Numo: Hedgehog blog

Automatic Translation for Romanian

Google recently added support for Romanian to Google Translate. As you can imagine, it doesn’t really work for anything but short stereotypical phrases. So I wouldn’t really use it for learning pick up lines, even less for translating a blog 😉

My personal favorite: “Software” got translated to “Produse de plastic” that means “plastic products” in Romanian 🙂

The good news: you can always suggest a better translation.

Turning a sphere inside-out

(from an ol’ friend’s blog)

Shift Happens

Nice presentation I found on the blog of an old friend.

My Penis and Everyone Else’s (BBC Documentary)

Human Computation (Google Talk)

Dangerous Knowledge (BBC Documentary)

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Boltzmann knew what it was to be in the grip of a beautiful and powerful idea. He once wrote that “What the poet laments holds for the mathematician. That he writes his works with the blood of his heart.” So we know that he was a passionate man.

Possible Origin of My First Name

One of my friends suggested that the origin of my first name is Catiline, a Roman politician from the 1st century BC.

While I don’t really know whether this is right, it is definitely more convincing than the other variants I’ve heard so far. The most common but least convincing one is that Cătălin is possibly the Romanian version of Katherine. I say least convincing since Ecaterin (Ecaterina) is the Romanian version of Katherine.