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Read a little bit of this. Explanation after the jump. Bleak but funny.
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Police examine genocide of longtime troops adviser
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MELISSA BLOCK, host:
John Wheeler was a invulnerability expert, a former tip central in a Air Force, a West Indicate connoisseur as good as Vietnam maestro who worked tough to get a Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall built upon a Inhabitant Mall here in Washington.
On Friday, John Wheeler's physique was detected in a landfill in Delaware. Authorities have been questioning a homicide. A bard James Fallows was a long-time crony of John Wheeler, as good as he joins me right away to speak about his hold up as good as his work.
Jim, I'm contemptible to listen to about your loss.
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS( Bard, A Atlantic Monthly) : we positively magnify my wishes to John Wheeler's family, yet I'm blissful to have a possibility to speak about his hold up as good as achievements.
BLOCK: How did we come to know John Wheeler? This was behind in a early 1980s.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes, in 1981, we published a book called "National Invulnerability, "
____Explanation: I have mentioned before the perils of relying on computerized translation -- something that is particularly popular in China, with results like this famous one, over a sign that is supposed to say "restaurant":
That is what we are dealing with in the "Inhabitant Public Radio" case.
Just now I was looking just now for further developments in the sad story of John P. Wheeler, previously here. Despite a lot of extremely far-fetched conspiratorial speculation, this is, according to interviews and videos from Delaware, increasingly looking like a more mundane yet all the more heart-breaking situation.
But one of the accounts I saw was from Vietnam. That wasn't so odd on its face, given how much of Wheeler's life work had been about the aftereffects of the Vietnam war. But this one, quoted above, was very odd indeed. It was a transcript of an interview with me, talking with Melissa Block, last night on NPR's All Things Considered. The English version of what we said is here; the "Inhabitant Public Radio" discussion, with me as "bard" and Melissa Block feeling "contemptible" to hear this sad story, must have been the result of a computerized-translation journey from English into Vietnamese and back again.
An interesting article in the Economist recently said that English was about to peak as a world language, because computerized translation would soon work well enough that people could stick with their native tongues. If this is any indication, it's still going to take a while.