On January 21^st, aged 89, Marie Smith died and with her the Eyak language passed into oblivion.

From the Economist:

This universe of words and observations was already fading when Marie was young. In 1933 there were 38 Eyak-speakers left, and white people with their grim faces and intrusive microphones, as they always appeared to her, were already coming to sweep up the remnants of the language.

As the spoken language died, so did the stories of tricky Creator-Raven and the magical loon, of giant animals and tiny homunculi with fish-spears no bigger than a matchstick. People forgot why “hat” was the same word as “hammer”, or why the word for a leaf, kultahl, was also the word for a feather, as though deciduous trees and birds shared one organic life.

Most outsiders were told to buzz off. But one scholar, Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, showed such love for Eyak, painstakingly recording its every suffix and prefix and glottal stop and nasalisation, that she worked happily with him to compile a grammar and a dictionary; and Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker was allowed to talk when she brought fresh halibut as a tribute. Without those two visitors, almost nothing would have been known of her.

… in an age where perhaps half the planet’s languages will disappear over the next century, killed by urban migration or the internet or the triumphal march of English, Eyak has no chance. For Mrs Smith, however, the death of Eyak meant the not-to-be-imagined disappearance of the world.

Of late I’ve noticed that deleting mail on my GMail account doesn’t always work. Delete a message, check mail, and there it is back again. Very frustrating.

Google took some time to actually add the ability to delete mail. Their theory was that if you had enough storage, you shouldn’t need to delete mail. And to find anything, you can just search.

In theory, that works just fine. In practice, users like being able to delete some mails. The ones I like to delete, aside from junk, are the notification mails from on-line services. I want to receive them, I don’t want to keep them.

In actual fact, most of the email I receive in my Google account are specifically these mails. I don’t pollute my normal email address with them. Thus, the deleting issue causes me some problems.

It does make sense why Google struggles with deleting mail. Their servers are massively redundant, housed in farms. To my understanding their mail store is built on the same platform as their search tool. This would mean that multiple copies are kept of all your mail.

When you ask to retrieve mail, a parallel query would be issued to the farm. The results would then be collated and returned to you in the GMail user interface. Simple enough.

Except, when you delete a mail, it now needs to be deleted in multiple locations. So if you hit delete, it sends out the delete command to the parallel server farm. Being a delete, it may take a bit longer to process than a query, as the farm is optimized for queries. They are a search company after all.

So while the delete command is being run, my refresh command is run to find any new mail. Unfortunately, it would find some of the mail I had asked to be deleted, but had yet to actually delete.

At least this is my theory on why deleted mail keeps popping back into my Inbox. Even if my theory is right, it doesn’t make it less annoying.

Note: This is a recipe for chocolate cake that my mother made us often when I was younger. It is posted here so I can easily find it.

Put everything into the one bowl and beat for about 3-4 minutes on MEDIUM. May take a bit longer with a wooden spoon. Mixture goes into a greased (sprayed) ring pan for about 30 mins.

• 1 cup S.R. flour (sifted)
• 1 cup sugar (can use a bit less)
• 1 tablespoon butter/margarine (melted)
• ½ cup milk
• 2 tablespoons Bourneville cocoa
•   vanilla essence

Variations

Add an extra 2 tablespoons flour and add

Orange

orange rind
juice of ½ an orange

Lemon

lemon rind
juice of ½ a lemon

Over years of living in China, I have spoken to dozens of Chinese professors and experts, intellectuals and urbanites who give the impression of having their fingers on the pulse of the nation and an ability to interpret it for foreigners. Sometimes they do it very well, but if you really want to know about China, real China, there are few better ways to find out than a long conversation with an ordinary long-distance truck driver, barreling across the Gobi Desert.

Rob Gifford’s book, China Road, tells a lively story giving rich insight into the Chinese nation as he travels along Route 312 from Shanghai to the western boarder. Along the way, he educates the reader on the state of China today, gives snippets of its grand history and adds his own perspective.

Rumour is that search as we know it only solves 5% of the problem.

Pondering that means when I fail to find something, it has my attention. The specific query, that sparked this post, is practically impossible using Google.

Find all places in Melbourne
	that have tennis courts, with lights
	are available for hire on Tuesday nights
	and include hire cost per hour.
Order the results by descending distance from home

Can’t be that hard, surely.