Pappus' plane

Using numbers 1,3,4,6, and basic arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and parentheses, obtain and expression that evaluates to 24. You may use only these numbers and only these operations. Every number should be used exactly once. Numbers cannot be concatenated, i.e. you cannot use 13 or 146.
http://en.braingames.ru/?path=comments&puzzle=442

A Megamind is lost in the mountains. He is standing on a path, shouting for help. Finally, he sees a local approaching. Megamind knows that the locals can be knights that always tell the truth, or knaves that always lie. He also knows that the path leads to the village of knights in one direction and to the village of knaves in the other. The problems is that the knaves are also hateful of Megaminds, and will stone him if gets to their village. How can Megamind ask one question and determine the right way to go?
http://en.braingames.ru/?path=comments&puzzle=443

A certain type of bacteria double every second. If we put one bacterium in a Petri dish, the dish will fill in 1 minute. How long will it take to fill the dish, if we start with 2 bacteria?
http://en.braingames.ru/?path=comments&puzzle=431

more on http://en.braingames.ru/

Okay... so I don't know how many of y'all there are in here, but I have a favor to ask, specifically of native US English speakers for whom the word "y'all" is a significant part of your idiolect. I would just do an APB for Southerners, but I'm not sure that's as accurate anymore... anyway.

Thinking about your everyday, informal manner of speaking, I would like you to read the following sentence, and then pluralize it:

You don't know what you're talking about.

Just leave the result in a comment, along with any demographic information you wouldn't mind leaving, up to and including age, gender, location, etc. And try not to read other comments before submitting yours. This is the best way I could think of to ask this question, and there is a reason behind this that I'm contemplating.

Thanks in advance, y'all!

http://xkcd.com/682/

Hey, guys. I'm doing some writing about Hindi films for an audience who I can't assume has any prior knowledge of the topic or of the language, and I'm running into a bit of a problem. I'm trying to give a brief translation of the movie titles just in parentheses, but I don't really know what to do when the movie title is just the name of a character. Is there some kind of set protocol for what to do in this case? I'm not sure how much space each movie I'm mentioning is going to get.

Hey all,

I want to send a postcard to the parents of a friend of mine, which I stayed with for two weeks over the summer. Could someone correct my spelling/grammar mistakes and maybe point out what would be hard to understand?! Thank you!


Здраствуйте,
Много приветов из моего родины, Кливленд. Я здесь во время каникул у мамы (она очень нравится платок, спосибо) и мои браты. С рождеством и новым годом!

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2006

Commenting on "Three-syllable Mom" (12/28/2009), Brooke observes that

You can hear a genuine three-syllable "Mom" in the opening title sequence of the kids' television show, "Phineas and Ferb." The character Candace says,

"Mmm-MO-om, Phineas and Ferb are making a title sequence!"

The pitch matches the stress, low-high-low. The first syllable is brief but clearly discernible. I suppose one could argue that it's not a true syllable, since it lacks a vowel, but the word is certainly three distinct beats.

Thanks to the magic of YouTube, I can bring you the audio (performed by Ashley Tisdale) as well as a still of Candace in mid-complaint:

A pitch track of the "Mom!" part shows that there are indeed three notes, though not really three syllables (or three "beats"), since the first pitch is clearly limited to the initial [m] (just as Brooke describes it).

(Click on the image for a larger version. The mis-tracking of pitch at the edge of the high note may be in some sense real, being caused by some laryngealization that may actually cause temporary period doubling.)

The pitches are roughly 250, 614 and 464 Hz, which (relative to A 440) are approximatly b, d#", and a#'. (Given those values, the first note is about 18 cents sharp relative to a concert A, the middle note is about 22 cents flat of tempered concert D#, and the third note is about 8 cents flat relative to tempered A#. But different choices of measurement points or regions would give different numbers.)

Here's a plot for the "Phineas and Ferb are making a title sequence!" part of the complaint, where there are (what I take to be) two more replications of the same pattern:

Contrary to the opinions of several commenters on the earlier post, there's no sign of a rise on the final note, either in the "Mo-om!" phrase or in the "…title sequence" phrase.  That agrees with my own impressions about this pattern. But they may be right about their own variants — I repeat my earlier call to send me audio clips, either of other renditions in popular culture, or in your own performance.

This one Japanese person has the link to my website on his link list, and now as the URL has changed, I would like to inform him about it ^^
The problem is, I don't know Japanese too well (i only know some words / sentences)...

The message should be something like this:
"Hello! The address to my website has changed. Could you please update the link? The new address is: *my website's URL*.
Thank you!"

I would be very grateful if someone could help me :)

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2005

A piece of fluff on the op-ed page of the NYT on December 28: Philip Niemeyer, "Picturing the Past 10 Years", with an item a year for 2000 through 2009 in twelve categories. The last two categories are words: Nouns and Verbs.

There are no statistics here, just someone's judgments about what was hot in each year; others would no doubt have made other choices. For the last two categories:

Nouns:

2000: glitch
2001: news cycle
2002: freedom fries
2003: spider hole
2004: friendly fire
2005: truthiness
2006: chatter
2007: surge
2008: hope
2009: Auto-Tune

Verbs:

2000: I.M.
2001: outsource
2002: download
2003: punk'd
2004: Swift boat
2005: Google
2006: text
2007: blog
2008: go rogue
2009: crowd source

We've commented on a few of these on Language Log (truthiness, for example) and used some of the others (crowd source).

Anyone know of any decent Ukrainian resources online? Dictionaries, grammar references, etc, in English or Russian? I need it for a tattoo.

http://myblogisagoodblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/2009-in-books.html

I can not remember what I was reading at the start of the year, so I'm just going to make an educated guess at a point on my facebook list and talk about all the books after that.

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Pretty cool, I guess. Since it was written in the 30s it is actually a lot better than it seems.

Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
This book was very long, and wonderful. Everything George Eliot ever wrote is marvelous and this is no exception. The book is almost ruined by the ending, but only almost.

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Despite the main character being a stalker weirdo, this was a good book. I felt much better about everything when Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself declared the main character horrible. It is also a magical realism book that has no magic, which I was kind of disappointed by.

A Fraction of the Whole, Steve Toltz
I loved this book, but the other people I made read it didn't seem to. In the first chapter the narrator's father takes him out of kindergarten and instead teaches him about Nietzsche, so that together they can 'rescue Nietzsche from the Nazis'. It is massive, sprawling, ambitious and wonderful.

The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
Very dated. But his conversational tone and harrowing tales of the British working class make this ride on the straight talk express well worth it.

Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
I adored this book. It vacillated between the stomach churning and the... well, nothing else. But it was always sublime. Due to the idiosyncrasies of my then book collection I had not read much stuff from centuries other than the 19th. This book made me resolve to change that.

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Very long, and it is debatable whether or not that pay off was worth the investment. That coupled with the infuriatingly sophomoric theological essay at the end cause me too put it somewhere towards the bottom of the best books of this year. Due to the idiosyncrasies of my then book collection I had not read much stuff from centuries other than the 19th. This book made me resolve to change that.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Suskind
The plot was suitably twisted and depraved. I liked the way scent was described in this book, very clever. However, the characters apart from the main one were very underdeveloped. And the main character was a total sociopath, making relating to him difficult. Entertaining, but nothing special.

East of Eden, John Steinbeck
This book was excellent. One of those books you want to just stop reading every so often because you can't believe something so marvelous can exist in print. Everything about it was perfect, and it would have been the best book I read this year if not for...

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
This is probably the best book I've ever read. It is a standing refutation of anything that Dave has to say about magical realism. The plot, the characters, the seamless integration of the magical realism nonsense and the underlying statements about politics and history were all masterfully handled. Read it, and after you do, make other people read it.

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
This book has risen considerably in my estimation since I finished it. I found it difficult and boring, but it is a lot better than that. It is all the goodness in Ulysses, none of the absurdity, and only 150 pages instead of 900. I like it and intend to read a lot more Virginia Woolf.

Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
This book was too depressing with no profound insights to make it worthwhile. It was well written and a very thorough exploration of loneliness, but it led nowhere. Two stars. Out of one hundred.

Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
Pretty funny, occasionally poignant. Would benefit from several more readings.

Everything is Illuminated, Johnathan Safran Foer
Very good book. I think it considerably better than his other book. It occasionally veers off into things that make no sense. But of all of this year's authors, this one is the most able to elicit strong emotions with a few short sentences. There are parts of his books that are unspeakably beautiful, and I think this one is more consistently excellent than the other.

A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
Pretty good. Perhaps I did not get as much out of this book as I should have, as the last 100 pages of it were read on the way from Brisbane to Singapore. I was so tired.

Junky, William S. Burroughs
Ho hum. No doubt it was shocking when it was first published a million years ago. But it just didn't grab me in the same way Trainspotting did. And since I explicitly read this book because I wanted more books about heroin, comparisons were inevitable. In a world without Trainspotting this book would be much better.

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
I very much liked this book, it was the first conventional novel set somewhere familiar (like England, instead of India) that I had read since East of Eden and I appreciated the reprieve from the post-modernity of all the others. This is the only book I both began and ended in Prague. I don't know how much this artificially inflates its score, but I love this book. My favourite character was Julia, and I hope any movie versions that exist cut Sebastian's role for the sake of hers.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Wonderful book. This is the sort of thing I was expecting with Love in the Time of Cholera. I can see lots of Midnight's Children in this book. If only South America were as interesting as the subcontinent.

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
The story of how this book was written is as amazing as the book itself. I'm not sure where the tension in the book comes from, since you know from the beginning how it ends. But it is very compelling, and keeps you interested right to the inevitable conclusion. Well worth the read.

Notes From Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
It is interesting to see the course of most 20th century fiction being set in this slim, 80 page story. The nihilism, alienation, loneliness and purposelessness of existence that permeates the books of people like Franz Kafka and Albert Camus is here in kernel form. I liked it.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
A very important book. What it lacks in literary merit it more than makes up for in message. Everyone should read this book, especially stupid westerners who defend the Taliban's attitude towards women as being acceptable given the culture of that part of the world.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Johnathan Safran Foer
Still wonderful, but has more of a tendency to rely on silly gimmicks instead of superb writing. Since this book still contains copious amounts of the latter he gets away with it, but I can understand people getting frustrated with this book. As with Everything is Illuminated, there are parts of this book that are incredibly lovely, just not as many.

The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
As I write this I know that I am going to mention the fatwa, and that is the problem with this book. It has become inseparable from the fatwa and is impossible to judge in isolation. This book is nowhere near as good as Midnight's Children, and in a world without the Ayatollah, Salman Rushdie would be known as 'The Midnight's Children Guy' instead of 'The Fatwa Guy'. It is a shame that, at least for the moment, he is better known for The Satanic Verses. Having said that, this is still an excellent book. It is about immigration, however much people want to make it about Islamic fundamentalism.

The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
Awesome!

Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincy
Another heroin book. I'd put it somewhere between Junky and Trainspotting. I really enjoyed it, but the author is a pretentious wanker. Sort of, quote things in ancient Greek level of wanker. And as they say in the Odyssey 'νόσφι Ποσειδάωνος· ὁ δ᾽ ἀσπερχὲς μενέαινεν.' Am I right?! Happily some clever person provided me with a translation of all that stuff in the back.

The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien
Awesome!

Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Another one that has grown on me after I finished it. The main character spends the entirety of the book drunk, and it is written in a disjointed, vague way that leaves out the important events. At first I found this frustrating, but upon reflection it was also a very good way to convey the experience of the main character. A very clever book.

That's it. I am currently reading Return of the King and Swann's Way. Wait until this time next year to find out more about them.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2004

Following up on "The order of ancestors" (12/24/2009) and "Sexual orders" (12/27/2009), I need to note one other important recent paper: Sarah Benor and Roger Levy, "The Chicken or the Egg? A Probabilistic Analysis of English Binomials", Language 82(2): 233-278, 2006. And several readers have pointed me to an older tradition of corpus linguistics that comes to a different set of conclusions about binomial ordering: Mishnah Keritot 6:9, etc.

Here's the abstract of the Benor and Levy paper:

Why is it preferable to say salt and pepper over pepper and salt? Based on an analysis of 692 binomial tokens from online corpora, we show that a number of semantic, metrical, and frequency constraints contribute significantly to ordering preferences, overshadowing the phonological factors that have traditionally been considered important. The ordering of binomials exhibits a considerable amount of variation. For example, although principal and interest is the more frequent order, interest and principal also occurs. We consider three frameworks for analysis of this variation: traditional optimality theory, stochastic optimality theory, and logistic regression. Our best models—using logistic regression—predict 79.2% of the binomial tokens and 76.7% of types, and the remainder are predicted as less frequent—but not ungrammatical—variants.

B & L take their examples from a number of tagged corpora, using a method described as follows:

The corpus search was conducted on three tagged corpora: the Switchboard (spoken), Brown (varied genres, written), and Wall Street Journal (WSJ; newspaper) sections of the Penn Treebank III, available from the Linguistic Data Consortium (Marcus et al. 1993).1 These corpora were searched for constructions of N and N, V and V, Adj and Adj, and Adv and Adv, where both X and X were part of the same XP. The search yielded 3,680 distinct binomials. Using the beginnings and ends of each corpus’s search results, we took a total of 411 input binomial TYPES—distinct sets A, B for some binomial sequence A and B—for analysis. This total consisted of 120 nouns, 103 verbs (including gerunds and participals), 118 adjectives, and 70 adverbs. We did not include binomials formed from personal names, because idiosyncratic factors frequently determine the ordering of names in a conjunction (however, we did not exclude the names of political entities such as countries or states). We discarded binomials formed with extender phrases, such as and stuff, as they are not in theory reversible (i.e. politics and everything cannot be everything and politics). For each of these binomials, we noted whether we considered each to be frozen (for example, by and large and north and south are frozen; honest and stupid and slowly and thoughtfully are not). We then searched for all occurrences of each binomial and its reverse in all three corpora, and included all such occurrences in our final corpus, yielding 692 tokens. Like Gustafsson (1976), we found that very few of the binomials occurred more than once in the three corpora. Most of those that did are frozen binomials, such as back and forth, which occurred forty-nine times.

Their technique has several important advantages.  For one thing, the use of parsed corpora allows them to avoid apparent binomials like dogs and desserts from the string "…selling hamburgers, hot dogs and desserts", or dogs and columns from the string "a most unique newspaper, one that carries no headlines, photographs of cats and dogs and columns with names like 'The Downieville Dragnet.'".  And this approach provides a valid sample of the binomials (common or otherwise) that happen to occur in a chosen chunk of text.

It also has an important disadvantage: the amount of text analyzed is only about three million words.  692 binomial tokens is thus a rate of about 231 per million. This is pretty common — it's about the same frequency as the word America, or the sequence "from a".  But their observation that "very few of the [individual] binomials occurred more than once in the three corpora" is both expected, and telling.  The nature of LNRE ("large numbers of rare events") distributions guarantees that the resulting sample will present a very noisy picture of the population frequency and the population order statistics for individual binomials. And this guarantee is honored by the facts, as can be seen in the following table, which compares a random selection of their 411 binomial types with counts from some larger corpora:

	B&S	COCA	LDC News
English and Americans	1 0	7 6	10 8
Connecticut and Massachusetts	1 0	15 23	140 190
slowly and thoughtfully	1 0	7 0	3 0
abused and neglected	1 0	86 18	336 57
acute and correct	1 0	0 0	0 0
approved and commended	1 0	0 0	0 0
strawberries and bananas	1 0	2 4	10 9
oranges and grapefruit	1 0	9 8	59 19
warm and fuzzy	1 0	154 5	1121 6
fruits and nuts	1 0	54 14	192 27
T-ball and soccer	2 0	1 2	2 2
pinks and greens	2 0	13 1	18 10
gold and silver	4 0	428 165	3287 548
principal and interest	5 2	55 33	980 787

(In each cell, the first number is the count for the cited order of the binomial, and the second number is the count for the reversed order.)

Given that their model assigns weights to 20 "semantic, pragmatic, metrical, phonological, and word-frequency factors that may affect the ordering of binomials", and that the patterning of these factors in their 411 binomial types is far from a factorial design (as expected in real-world linguistic data),  this amount of noise in type-token relations will certainly degrade the predictive power of the result.

As they observe, "Because our full logistic-regression model uses a large number of constraints relative to the size of the dataset, it is not possible to draw detailed conclusions from the specific values of resulting constraint weights". This would be true even if the estimated frequencies of binomial types were reasonably accurate — it's much more of a problem given that their counts are nearly all 1, and thus almost meaningless as a basis for predicting population frequency. (This is especially true if the model is tested via cross-validation — as far as I can tell, though, they tested on their training set, making the reported 77% performance surprisingly low. )

At the start of this post, I mentioned an older corpus-linguistics tradition that also must deal with the problem of binomial order in a small corpus (about half a million words).  This older tradition, without access to generalized linear models, draws a different sort of conclusion from the fact that binomial order is hard to predict and apparently variable.  Thus

“This is the same Aaron and Moshe to whom G-d told, ‘Take the Jewish people, all of their hosts, out of Egypt.’”  (Shemot 6:26)

The Tosefta at the end of Masekhet Keritot asks:  Why does Aaron precede Moshe in this verse, whereas Moshe usually precedes Aaron? […]

[T]he Torah, one verse after another, switches the order of their names.  When it speaks about the actual Exodus – “to whom G-d told, ‘Take the Jewish people, all of their hosts, out of Egypt” – where Moshe was central, it lists Aaron first – “Aaron and Moshe.” (Shemot 6:26) Then, in the next verse when it talks of speaking to Pharaoh – “They are the ones who speak to Pharaoh the king of Egypt . . .” – it lists Moshe first – “this is Moshe and Aaron.” (Shemot 6:27) This switching of the names actually teaches a lesson. By listing Aaron first concerning the area where Moshe was central and listing Moshe first in the area where Aaron was central, it makes it clear that both had an equal role in the mission.

Or again:

Dealing with the duties and the relationship of the child to its parents:

a) Honor your father and your mother, (Exodus 20:12; Deut. 5:16)

b) Ye shall fear every man his mother and his father (Levit.19:3)

[In the matter of honor due to parents, the father is mentioned first; in the matter of reverence due to them, the mother is mentioned first. From this we infer that both are to be equally honored and revered. …]

And:

4. "You shall revere every man his mother, and his father"

Rabbi Yosi says that whoever fears their mother and father observes the Shabbat. He wonders why the mother is mentioned first, and Rabbi Shimon explains that the mother does not have the power to instill fear that the father does, therefore she is mentioned first. Rabbi Yehuda says that just as heaven and earth were created simultaneously, both parents are equal in fear and honor. Rabbi Shimon tells us about the sanctification below during mating and the supernal mating above.

Some similar arguments are advanced about sheep and goats, pigeons and doves, and perhaps other binomials.  But here, I think, we have an even more problematic instance of testing on a training set with small type and token counts.

Hi all~

I've had this groovy song for years, but I have no idea what the lyrics mean. It's essentially one verse repeated over and over again. It's part Algerian Arabic and French - I think the French means, "Me and you, western woman, I'm sick of this", but I am not educated on Arabic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z_Lcs57vSM

Merci^^

Dear friends,
please, could you explain me in which cases we use prepositions IN, ON and AT with the word "workplace". I've seen different variants but can't find any rules explaning this.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2003

Snowclones, in Geoff Pullum's early formulation, were defined as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists." Of course, the field of snowclonology has moved beyond "lazy journalists" to a consideration of phrasal templates used by the broader populace, in varieties exhibiting a wide range of creativity. But journalists who have many column inches to fill remain a fertile source for the more clichéd strain of snowclones.

Sports journalism might be particularly prone to such hackneyed phrase-making. Case in point: in his most recent Monday Morning Quarterback column for Sports Illustrated, Peter King wrote that Carolina Panthers receiver Steve Smith "leads the NFL in guts." The sports blog Deadspin had already been tracking King's "funny little tic of expressing abundance by saying something like, '[Person or Team X] leads the league in [Intangible Category Y].'" Deadspin's Tommy Craggs then laid out the damning evidence of King's endless snowcloning.

A sampling:

Person: Andy Reid, 2002
Leads the league in: "boring press conferences"

Person: Andy Reid, 2004
Leads the league in: "brains"

Person: Norv Turner, 2007
Leads the league in: "coloring the color book between the lines"

Person: Bill Parcells, 1997
Leads the league in: "decisiveness"

Person: Tanard Jackson, 2008
Urged to lead the league in: "effort"

Person: Tarvaris Jackson, 2008
Leads the league in: "good news"

Person: Steve Young, 1992
Leads the league in: "diplomacy"

Person: Matt Schaub, 2009
Leads the league in: "normalcy"

Person: Tony Romo, 2009
Leads the league in: "smiles"

And so on and so forth. King, Craggs concludes, "leads the league in boiler plate."

Later on in the same MMQB column, King said of New York Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis, "He's been the definition of shutdown corner." Deadspin editor-at-large Drew Magary, at his other blogging home Kissing Suzy Kolber, snarked thusly:

He defines shutdown corner. You look up that term in the dictionary, where you will not find it because it isn’t an entry, and you will see a picture of that man. Only you won’t, because that’s not actually true.

Geoff Pullum has termed this type of cliché a "snowclone of linguification" (e.g., "Look up W in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of X"). And King has been guilty of such linguifying in the past. In January, when King declared that Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb "was the definition of clutch," Magary wrote:

If you remember last week, it was Brian Westbrook and Ed Reed who were the definition of clutch. Now, McNabb defines clutch. Next week, someone else will almost certainly define clutch. This is why, when we define words, we use OTHER WORDS to do it. People are notoriously unreliable for lexicographic purposes.

Perhaps the next time King needs to assert a player or coach's dominance in a notional category, he should lay off the league-leading and the defining.

This is, surprisingly, rather like futurebird's post immediately below. I'd like to prove or disprove that if f_n is a sequence of functions in L^2[0,1] whose 2-norm goes to zero, then f_n(x) goes to zero for almost all x. I seem to remember that there's a counterexample, but I can't remember what, in fact, it is. Ideas, hints or blatant solutions? Thanks!

Let me show you it! My mother didn't seem to understand why I was taking so many pictures of her eBay stuff. But it's fascinating! Especially to somebody like me, who has never been organized. Why couldn't I have inherited this methodicalness and follow through?


When we visited a month ago, she had sold over 9,000 books.


The warehouse on the 2nd floor of their new home. Those tubs are full of paperbacks.


She has also sold hundreds of puzzles and craft supplies.


The shipping department. My dad built that table for around no dollars.


I believe she claimed to be uncharacteristically relaxed about her record keeping.


This inventory record shows books by a particular author.


And this is a chronological payment record, and a page of customer locations. ( Here's a bigger image if you want to see. )

So that is just one of the things my mom is doing with her so-called retirement. My parents are... busy.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2002

Noted by John McIntyre, from "Eastern University demolishes nearly century-old log cabin", The Daily Local News (Chester County, PA), 12/26/2009:

Indeed, the top suggestion for the string "incect" from Word 2007's spelling correction system is (plausibly enough) "incest".  Apparently Sam Strike (or his editor, if any) is one of those people who unwisely allows spelling correction to run without human supervision.

As people who had ever spent a night in a U.S. hotel or motel and are curious enough to look into nightstand drawers know, there is a Bible published by Gideons International in each room.

Among other things, it contains translations of the verse John 3:16 in 27 languages understood by more than three quarters of the world's population. I find some of the choices a little peculiar. Do you?

http://www.sporcle.com/games/leob/Gideons_languages

Hello dear guys!

I need some urgent help. Would you be so kind to translate the following phrase into Swedish?

"I know that you've loved me since you were a child and I'm really grateful for that. I wish all your dreams come true. You are a very gifted person, an outstanding girl. Hope you get everything you want. Love, N."

Thank's in advance!

Today's XKCD was interesting.
http://xkcd.com/681/

It made me think of a question. The XKCD comic says;

"It takes the same amount of energy to launch something on an escape trajectory away from earth as it would to launch it 6,000 km upward under constant 9.81 m/s^2 earth gravity. Hence, Earth's well is 6,000 km deep."

Now in the absence of other moons, planets, stars etc., if the Earth were alone in the universe, I thought that Earth's gravity extended indefinitely, but just got weaker and weaker. So there would be no point at which you would be free of the Earth's gravity. For example when you leave Earth and travel to the Moon the Earth's gravity gets weaker and weaker, and the Moon's gets stronger and stronger, and there is a point between the Earth and the Moon when the Earth's and Moon's gravity exactly balance.

(Aside: a Lagrange point is when gravity and the orbital motion exactly balance, but I'm just asking a question about the Earth in isolation.)

So, why does it make sense to find a particular point when you are free of the Earth's grvity ... if you have a large rocket with lots of fuel perhaps you could get the rocket to 10 million light years away, but if ther Earth were the only object in the universe, the gravity would eventually pull it back?

Or it is a practical limit when for all intensive purposes the rocket will not fall back to Earth?