Google Maps (China) tries automated toponym translation and fails.

Putting aside the question of how useful street-level translation really is for tourists rather than, say, conquerors (if you can’t read local language maps, how will you read the street signs?), this is actually 80% of the way there for pure transliteration items (a bit stilted). The main problems, in red circles, come from compound toponyms with attached literal meanings (X Pond, X Hill, X Course, Old X, etc.) or with target-language conventions already (Massachusetts X, Oxford X, etc.). Those require translation rather than transliteration, and there the Google bot enters uncanny valley with its vain attempts, which bothers people a lot.

All in all, there were only a few true full-blown errors. One was “Boston College”, which got translated as the phrase used for “Boston University”. Another was “Fort Independence”, which was just wrong to be carried with no syntactical change into Chinese. “General Edward Lawrence Logan” was parsed very badly, resulting in a transliteration of “General” as if some kind of Hispanic first name.

This is one of the nicer stations. Still looks like a 19th century dungeon, though; which of course, it is.


One of the nicest things about the subway stations is the porcelain-tile wall art. Since the trains are always late, one can spend a lot of time observing these oddities.

But have you noticed that it’s not trivial to make these pieces all line up and look nice — because the letter strokes make non-right angles? See how the tile alignments are fudged, near the bend of the letter Y on the left side? There is a long side of a triangular piece aligning with a side of a square piece, where the hypotenuse of the triangle has to be a little bit longer. So they just jam it in there. It sticks out a little bit.

And here is a letter V. Clearly when they do the tiles, they make each line of tiles for the \ strokes before the corresponding / strokes, because the \ tiles run longer.

These were all taken at the station called 23rd and Ely. Of course the station names don’t correspond to where the exits are. One stop at 49th Street actually produces exits mostly on the 47th Street. Another at 42nd Street actually opens onto 40th Street. Go figure. Actually, station names in Manhattan itself are almost consistently “wrong” in this way, which leads me to believe that Manhattan streets have been renumbered at some point.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued the architect Frank Gehry and a construction company, claiming that “design and construction failures” in the institute’s $300 million Stata Center resulted in pervasive leaks, cracks and drainage problems that have required costly repairs.

The center, which features angular sections that appear to be falling on top of one another, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2004. Mr. Gehry once said that it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.”

Gehry should stick to designing museums, and, the MIT planning offices should stick to practicality.

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