From the nice folks at Lexus, on their new in-car control system:

Remote Touch is as natural to the driver's hand as a computer mouse.

So, expect to hear about a lot of car-pool tunnel injuries in a few years.

The sign reads:

　〜　喫煙されるお客様へ　〜
構内は禁煙になっております、
外の喫煙コーナーでお願いします。

Literally translated, it says: “To respected customers who (honorably) smoke tobacco: the premises have humbly become non-smoking, we request (you do it) at the outside smoking corner”.

The English translation is broken in a number of ways, but the most interesting part is “smoked visitor”, because it demonstrates that the translator wasn’t fluent in Japanese. The verb conjugation sareru is the passive form of suru, “to do”, so the first line really does say, “to visitors who are smoked”, but no one who speaks Japanese would interpret it that way. The context makes it painfully clear that this is the passive honorific form, and the honored visitor is the smoker, not the smokee.

So, we have a translation done by someone who doesn’t speak English or Japanese, better known as a computer. Without knowing how long ago the sign was made, it’s impossible to determine which software, but here are some modern attempts.

Babelfish (and anything else based on SYSTRAN, including Apple’s translation widget) produces something that’s almost English:

- To the customer who smokes -
the enclosure we have become prohibition of smoking,
we ask with the smoking corner outside.

Google’s attempt is poetic, but incomprehensible:

Smoking to be one of your
Smoking is on the premises,
In the smoking area outside.

Reverso, one I’d never heard of before, gives something that looks quite familiar:

I ask a smoked visitor for the yard at the outside smoking corner that smoking is prohibited in.

Paralink’s translator offers a nice contradiction:

Customers will be smoking on campus is a non-smoking, smoking outside corner.

Windows Live thinks different:

and smoking that is customer to premises smoking and: on the outside smoking corner in.

The Japanese site OCN has an interesting answer:

Premises at the outside smoking
area which becomes no smoking
to the customer who smokes, please.

Another Japanese site, @Nifty, gives this:

- Visitor smoked -
please give me premises in the outer smoking corner which is giving up smoking.

I won’t dignify Animelab’s web form with the term “translator”, but they give a link to Excite, which produced this:

?To the customer from whom it smokes?
I hope premises in the smoking corner of the outside that is no
smoking.

In the land of Your Mileage May Vary, I found this music video so cute that I went to Amazon to look for the CD/DVD single, and was saddened to find that it was a very limited limited edition.

But I have to say, I wouldn’t drink her milkshake. She has excellent taste in potato chips, but that’s just not how you’re supposed to eat them.

[this is the OP song from Kannagi, by the way]

Using a forced refresh inside a NOSCRIPT tag combined with Javascript that disables text selection and right-click is not a copy-protection system. It’s 30 seconds of mild annoyance, at best.

You see, browsers have this remarkable function called “save as”…

Spellcheck != editor.

[from the iPhone version of Spore Origins]

If you like anime, and you plan to visit Tokyo, you’d be a fool not to visit the Studio Ghibli Museum. Just make sure to buy your ticket before you get to Japan, to avoid the weeks-to-months waiting list.

This is a recommendation I can accept:

Here’s the reason I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the view from our hotel window in Tokyo, and why it took so much work to make one of them look decent:

Yes, that’s the in-room television set that was bolted to a stand right by the window. I worked around it in later shots by covering it with my black jacket, but the correct solution would have been to put a rubber lens hood on the camera and press it right up against the glass (this also works with aquariums, if the glass isn’t curved).

There were three reasons I didn’t use the correct solution: first, I forgot to pack a rubber lens hood; second, it wouldn’t have helped anyway, because the hotel next door was lit up for most of the night, spilling light across the window that would have washed out any shots taken from that position; and third, because my little tabletop tripod wouldn’t have fit on the window sill.