February 16, 2010 
Thinking about a comment from Eden I tried the following experiment. I copied the second and third paragraphs from the Headmaster’s introduction on the Summer Fields website. I pasted this text into an online translation website. Firstly I translated the paragraphs into French, then that translation into German and finally back into English. At each translation, some of the meaning gets lost producing a ‘Chinese whispers’ effect. The text gets altered with quite charming results!
Always a strong school tradition held the summer fields. In the course of the five last years more than 40 scholarships and rewards in the important state schools won are. The talented personnel has enormous forces, which are infinite in the internal and outward obviousness of the class hall. The whole amounts to 70 mornings of reasons, and the playgrounds, the equipments are unusual. The sport, the music, the art, the conception and the technology, the drama and the services from TCI are from first order.
The summer creates remainders, which were committed at the Christian values, on which it was based, and we are very proud from the quality of the pastoral care, which was congratulated strongly in the newest inspection to ISI. We aim off to consolidate and develop an environment, the confidence in each child multiplied. More importantly the boys are happy, and a strong sense of family exists in the whole school. Summerfieldians leave us as the enthusiastic and full boys with interests and qualifications, them with them will continuously take the whole life.
Well you can’t say fairer than that! I particularly like the bit about the ‘talented personnel’ with ‘enormous forces, which are infinite’ – you have been warned! I was also pleased by the one sentence left largely unaltered.
This seemingly random mutation during translation is not unlike the process that occurs when organisms reproduce. Mutations that occur in living things tend to be minor – anything on the scale of the example above would instantly kill any offspring – but it is small random variations that allows natural selection to drive the process of evolution.
(Just a normal question) which topics should we revise during this time of hols (would it be thermal decomposition)?
I would certainly make sure you know the sheet “Types of Reaction” thoroughly & maybe “Gases and their Tests”. If you need something else, go through last term’s papers question by question and ensure that you understand all your correction. Email me if you have any difficulties.
thank you sir
I foolishly left the chemistry & physics modules at home so please can you publish a page on gases and their tests. Thank you again
You can download “Types of Reaction” from here as a .pdf file. It is not filled in so do ask if you need any help.
For the time being I only have this post that is about gases. I will see what I can do over the next day or so.
Hi sir, completely off science but I was just wandering what computer is the correct one to buy for music recording and what other kit would I need to make recording music work. Thank you
Any reasonable PC will do the job (try to get a decent processor, 2GB RAM and a good video card if you want it to run really well) well but if you can get one with XP rather than VISTA it is better adapted to the task. You can get a USB interface (I probably have a spare one you can have) to get the sound into the computer. USB only allows for two tracks at a time, if your computer has a FireWire port then you can get interfaces that allow 8 or more instruments to be recorded at once. In practice, you may not often need this much capability. Once the computer is set up there are masses of free gizmos available online for tweaking sounds, making new sounds and sampling. We can talk about it more next week or email me if you want a longer reply.
Sir, could you find me a good one that I can look at thanks?
From the two Freddies’ questions you can tell they will leave the summer fields enthusiastic and full. My favourite bit of the re-translation is ‘The summer creates remainders’, because, as any summer (i.e. someone who does sums) will know, when doing long division you don’t create remainders but rather carry on the sum to another decimal place.
Just something to say. A week today, March 6, my mother will be helping to coordinate the Oxfordshire Science Festival, in which people will attempt to break the world record for the longest ‘Chinese Whispers’,(Broad Street, Oxford) and use it to demonstrate how Motor Neurone Disease works as communication between nerves breaks down.