Getting Books in English and Irish with Irish Audio

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. 

Find your councillor here

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. 

Placenames in Irish

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. 

I made this map of 100 Irish words commonly found in place names. Interactive Google Map of Irish placenames 

 

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.

Books with Irish text and Audio and English translations.

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. 

Here has a list of 13 free Irish audiobooks but I cannot find English versions of 11 of them.

2. Aesop's Fables in Irish 

English here 

Aesop a Tháinig go hÉirinn text 

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.

Peig Sayers has one book with an audio recording.

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

7. Looking at gutenberg Irish language section. Douglas Hyde, has the bilingual 

Beside the Fire: A collection of Irish Gaelic folk stories but I can't find an audio recording of it.

8. Mo Sgéal Féin, My Story by Peter O'Leary 

Irish Audio on this great site 

Irish text 

English text 

Séadna by O'Leary is also available

9. Scéalaíocht Amhlaoibh íLuínse fairy stories by Seán Ó Cróinín and Donncha A. Ó Cróinín

has audio on the same site but I can't find an English translation.

10. Graveyard clay by Ó'Cadhain has an audio version and a translation. But seems only suitable for fluent speakers. 

11. A choose your own adventure game with text and audio in both Irish and English https://darkdawn.irishimbasbooks.com/

If you know of other books with English and Irish text and Irish audio available to help people learn the language could you please comment them?

How many Unique Words are in a Text?

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.

Get the text in TG4 Subtitles

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.  

Results Of Fluent Forever Words List Blitz

 I made a claim that I would learn the 625 words in the Fluent Forever list in Irish over the weekend.

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. 

No Chemical Element has ever been discovered in the Southern Hemisphere

 

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. 

The next furthest north is Technetium in Sicily in 1937 at 38.1° N

More info on where and when discoveries were made on this wikipedia page

Map from here

Learning 625 Irish Words in a Weekend

 

I watched this video I learned 1000 foreign words in one day 

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?

Anki Deck for Irish

 

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.  

Wordle Words for Irish

 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.  

How Dangerous was Whaling?

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%. 

 Comparing that to Astronauts. 574 people have gone into space. 31 Astronauts have died. Including training/testing accidents. Which is 5.4% Though those astronauts died on some journey not just one. On this one data comparison whaling was as dangerous as being an astronaut.

 
The journeys were of 3 to 4 years. With very little if any visiting of ports involved. Which is longer than Mars journeys are projected to be.

NOAA Warming in US Graph

 There is a strange graph that is common in Climate Change denying circles.

The issues I see with it are

• It only goes up to 2011. More recent data should be included.
• The second access of CO2 is very weird. Generally 2 Y-axis graphs are frowned up and here it is confusing.
• The graph shows US but the claims around it are about the World. Which are two very different things.

The link in the graph no longer seems to be working http://ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/cag3.html 

The Noaa does have data for North America still and it shows warming in the last decade https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cag/global/time-series/northAmerica/land/1/6/1880-2022

Modernising Old Films

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.

The 15 year global warming pause that didn't happen

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

Combined Solar and Wind Farms in Ireland

I was talking to a wind energy guy and he expects loads of these wind farms to get solar added soon.

He explained to me 

• The cost of connecting to the grid is already covered. 
• Sun tends to be best when wind is lowest. Daytime and the summer both have lower levels of wind.
• These land owners do business with electricity companies already. Setting up that relationship is a big challenge that is already covered.
• Most of the land wind farms are on now is fairly hilly and not of huge value for farming. Herd reduction is not huge from solar farms.

There are about 300 wind farms in Ireland

The one solar farm we have generates enough electricity for 3600 homes. 

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.

An Abundance of Housing and TV that Promotes this

We know how to build lots of things cheaply. Things like clothes, toys, TV/computers and food have all gotten relatively much cheaper over my lifetime. These are mass produced, at a pretty high quality in factories with very specialised labour.

Housing however has not. The numbers who own by age 30 (when you want some stability if you are going to have kids) keeps dropping. One thing that could encourage cheaper housing is more programs that promote non unique one off builds. Instead of Ireland's most exclusive homes we should show the most inclusive ones.

Just Grand Designs where the house is fine and loads of them are made. “I can’t see the justification for gross spending on what are essentially basic requirements.” Kevin McCloud

Room to Improve where we build enough houses to give adults room to improve their lives by not having to silently ride in their parents house

RTE Home of The Year should be for a design of house that's had 1000 delivered this year and people can afford. Then have a decorating competition show between people who live in this same type of house. Thats fairer in terms of a competition and more practical help to people in how to decorate their own house.

There isn't a build your own car program. Grow your own food. Make your own pencil. As a hobby these are all worthwhile but the home building programs are not about a hobby. 

The reason things are cheap is the specialisation of labor and mechanized production. Why are houses different? And why does TV encourage this expensive way of building houses?

Meta analysis of Vitamins Open Dataset

Vitamins and Mineral supplements are a huge industry worth billions or euros per year. The evidence that they have benefits is a lot more controversial though. I first learned about this controversy around supplements from this overcomingbias post. 

This 2007 meta analysis Mortality in Randomized Trials of Antioxidant Supplements for Primary and Secondary Prevention concluded "Treatment with beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E may increase mortality. The potential roles of vitamin C and selenium on mortality need further study."

There have been meta analysis since including newer studies with slightly different conclusions. But this one is pretty well laid out and we can add newer studies later.

With any statistical analysis it is possible to find issues with what data was included or not. One way around some of these issues is to make a public dataset of the trials used in a meta analysis and allow a quick reanalysis with some trials removed (or added).

I have been reading this book Doing Meta-Analysis with R: A Hands-On Guide and by combining an open notebook of how the meta analysis was calculated and a dataset that everyone has access to I believe arguments over the effects of inclusions of some trials and methods used in a meta analysis could be made much more explicit and worked out faster.

There is an open collaboration platform for working together on datasets https://datastack.net/ I have no connection with it. But it seems a good place to work together to make supplement meta analysis easier.

If you want to help track down papers used in this meta analysis and put them in a format others can use please message me. I have started putting up a dataset https://datastack.net/cavedave/vitaminRCTs/

The Pandemic. Fathers spend more time with their children

 A good thing that came out of the pandemic is how much time fathers got to spend with their children.

According to this research in 2014 time focused on their children was 35 minutes a day for working fathers. Up from 5 minutes in 1974.

This means I've spent more extra time over the usual amount properly with my kids in the last 2 years than 1970s dads got to spend with their kids over their entire childhood. And that is just extra time due to the lack of commute or work trips.

I am not counting time off school here. As that was just so difficult for so many. Particularly for mothers whom the balance of minding kids during the lockdown hit disproportionately

How are mothers and fathers balancing work and family under lockdown?

And plenty of fathers still had to be physically in their jobs just to keep society running.

But on that one measure of focused time spent with kids my generations relationship with our kids will be much closer than that of fifty years ago or even ten years ago just from the extra time we got to spend together.

Buying the Rights to Franchises

People are laughing at the SpiceDao for spending $3.8 million on a book. But one thing has shown is a group of fans of a story can get money together to spend on that story. And this can be organised in a decentralised way. We don't need Disney to buy franchises, fans can do that now. 

The stories that are most undervalued in monetary terms compared to how much fans value them are probably 

1. Young Adult stories as people who read these at a formative time find them really important but traditional publishers don't. 

2. Sci-fi and Fantasy books as these are generally seen as less prestigious than standard literature 

3. Non English Language stories.

4. Books that are out of print as that can change who owns the rights or at least makes them cheaper. 

5. One from a few decades ago so the fans are now old enough to have some spare money. 

6. Choose your own adventure and adventure games are eve further out of mainstream critical valuation. Comics have been mined for IP value but they are such a rich and diverse medium I am sure some areas have been ignored.

Fans of a non english language YA sci-fi/fantasy series could for much less than $3.8 million get the IP rights to a story like this. Frequently the author will have the IP rights themselves and they could well be easier to deal with than a publishing company. 

I would guess once you have the rights the order of things to get the story more popular are

1. Republish the story on kindle. Effectively free. Give the author a lot of any money this earns so it is in their interests to encourage the steps below and to sell you the IP rights cheaply.

2. Set up a fan site including forums and fan fiction. Not expensive but it would take up some time with moderation.

3. Create a prize for fan art including images, fashion designs and comics and for fan fiction stories. Again this is very cheap.

If the original language can create enough interest in the franchise to keep these busy

4. Publish special editions of the book. With a new introduction, cover based on a prize winner etc. 

5. Translate the story. A high quality book translation is pretty cheap. Especially if you are not under strict time pressure. Cost 5-15k per language.

6. Copy steps 1->4 in the newly translated language.

After the first franchise you carried this out on you can reuse the website software etc. I would guess each additional franchise would cost under 50k to buy and do these steps with. Even if it was 100k that would still be 38 different franchises resurrected for the price the spiceDAO paid for the physical copy of a book.

And if any one of them really succeeds and becomes popular enough to spawn a movie a large profit could be made. But thinking about the worlds of fans I think just seeing their favorite characters again either back in print for a new generation, back with new adventures in a new series of books is really what most fans want.

Calculus Made Easy and Memorable

I made a website to help people learn calculus. I have taken a 1910 book Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson that has already been digitized and put on the web in a nice format at https://calculusmadeeasy.org/. This was created by nadvornix and other volunteers. This edition has added some memorisation reminders to the text.

The book is famous for being accessible to teenagers. Some of the text has dated in the century since. Martin Gardner created a new edition in the 1980s with some of the text deolded and some extra background chapters. Making similar updates might improve this book some more.

Orbit is a tool that tests your knowledge of text you just read. And then retests you on a regular basis. This vastly increases the amount you remember for very little extra time or effort. Some of the evidence that timed repetition aids recall is given in this essay 

Calculus made Easy and Memorable is on the web at http://calculusmadememorable.org/ and the code is here. 

Why put a new more memorable calculus book online? ‘1 million students take a college-level Calculus 1 course in the United States, at an average cost of $2,500. And then 40% of them fail.’ That is 1 billion loss a year in one country from failing one course. Anything that helps reduce that rate could be a boon.