Truck and Barter: My Stats Profs Would be Proud

May 12, 2004

My Stats Profs Would be Proud

By Ian

This is just a humorous aside.

I used to want to be able to say, in as many languages as possible, "Where are the guns for my revolution?" (Please not the order of the possessives. Not "my" guns", but "the" guns. Not "the" revolution, but "my" revolution. I find this part very important.) So far, I've gotten it down in a few tongues.

But I think maybe I should move on to something a little more...me. So, I propose this as the alternative:

"Correlation does not imply causation."

I thought of this, and I've gotten a head start, after reading referrer logs and finding a site that generously linked to an interesting post from Kevin. A site in German.

Nun muß man eingestehen, dass Korrelation keine Kausalität ist. Somit bin ich vorsichtig den Schluß zu ziehen, dass Freiheit und Öffnung gegenüber anderen Ländern zu steigendem Wohlstand führt.

If I remember my college German, and that's a big if, this is saying that freedom/liberty and openness lead to increased prosperity. (NB: That took a lot of time and effort to hammer through my fuzzy banks. I'm not even close to competent to read a newspaper, let alone conversant. I've switched my language interests to Arabic. No mean letters about bad translation, please.)

So, consider that one down (Correlation does not imply causation: dass Korrelation keine Kausalität ist), hundreds more languages to go.

Anyone want to offer others?

Posted at May 12, 2004 02:09 AM

Comments

I encourage readers to use Google Translate to explore in comfort and simplicity the non English language blogosphere.

It's the closest thing we have to a universal translator.

Comment by Kevin Brancato at May 12, 2004 03:50 PM | Permalink

I'd concur. Though, I try to stay away from it on languages I feel I should have a grasp on. Good practice.

Comment by Ian at May 12, 2004 08:23 PM | Permalink

I can offer Italian versions of both:

"Dove sono le armi per la mia rivoluzione?"

I used "armi" (weapons) because there is no commonly used word in Italian for firearms/guns.

"La correlazione non implica la causalità."

I'm not sure if that last character will come out - if it doesn't, it's an accented letter a. In HTML, you can write it with an ampersand character, followed by "agrave" (without quotes) and a semicolon.

Comment by Dominic at May 13, 2004 10:31 AM | Permalink