Where do people find the time?

I'm downloading a talk from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and it occurs to me - while I'm waiting - that doing so at a rate of 1.4 MB/s (with excursions to nearly 2 MB/s) means the "pipe" Cablevision provides is big enough, and that consequently, downloads that insist on creeping along at 50 kB/s are being throttled somewhere along the way, perhaps even at the source.

Just an observation.

The fact that I am was waiting for the download to finish is no indicator of an ability to pause and watch the video of Clay Shirky discussing his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. That's for later.

I was, however, intrigued by what is apparently an excerpt posted at boingboing, wherein an effort is made to respond to the rhetorical question "Where do people find the time?" when they look upon an effort as seemingly large as, say, Wikipedia.

Shirky's thesis is that the free time that's cropped up over the past 50 years or so has created a "cognitive surplus" that has been absorbed by - you guessed it - television.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation worked out by Shirky and one Martin Wattenberg of MIT suggests that the whole of Wikipedia represents something like 100 million hours of human thought, which is a pretty impressive number.

However, people in the US watch 200 billion hours of television each year, which is the equivalent of 2,000 projects as big as Wikipedia.

And here, I'll go off on my own, and note that Wikipedia recently celebrated its 7th birthday, so, for the sake of argument, if we assume that all of Wikipedia is the result of only the past two years of effort, it turns out that, over the course of a year, we spend 4,000 times more hours watching the boob tube than working on Wikipedia.

Taken as a percentage, that's 0.025%.

To put that in perspective, if you work an 8-hour day and were told you could go home 0.025% earlier, you would shave about 7 seconds from your work day.

I need to get back to work, but this is an intriguing line of inquiry.

Cheers...

An experiment...

I had this nasty suspicion that I was spending a lot of work time doing stuff other than translating, so I dug out my electronic chess timer to run a little experiment.

For those not familiar with chess timers, they basically consist of two timekeeping mechanisms with buttons that start and stop them. Pressing the button on your side of the timer stops your clock and starts your opponent's clock, and your opponent's button works in a similar manner. As it turns out, the device measures how long each side spends thinking about its moves when it is that side's turn to move.

Anyway, my timer allows some incredible number of different time controls to be set, so I set it for 2-1/2 hours per side and started the clock on... call it side A. For the time I was translating, side A was, um, "ticking." If I got up for a break, or to help Galina with taking apart the bathroom light, or to walk Shiloh, or any other distraction, I'd punch the button on side A and then the clock on side B would start counting down. You get the idea.

So now, after 4 real-time hours, I have a data point: I've spent 2-1/2 hours working and 90 minutes goofing off. However you slice it, I managed to translate almost 1900 words.

FWIW, I have about 2900 words left in the job. Dinner calls. I'll be happy if I can whittle another 1500 words from what's left before hitting the sack.

Cheers...

A curious sentence...

I'm not sure, but I think I've run across the term экспертиза (ekspertiza) fairly recently in my career, and the first time I ran across it, there did not seem to be any ready equivalent term. From context, however, it became clear that the word describes a process in which a panel of experts reviews one or more documents and gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down based on some technical criteria.

I started to use the term "expert review" for this process, and though I initially met with some "opposition" (in the form of seeing other variations in files I was editing), I see it being used increasingly more often.

Anyway, this expert review process is, as a rule, not some kind of rubber stamp. Indeed, some of the saltier reviews I've translated are quite entertaining to read in terms of "how to effectively call someone a careless, stupid ass without actually resorting to namecalling."

Check this out:

Рекомендация xxx для этого yyy, ранее обоснованная, не встречает возражений, хотя приводимые подробные обоснования содержат некоторые неточности, возможно, возникшие при переводе.

The xxx recommendation for this yyy, which has been previously substantiated, meets with no objection, although the presented detailed rationales contain some inaccuracies that, possibly, occurred in the course of translation.

Now, since I only work from Russian to English, I can't possibly be the culprit. :^)

Still, it crossed my mind that everyone's a critic, dontchaknow.

There follows a list of these, un, inaccuracies, and you simply cannot imagine how hard it is to back-translate stuff that's not supposed to make sense! (I mean, if I do a good job, how do I know?)

Cheers...