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Comment by dimitar | Hacker News Reader

Good story, but in Russian. Most of the audience might want to read the original, from the Daily Mail, which is in English: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1259863/Wo...

Another article in English, from Pravda: http://english.pravda.ru/russia/kremlin/84114-0/

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Said to be the world's cleverest man, Dr Grigory Perelman, 44, lives as a recluse...

Leave it to the daily mail to add an extra layer of hyperbolic bullshit. As if it weren't a fascinating story already, he now has to be "the world's cleverest man".

"The topological conundrum essentially states that any three-dimensional space without holes in it is equivalent to a stretched sphere."

I love how they throw that in as if any of their readers will understand it*

* FYI, the Daily Mail is one of our tabloids, famous for claiming that just about anything causes cancer: http://thedailymailoncologicalontologyproject.wordpress.com/

Possibly moving to the UK in a year. Tabloids are the thing I'm most looking forward to.

I give you 1 week before you change your mind. I initially found them very amusing but now I cringe every time I pass a news stand or otherwise catch sight of the tabloid front pages.

I've lived in Ireland before and I would get the British tabloids an armload at a time. Something about being able to point to one over coffee and say 'look at this.'

From where?

Well, that's undecided. I've been in Australia for the past five year but recently lost my visa. I will most likely return there in a few months.

Daily Telegraph not tabloid enough for you? ;)

No, seriously no. They are pollution. If you read them no matter how cynical you are your subconscious will gobble up the "facts" only to spew them at you later as "truth" without the association with the source.

IMO tabloids make people dumber. So just _don't_ read them, its bad for you.

I'm going to Bradford. From what I hear, I'll need them.

Not far from my old haunt; Leeds. That's a much nicer place all round :-)

We're considering commuting from there. Comparing to the distances we're used to (melbourne) Leeds-> Bradford is like 3 suburbs.

Yeh it's about half an hr commute give or take.

I only head back once a month or so but drop me a line when you're there and I'll buy you a drink if I'm up :-)

Sure. Cheers. It'll be a bit over a year though.

There are differing levels of pollution, though. The Daily Mail is, IMHO, almost "evil" in its level of ridiculousness. It exists mostly to rile up the darker sentiments held by middle England. It's Fox News in paper form.

The Sun, on the other hand, is the ultimate tabloid (in terms of sales) but is more playful and aware of its role as a form of entertainment. The Sun and the Daily Mail couldn't be any different.

which ones have aliens and suburban housewives raising bears as children?

You're thinking of the Sunday Sport http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunday_Sport

They were famous back in the '80s for ludicrous headlines like "London Bus Found On Moon" and "Aliens Turned Our Son Into An Olive". I can't recall seeing it on the news stands lately.

Would have been funnier if the blog had lasted more than 4 days.

The whole article read like it was straight out of The Onion (a parody newspaper). The caption under the photo had me cracking up: A rare photo of bearded and reclusive genius Dr Grigory Perelman.

in Chrome there is a nice translate option at the top, the comments of russian readers are pretty interesting

Neat feature, I didn't know Chrome could do that.

One of the more amusing auto-translated russian comments:

  say, lives on a pension mom.
  In place of my mother I would beat his frying pan. But not on the head.

http://www.gazeta.ru/science/2010/03/23_a_3341933.shtml?comm...

I'm going to guess at 'what if his mother lives on a pension? If I were his mother I'd beat him with a frying pan, but not on the head'.

it actually says that he lives on his mother's pension.

That's actually not that bad. Google voice does a number on translations when the message is in another language: "My telephone number on the most gorgeous of and ideas. Fits in."

The problem with Chrome's translate feature is that it keeps claiming that random pages are in some language that they aren't in, like Afrikaans, and offering to "translate" them. It's a bit annoying.

I had some broken (junk, seemingly random bytes rendered to screen as text) responses coming from IIS yesterday, and ended up with some very confused users asking me "why is the page in arabic?". Turns out, Chrome was telling them it was in arabic, and offering to translate it.

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