Back at the face of the salt mine...

I pressed on last night and finished the text of the accounting job at around 11:15 pm, at which point my DSL connection went belly up (I suspect our ISP's DNS support went south, since the signal was there, but no names could be resolved). I figured this was the Great Bit Bucket™'s way of telling me to knock it off for the night, which I did.

I tossed and turned for, it seems, ever before finally falling asleep this morning. Fortunately, the cat decided to wake me up late, at around 5:45 am, instead of the more fashionable 2:45 am. I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't.

I posed yesterday's translation question on ProZ, hoping for a miracle, but there's been no joy so far. I did run across a web page on basic accounting concepts hosted at Washington State University that distinguishes "accounting depreciation" from "economic depreciation," as follows:

Definition of depreciation can be divided into categories, economic depreciation and accounting depreciation (refer to Alexis, Henry Ergas, John Small, 1999). The basic conceptual difference between them is that economic depreciation involves a process of valuation, while accounting depreciation deals with allocation.

Economic depreciation can be defined simply as the period-by-period change in the market value of an asset. The market value of an asset is equal to the present value (see Module 3) of the income that the asset is expected to generate over the remainder of its useful life. In contrast, accounting depreciation reveals the decrease in market value of an asset over a period of time.

This sounds like it's more on the right track, i.e., non-commercial entities don't allocate depreciation; instead, the asset's market value changes (and goes down as the income expected over the rest of its useful life decreases). I have a little time to mull that over, and will.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

...it's acoustics day!

I better hop to it.

Cheers...

Interesting coincidence...

It was just a year ago that I posted a home-rolled mnemonic to distinguish between offgassing and outgassing.

For the first time since then, today I needed to know the difference.

The good news: The mnemonic worked, and I chose the right word!

The so-so news: I felt compelled to go peek to make sure. (Which is why I know it's been exactly a year.)

Speaking of coincidences, I seem to recall a quote by Isaac Asimov - roughly on the theme that coincidences are constructs of our minds - that seems, in retrospect, to have popped up with alarming regularity in the past, but which I cannot for the life of me find on Google at the moment. Am I hallucinating (about the quote, not my inability to find it)?

Cheers...

On finished translations and coincidences...

In the end, I translated about 4000 target words today, in three documents. And despite the fact that the last thousand or so were distributed among 24 pages of figures, I still don't feel as drained as I did yesterday when I finished the accounting job.

Tomorrow, I plan to spend an hour or two checking over the acoustics, and will then "turn to" on the accounting. I already have a fairly large job promised for tomorrow, which is a welcome sign.

* * *Just a note about coincidences...

It's hard to argue against coincidence, especially when folks want to see the hand of Divine Providence, or Gaea, or Infinite Wisdom, or whatever behind it. Someday, I shall try my hand at a formal essay, but for now, consider the following (as background):

What is the probability of lottery numbers coming up 1-2-3-4-5-6, in that order, if there are 50 consecutively numbered balls to start with in a fair contest?

Probability theory says this can be expressed as the number of ways the outcome can occur (in this case, one) divided by the number of possible outcomes (here, 50 x 49 x 48 x 47 x 46 x 45, or 11,441,304,000).

So the odds are one in 11,441,304,000, or over 11 billion to one.

Okay, now what is the probability of lottery numbers coming up 7-2-43-24-50-16, in that order, under the same conditions?

If you do the math, you find it's the exactly the same as for the previous case. (Still only one way it can turn up; still the same number of overall outcomes.)

But now tell the truth: wouldn't your antenna quiver just a little faster if your local lottery came up with the first result? There'd be a temptation to say something like: "That's pretty amazing!" Yes? There might even be a temptation to think that the result was not random.

Stepping away from human-controlled events (conceivably, a lottery result could be interfered with), you can take the "Gee, whiz!" you find in the world and go on to build - or believe - elaborate theories that attempt to explain all of existence as something simply too complex to have occurred "by chance." However, at each step, you've got to realize that the "Wow!" factor is really the result of an emotional reaction on the part of the observer.

Where things get interesting is when you can prove the game is rigged.

And on that note, I'll close for now, go upstairs and unwind. I've been keeping the nose a little too close to the grindstone and the shoulder too close to the wheel lately. Any more such shenanigans, and I'll look like the product of the comprachicos.

Seriously, I need to rest.

Cheers...