepl.

That stated, I think the google toolbar doesn’t fall in the same category. It just reduces the number of clicks to complete the act of laziness. Now, if you were to translate the document manually from knowledge of the language, that’d be different. But then you wouldn’t have need of the babelfish or google translate services.

I do agree with the brain training. I leave that to sudoku, crossword puzzles and never writing down anyone’s birthday and trying to remember them at a later date.

By: jrsjr

jrsjr — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:41:13 +0000

The thing is, I long ago got in the habit of staying away from computer tweaks like the Google Toolbar because if you sit down to use a computer that doesn’t have it, you may suddenly find that you’ve sort of been lulled to sleep by it. A great non-computer related example of this same phenomena is the contact list on a cell phone. Because I’ve never had to manually dial the numbers on that list, I haven’t memorized the numbers. In fact, I’ve forgotten ones I used to know, This is all no big deal until I drop the phone in the toilet on a trip and then suddenly have no clue how to reach my own family members! I’m no Luddite, but I certainly have discovered that it’s possible to make yourself a little dull by overrelying on every available technological trick, particularly ones that are designed to free you from the burden of memorization.

Not to belabor the point, but there may be some fairly persuasive evidence forthcoming that indicates that old-fashioned (massive) memorization was gerat for the brain. Even mental arithmetic (rather than using a calculator) may turn out to have been really great exercise for the brain.

P.S. I should have used TinyURL to tame that stupid huge URL I published above. It wouldn’t have looked so idiotic had I just thought to do that. Note to self…

P.P.S. Does that Google Toolbar have enough smarts to advise you before you post a misspelling like “disover?” ;->

By: Brooke

Brooke — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:00:06 +0000

John, you need to disover The Google Toolbar!

By: jrsjr

jrsjr — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:18:08 +0000

Here, use this link to go to their homepage and see the babelfish x-lation of all their pgs.

http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.grancircuitodelsestriere.it%2Findex.htm&lp=it_en&btnTrUrl=Translate

By: matty

matty — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:17:55 +0000

That’s you, me, and Rye in a former life.