I had another tiny yet triumphal linguistic milestone this morning when I logged onto the internet. I opened up google news, which, because of my IP address, plops me down on the Korean version of the site by default. Normally, the only time I spend time on google news in Korean is if I’m intentionally and masochistically spending time there trying to decipher a headline or maybe (if I’m feeling ambitious) the first line of an article.
But today, I had the experience of a headline grabbing my attention and leading me to click through to the article. It said: “스페인 여객기 추락 153명 사망…19명만 생존.” It helped that there were a few keywords in the article that I easily knew: 스페인=(Spain), 명=(PEOPLE COUNTER), 사망=(dead). So it was about 153 people dead in Spain. More terrorism? I, the reading public, had to know more!
Of course, I went to google news in English, finally, to satisfy my curiosity. But it was cool to have the experience of “spontaneous reading” (as opposed to deliberate reading, I guess). Still, reading about airline crashes, whether in Korean or English, isn’t necessarily smart, right before an airplane trip.
And now, a completely unrelated thought. There’s been a lot in the news lately about McCain closing his gap with Obama in polls on the presidential race, and much commentary about how they’re “neck and neck,” or somesuch.
But Obama is still at 60 points to McCain’s 40, if you look at Intrade. Intrade is a “prediction market”–a place where people bet real money on the outcomes of future events–and a large number of studies have shown that prediction markets are phenomenally more accurate than polls at predicitons. So I’ll just keep watching Intrade and keep ignoring the polls–I will be surprised if that historical accuracy doesn’t again prove out.