It's head-scratching time...

I am simply... stunned... at the idea that someone could take a Word document (one that had been submitted previously for translation), make revisions to it, and then create a PDF of the result and send the PDF for use in "updating" the original translation!

The fact that some of the text in the PDF is highlighted is not much of a consolation, because (a) there's no highlighting of any text that may have been deleted (and I've already found some), (b) there's no way to consistently move from one such highlighted revision to another (other than through the assiduous application of the Mark One eyeball), and (c) if I had a nickel for every time a client sent an update in any kind of revision mode (ranging from actual down-and-out revision mode to manual highlighting of changes) where the updated file didn't accurately reflect all of the deltas from what had been sent to me previously, I could seriously think about retiring to a small Caribbean island.

On the one hand, if I had wanted an easy job, I wouldn't have ended up a translator. On the other... why do some people seem to be almost aggressive in their thoughtlessness?

Pushing beyond the comfort zone...

I did a little digging to find out more about Acrobat's capability to compare PDFs, and far from being a new wrinkle in version XI, the feature has been part of Acrobat Pro since before the gawdawful interface redesign in version X.

So, in an attempt to avoid having to spend huge amount of time doing a line-by-line comparison of two rather hefty documents, I "printed" a PDF file of the original version of the revised PDF I received to work with and set Acrobat loose on the files.

The result is not a tremendous confidence builder. There are a lot of "false positives" (stuff that's highlighted as different, but really the same). The number is manageable, so that's not a deal-breaker. More serious is the fact that a number of what the comparison says are additions actually exist in both original and revised PDFs. These are not very numerous, and therefore, are also nothing more than annoyances.

This leaves two unfortunate cases that can not readily be identified without close examination: unmarked additions/changes and unmarked deletions. Given this overall state of affairs, I really have no choice but to do the work the hard way, line by line. There may be something I'm missing with this Acrobat feature, but I don't have the time right now to explore further, as more work hits the proverbial plate.

* * *I managed to surprise myself the other day at the Memrise site with a sub-three minute score in the $10K Memory Competition. One thing that helped me was running across some combinations of persons and objects that are still in my head. (Probably the most memorable was the image of a certain Lady Estelline—a sword-swallower who was on the bill with me at the short-lived American Theater of Magic, which made its home literally under Broadway back in the day—wearing a toga! Mamma mia!)

One curious thing I noticed was the recurrence of one particular pair of cards at the same point in the deck (Karl Marx (3S) eating chocolates (5C) while crammed in a dumb waiter). This naturally leads one to ask the question, "What's the probability of that happening?"

My back-of-the-envelope calculation starts with the fact that there are 52! ways in which 52 cards can be ordered (the notation is shorthand for 52 x 52 x 50 x ... x 3 x 2 x 1, which is a number slightly larger than 8 followed by 67 zeros... which is one heck of a big number!).

Two particular cards showing up one after the other in such a series can occur with the two cards showing up first, in which case there are

1 x 1 x 50 x 49 x ... x 3 x 2 x 1

ways of arranging the cards, or showing up in positions 2 and three, for which there are

50 x 1 x 1 x 49 x ... x 3 x 2 x 1

arrangements, and so on.

In the end, there are 50 different places in which two cards can show up, one after the other, without considering the order of the remaining 50 cards. But I'm getting off the subject, because there is only one way in which two cards can show up, one after the other, in the same position in the deck while the remaining 50 cards arrange themselves as they will.

So, since the probability of something happening is calculated by dividing the number of ways some desired outcome can happen by the number of ways all outcomes can happen, we take

1 x 1 x 50 x 49 x 48 x ... x 3 x 2 x 1

(moving the two special cards to the head of the line for the sake of convenience) and divide it by

52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48 x ... x 3 x 2 x 1

Fortunately, we can factor out and "cancel" quite a lot of these numbers, leaving us with (if I did the math correctly)

1 / (52 x 51) = 0.00038

or 0.038%, which is much less than one percent, meaning something like this can be expected about once in every 2600 well-shuffled decks.

So is what happened the result of a flaw in the site's deck-shuffling routine, or just the laws of probability asserting themselves with an enthusiastic Bronx cheer? Without doing a lot more research, we can only interpret the enigmatic words of the Great Unknown Sage:

The probability of being eaten by a Bengal tiger at high noon on the Fourth of July on main street in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, has been estimated at about 10¹⁷ to one, but once is enough!

(Translation: Just because something is unlikely doesn't mean it can't happen.)

I can live with Estelline in a toga, but Marx eating chocolates while sitting in a dumb waiter... is there a way I can "unsee" that, please?

Cheers...