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.

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The New York City subway, in analogy to New York City itself, is an old rat-infested hole prone to breakdown and teetering on the edge of operability. Its layout and signage are illogical but somehow comprehensible, its margin for error is just not there … yet, somehow it manages to run. Dirty, smelly, hot in summers, and generally contemptible, it is oddly alive and orderly. People not only put up with it, they adapt to it.

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

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Hoho… It does suck compared to the Brain and Cognitive Sciences building right across the street.

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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