In America, a federal judge has ruled that “Gruyere” cheese does not have to come from the “Gruyere region of Europe” (notice my bunny ears quotation marks) to be sold under the “gruyere” name. Continue reading →

Shells again this week… 😊

When three tonnes of oysters were stolen from French shellfish farmer Christophe Guinot, he found a solution: planting secret notes inside oyster shells to help police track down thieves.

Since Guinot put the method in place in 2016, he says there have been no new oyster thefts on his farm. “It has had a dissuasive effect,” said the 60-year-old, from Leucate in southern France. Continue reading →

Just couldn’t resist this.

The EU’s new plans on shell companies are unconchonable

Continue reading →

According to the team of researchers behind the British TV show Quite Interesting (QI), “if you want to use a photo of the Eiffel Tower for commercial purposes, you need permission if it was taken at night but not if it was taken in the day. The copyright on the tower and its image has expired, but the copyright on the tower illumination installed in 1989 has not”. Continue reading →

Saudi Arabian authorities disqualified dozens of camels “after owners manipulate their looks with hormones, fillers and facelifts” according to The Guardian newspaper this week in an article entitled “Camels enhanced with Botox barred from Saudi beauty contest”.

We’re on a theme here after last week’s giraffes… Continue reading →

Following on from this post, here’s another selection from the kookier realms of academia… 😊

Research Re: Search & Re-Search

(By exploring promising parts of the search space first, best-first algorithms are usually more efficient than depth-first algorithms.) Continue reading →

A Monday smile in French today. Bonne semaine ! 😊

Un surveillant pénitentiaire dit à un prisonnier :

Félicitations, vous allez sortir de prison pour bonne conduite !

Ah bon, mais je ne comprends pas…

Pourquoi ça ?

Je suis entré pour excès de vitesse et je sors pour bonne conduite ?

In the news lately (apart from the COP26 conference), and especially at a number of translation conferences, we’ve seen plenty about artificial intelligence, so I really liked this take on the matter…

Continue reading →