I have noticed watching Ros na Rún has improved my Irish but how much could it really help?
Ros na Rún has 82 episodes a series each about 24 minutes long. You could easily watch one a day over about 3 months. But how much could you learn from that?
I extracted the Irish subtitles from one episode and it had 2964 words in it.
Over an 82 episode series that would be 243048 total words. Heap's law says that is about 9860 unique individual words.
Soap Operas are closer to how people talk than the words used in novels. And there is a fair bit of repetition as people spend several episodes talking about the events a hen night or something. But using words again means you are more likely to remember the word. Any decrease in unique words is an increase in the times you hear a word and your chances of remembering it.
It is easy enough to extract TG4 subtitles and audio if needed. Which allows you to recheck and learn any section you found difficult.
'Learn Irish with Series 26 of Ros na Rún' would be an entirely practical 3 month process.
It feels like Ireland cannot do much to help Ukraine in its fight with Russia. But I think that we can by bribing Russian pilots to defect with their planes.
This is allowed under the normal rules of war. Here is a story about Ukraine trying to do it. 'Russian aviators who were in the midst of bombing Ukraine to defect with their warplanes in exchange for $1 million a piece'. And it seems to have worked at least once.
Theres a good few wonk game theory analysis out there of the best schemes and how much it would cost. Make Desertion Fast
But at a simple level €10 million and an Irish passport would be pretty tempting for any pilot flying nearby to find they had an engine trouble and to ask to come in for an emergency landing. the passport reduces the worry of being repatriated back to Russia later. Of course not every pilot with the opportunity would defect for that money. But no plan is ever 100% effective.
A price of €10 million per plane to help bring about the end of the war would be cheap. And if the scheme does not work and no one defects it would not cost us any money.
We need a 3 meter high place to stand on. A 5km long lake. And a 2 meter tall line of lights. And here is why.
How would you show the earth is round? A simple way to do it is to use a lake.
If you had an easy to see object several kilometers away. And you were looking at it from a few meters above the lake. And then you moved down close to the lake surface and the object disappeared. That would show that the earth is actually curved and the curve is blocking out the object.
I can't find a 'show the earth is round art sculpture' anywhere. We would need a location with a long lake view. A height of a few meters that could be moved up and down safely. And a cool looking object that can be seen from kilometers away. Possibly a light buoy anchored out in the lake. or possibly on the other shore. But the main thing is it is easy to see at a distance.
You could add Tower viewers and some sort of explainer plaque for the calculations of how much is obscured due to the curvature of the earth would probably be needed. But at least initially most of the difficulty would be making an easy to see object in the distance.
An Béal Bocht is considered one of the classics of literature from Ireland. And of the Irish language in particular. It is a satire of the Irish language 'we had it tough' growing up books like that of Peig Sayers. It is here in the list of 100 important Irish artworks. And has an English translation called the Poor Mouth.
There is a great sort 2018 animated version here and Graphic novel with the same drawings. But there is no Irish language audiobook version. This is unfortunate as it would help learners and audiobooks in general are useful for disabled and older people also.
Mercier press publishes an Béal Bocht, their email is info@mercierpress.ie The email I send said asking for an Audiobook version was
A Chara
I am trying to learn Irish at the moment. And I really enjoy reading An Béal Bocht. The learning method I use involves listening to the audiobook at the same time as reading the book.
Unfortunately I cannot find an audiobook version of An Béal Bocht. Is there one available?
I discussed in my last post about how a book in 3 formats English, Irish and the Audio in Irish is a great way to learn the language. And that the Open Door series is the best resource with these three formats available that I can find.
I emailed all my local councillors and the ministers involved and they have gotten the Fingal librarian to agree to get more copies of these books. I emailed the politicians directly as I am trying to help local. librarians get more resources. Because these are digital versions of the box not just Fingal but all Irish libraries will have access to these books when they become available.
If you would also like to encourage this useful resource to be expanded please contact your local politician. As you can see above the wait times on the audiobooks in particular is long.
My last post was about why we would want books in Irish and English that also had audio. This post is about how we can get them to people
What I want
I want local libraries to get more copies of books with English and Irish text and Irish audio. Ideally E versions as lots of people don't have CD players anymore and getting to the library is hard for some.
What books?
The open door series is our best option. These are short books by the likes of John Connolly, Roddy Doyle, Marian Keyes and Maeve Binchy
Who to talk to
You can just ask your local library to get more copies of these books. Your local library can be found here . You can find, join and get contact information for them there.
Asking them to get more copies of these books might help. But realistically to get more Irish resources getting the whole library more resources would help. Which is politics.
Libraries are controlled by local councils. Which means your councillor can help get them resources.
The minister for Gaeltacht is Catherine Martin catherine.martin@oireachtas.ie
and for local government is Darragh O'Brien darragh.obrien@oireachtas.ie
What to say to them
My email that said
A Chara,
I am trying to learn more of the Irish language. My local library has great support to help me do that. But there is only one series of ebooks in English and Irish and with Irish e-audiobooks and they do not have many copies from it. This is Open Door series https://www.newisland.ie/open-door
If you could help my local Fingal library with resources to get more digital copies of these books it would help me, and others, in learning Irish.
Le meas
There are not enough resources for adult Irish learners out there. The Open Door series is a resource that libraries currently have. Sending a few emails might get them available to more people.
You pass loads of clues everyday to the geography and history around you. And until recently I had not been paying attention. I made a map and flashcards to learn the meanings of Irish placenames to help decipher signposts.
These words are used loads of places. So once you recognise them you pick up on them elsewhere.
In general you can look up addresses and town names on logainm if you get stuck. Corrections and suggestions welcome. If you know of someone who might find this interesting or useful please send it onto them.
I made an Anki Deck here of these words as well to help learning and memorising
Being stopped at traffic lights since I learned these words is a lot more entertaining.
The last post here was about how many words you would have to read in Irish to have seen a particular number of unique words.
What books exist with Irish text and Audio and English text available? This is for the Listening-Reading language learning method
1. Small kids books. Gruffalo and other Julia Donaldson books have been translated. These have simple repeating language which make them a good place to start.
There are about 700 words in each of these. Which means there are probably about 800 unique words in two of them.
Irish Audio for 8 of the tales, this is a great resource.
2. An Triail. This is a play on higher level Irish leaving cert. It has about 10000 words and has english versions, audio and a great sentence by sentence audio translation available. Though the level of Irish is pretty high so it is not ideal to start this learning process with.
3. Other kids books with Irish translations like Diary of a Whimpy Kid and Harry Potter do not seem to have audio versions.
4. The 'we had it tough' books. The Beal Bocht has a great animated film version but no Irish audiobook.
The Islander with Tomás O’ Crohan and 20 years a growing do not seem to have audio recordings.
5. The Little Prince the Irish translation does not have an audiobook yet. But hopefully it will soon. It is a great book of 15000 words 2500 unique ones. And the level is slightly simpler than adult books.
6. Open Door new Island books. These seem to be the best option at the moment. The ebooks and audiobooks are on the Irish libraries online borrowbox program. But not enough copies are available so you have to wait to get the english and Irish ebooks and the eaudio loans. Increasing the number of copies the library can lend is probably the simplest way to increase people's access to this reading and listening form of language learning for Irish.
There is 11 of these books in Irish, with audiobook versions and written by great writers in this series. For example Rúin by Patricia Scanlan
How much text would you have to understand to get a good understanding of a language? There is a formula to estimate how many unique words you would find as you read an amount of text.
Heaps' law lets you estimate after 10k, 20k etc how many unique words you would have seen. As the number of words go up how often you find a new word decreases.
For reference 3,000 words is enough to carry out a lot of everyday conversations. Fluent people know about 10,000 words. You can check the word counts of famous books here to put this graph into context. Graph code here.
Languages are not a list of words to memorise. You have to learn common patterns and grammar also. But as new words become rarer as you see more text you are also getting more repetitions of common patterns. Which will help you internalise those common patterns.
There is a collection of short books, by Irish authors, to help with literacy skills called Open Door. These books are about 10K words each. These books, by famous authors, together cover a lot of the language. If you read Patricia Scanlon's novella you would see about 2000 unique words. Roddy Doyles would bring you up to 2600. Marian Keys, Maeve Binchy, John Connolly and other great writes are in the series which will keep adding new words. This graph is an estimate of this coverage.
I bring up the series as the have Irish language versions. Including with audio. Irish does not have enough content available in English, Irish and with audio. I will discuss how audio and text might combine together to help language learning in my next post.
I have been watching Ros na Rún. Mainly because I am a messy bitch that lives for drama but also to learn Irish. The subtitles are really high quality. Here is how to extract them.
Go to the episode you want. And make the developer tools viewable at the bottom of the browser
Also make sure the subtitles are turned on
We want the network tab in the developer tools
Search for VTT (in the second search box). and open that file in a new browser tab.
This can show slightly funny as Irish is encoded in utf-8 and your browser might think it is simple ascii that does not have fada's. But if you save the page and open it in another editor it should look fine.
WEBVTT
X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0
01:21.800 --> 01:24.560
Tá siad ag ceapadh anois
gur seipsis atá i gceist.
01:24.640 --> 01:26.680
Ach tiocfaidh sé tríd,
nach dtiocfaidh?
Why do this? One of the best ways to learn a language seems to be to listen to stories and when a new word comes along learn it then. Linq uses this but Irish is not popular enough for them to have it in their options. Soaps and plays are also good as they are much closer to how people actually speak than literature is.
TG4 have gone to the trouble of making great subtitles. And they want people to learn the language. It would be good to turn this resource into something that helped people even more. For learners to watch an TV episode and have a list of new words and their meaning might really help their learning.
And I did it. Learn means lots of things. 1. able to generate and understand quickly 2. able to understand in context 3. able to work out the word but it takes a while. I have 90+% at 1 now. Maybe 5% that a sentence would really help. And probably 2% that I had to make mnemonics for. For example leaf is a boring child stuck in a hedge (Dull Og).
Without refreshing these words I will forget over time. But in a test learning this wordlist seems to help. I read a few ages of the kids book Diary of a Wimpy kid. About one word per page was in this list but I did not know previously. smell, ring and neighbour (boladh, glaoigh and comharsa) which left about 4 words I had to look up per page. Still a 20% improvement in, kids level, literacy in a weekend is good. Even if its only actually 10% less looking up time for common words for the next while it still feels like reading Irish is easier now.
I would guess I spent somewhere between 2 and 3 hours concentrating on this. And some more slack time on my phone. Which makes me think about all the time I waste on my phone. As well as Anki I also made some notes for the words I was getting really stuck on.
The Anki deck is here now there are better pictures and some errors fixed. But if you see anymore please let me know.
The furthest south a chemical element has been discovered is Bikini Atoll at 11.6° N where after a 1952 nuclear test Einsteinium and Fermium were discovered.
Could I do the same with the 625 words deck I made and described in my last post
Can I learn 625 words in a weekend?
1. Probably not. But no guts, no black pudding.
2. I probably know about half already. Even though I got a pass c3 25 years ago some must still be rattling around in the ceann.
3. I made the deck which means I have vaguely seen the words before recently. I was trying to get the deck made fast, not trying to learn them at the time.
4. I am saying this publicly mainly so the embarrassment of not learning these makes me work harder.
I am going to put aside an hour Friday, Saturday, Sunday evening. No twitter, reddit or chess on the phone only Anki.
I am going to fix up the deck as I go, some words now are wrong, some pictures confusing etc.
When I get stuck on a word I will create a context sentence for it and add that to the Anki card.
The deck is here. I have added more and synced since then but the page has not updated. If you download the deck could you let me know if gift looks like this?
I really enjoyed the book fluent forever and decided to use the method to learn a language. One of the ideas in the is to learn 625 common words quickly. They are listed here.
And then I realized I do know a language. Well kind of Irish to a C3 in ordinary level several decades ago. But learning these 625 words will at least get me past the 'I do not remember a word' level.
Anki is an app that uses spaced repetition to help you memorise words. The deck is there here. The deck is based on a smaller one in Spanish here. Some of the pictures might be changed to make them less Spanish. And some of the 625 are missing, the themes of Numbers, Months and Days of the week.
It would be a great help if you could point out any mistakes you find in the deck. Or are willing to help with coming up with sentences to add to the deck. The idea is that reading 'the big black dog is an actor' will get 4 words in the deck into your head. Which means over the course of session far more repetitions of words in context would happen.
There is a version of Wordle for Irish called Foclach
Matt Parker has a youtube video working out how many five letter word combinations cover 25 of the 26 English letters.
This is an exact cover problem and has been studied for ages. And theres some great follow up videos to that one on how to make quick version of the checker.
There are 23 letters in Irish used by Foclach (this dataset). There are rare words with v (víosa (visa),veist (vest), veain (van)) and other English letters but they are not accepted in the game.
I took this code from azirale's matt parker answering version and changed the alphabet to Irish and looked for words that had all 23 alphabet out of 25 letters in 5 words. I got an Irish word list from here. There are only 6500 words in it. With 910 being 5 letters long.
There are loads of word combinations where all 23 letters are found in 5 5-letter words. Some examples are
beola-nádúr-putóg-séimh-fíoch
bheir-camán-folús-putóg-éindí
cónra-fostú-geábh-pluid-céimí
cúige-díobh-pluma-óstán-sféar
féile-putóg-rúnda-íomhá-bácús
fíoch-maide-putóg-slánú-bréan
fórsa-geábh-modúl-péint-curaí
geábh-modúl-próca-stuif-éindí
méadú-oibrí-putóg-sleán-fiuch
oíche-putóg-ráfla-sméid-bunús
I thnk this implies the Wordle in Irish is easier than in English at least for a computer.
In Moby Dick he writes
'upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat’s crew'
A boat had about 30 sailors so this would be at least 1 out of 30 on 27 boats and 6 out of 30 on 3. So 27+18=45 out of 900 or 5%.
We can make old films look much more modern using AI. This is a great article on the technique used on early 1900s films
"Using a variety of publicly available algorithms, Shiryaev colorized and sharpened the film to 4K resolution (that’s 3,840 horizontal pixels by 2,160 vertical pixels) and bumped the choppy frame rate up to 60 frames per second, a process known as frame interpolation."
The 2018 film They Shall not Grow old using WW1 footage used similar techniques as described here. But even in 4 years the AI technology has improved hugely.
Archive historical footage is one thing. But is there a market for films upscaled in the same way? Would the Marx Brothers with realistic colours, smoother motion and sharper faces be watched by more people? I think the great Pathe news footage upscaled could make some great documentaries. The wired article goes into interesting detail about what counts as improvements and what is just being made up of the AI algorithm.
The value of these sorts of changes I am not sure about. The cost of them has been falling rapidly though. Due primarily in the last few years to improvements in the algorithms and hardware.
The recent crypto crash has put large numbers of GPU's onto the market cheap. In some cases these are located beside renewable power supplies for cheaper electricity. These tend to be remote locations with not great internet speeds. Old films can be moved around on USB sticks as they are not real time bandwidth dependant. At some point I think the price of Bitcoin will go low enough that a container filled with GPUs currently using, close to free, night time wind energy will have a greater return upscaling old films than mining.
There is a nine year old article that is doing the rounds online. about how there was no increase in global temperature for 15 years
Here is what jumps out at me that is wrong in the article and its current interpretation
1. It is 9 years old. And those posting it don't mention the clear increases since.
2. They don't mention the changes before 1998
3. Or indeed the increase in the 15 years the article says there was no increase
4. "it is expected to address the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record" 1998 wasn't the hottest year by 2013
You could claim the Hadcrut data, the IPCC use, is flawed in some way that means we should ignore it. But then you can't post the article as it uses Hadcrut data.
It is weird a 9 year old article has resurfaced and those posting it are only looking at the data for this exact 15 year period. And even then not actually looking at it. The code for these graphs is here
There are about 2 million homes and apartments in Ireland. Which would be 3600 houses* 300 farms is about 1 million homes. That solar farm is 25 hectares. If all the wind farms had the same size solar added thats 300*25 hectare is 7500 hectares or 75,000,000 square meters. 75 square km. Which is a fair chunk of land
But the solar farms would be spread out
This calculation is very back of the envelope. There are also all sorts of constraints about how much solar power can reasonably be put into the grid. Windless nights happen and electricity has to be available then so backup to wind and solar is needed. Also I am not sure if it is not just more efficient to put the same panels in Morocco but given the points above it is probable Irish Government subsidies will go to Ireland.
It seems a lot of solar power will be added to what are now wind farms soon.
