A couple of months ago a pub in England got into the news by installing a Fraday Cage that blocked wifi and cell phone signals. They claimed thT mobiles
Phones were killing the pub experience of people talking to people -either to strangers or TO THE ACTUAL people they walked into the pub with.
They were prepared to lose a lot of customers. They weren't prepared for the actual increase in the number of customers.
Every Latin American country has its peculiar accent (and I can recognize most of them) but there is no issue of dialects or difficulty in understanding the words. You never have to ask ¿Qué? because you don't know what the other person said. The music and tone might be different, but every letter can be heard in its proper place.
Go to the West Indies, Trinidad or Jamaica, and unless they are making an effort to talk to you, I promise you won't understand half of what they say. You have troubles even when they are making an effort.
I yield to few in my love for Tolkien, but I prefer much more the symbolism and philosophical meta of the Ainulindale and The Silmarillion, that the action packed Lord of the Rings.
But if you want a complete -and very intelligent- counter to Tolkien's lookback to the pre industrial Shire and his not totally Christian (*) outlook, you probably can't do better than Kiril Eskov's The Last Ringbearer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer ). I truly vow that it will make you think.
(*) There is no Jesus in Tolkien, God does not redeem mankind. Mankind redeems itself, because, as Tolkien says "through the works of Men, all shall be completed, up the last and smallest" (**)
(**) Going on memory here, I'm quite sure I didn't get the quote right
Actually, phonetical orthography helps prevent drifting accents become drifting dialects becoming separate languages.
I have a hell of a time with my Ulster in-laws. I can understand my mother in law with some difficulty, but for the life of me I cannot understand a word my father in law says, so I stand there looking like a deer in the headlights until someone takes pity on me and translates English into English.
I'm quite sure we do not know yet how the brain stores and processes information. But my basic understanding of computer information storage and processing, I feel brains and computers do it quite different. Neurons are simultaneously bits of information, transistors operating an algorithm and connecting wire, and that doesn't feel right to me.
Tl/dr I don't think you can replicate a brain in a computer, unless they change the way computers are structured.
What's with the orthography, guys? It's fine to say that in Shakespeare's time everyone more or less made up how to spell a word, but it's been fishing 400 years. There's been plenty of time to put that in order.
The Turkish sat down in 1922 to select an alphabet, and now have one single letter for every Turkish sound. And you spell every word exactly as it sounds. That wasn't that hard(*).
(*) Talking about Turkish, I love that for everything that existed before the 1700s there is a Turk word, but for everything newer, apparently the Turks just gave up and started using French words. Things like insurance, cars or high schools are just said in French, properly transcribed phonetically to the Turkish alpabeth (since the French, their precious Academy notwithstanding, are not that good in correlating spelling and sound). It makes reading billboards in Turkey quite amusing, because you know that they are talking about insurance or cars, but have no clue what's going on about them.
Englsh is a classical creole language. Just a surprisingly old one. Things like dropping gender and conjugations are typical of creole languages like Papiamento (world's most recent Romance language).
For those that want a feeling of what original English would be now, the classical Paul Anderson's technical paper Uncleftish Beholding is a must go. Caution: High schhol chemistry strongly suggested
F2: I had heard that The Lion King was Hamlet and thought that's what you meant. I had completely forgotten about the Simba cartoons, even though I had watched them as a kid (never fond of them, but it was television. In the long forgotten world of two or three TV channels, it beat turned off TV by a wide margin)
The article is true. It's a complete rip-off. If I were Disney I would have made sure to quietly buy the bankruptcy creditors and thus to hold any possible claim. The Lion King is too valuable a franchise to even allow a lawsuit to come forward, even if they know they will win at the end.
In my memory there's a scene of Hillary, either in the 1992 campaign, or shortly after inauguration, saying something about she wasn't going to discuss her favorite cookie recipes because she didn't bake cookies.
In my memory, the republic and cried to high hell about her dissing of cookies.
Did all that happen, or was it a sweet dream?
I don't think Hillary is at all impressed with Melania's cookie recipes.
Not completely in the eye of the beholder. What pleases the eye is the same in most visual expressions, even in fashion (rythm, balance, volume, texture, color harmony, etc.)
Without properly combining these elements, the result is not pretty, even though pretty encompasses infinite combinations
That I can agree with. I can also agree when the ectopic pregnancy is added to the mix. But just saying after two years of unprotected lesbian sex we aren't pregnant as a bridge too far for me
At the risk of being misinterpreted again, at some point fertility treatments should be more like cosmetic surgery than heart surgery.
And as much as I fully, absolutely, totally, no questions asked ever, support gay equality, I don't think insurance should pay fertility treatments for people that are infertile only because they are not doing it right.
They don't need to stay childless. They can pay for it themselves, they can go turkey baster (and the law should get the turkey donor off the hook forever no ifs, ands, or buts) or they go the adoption route.
For insurers to bake into the policy prices the (potential) paying for lesbians fertility treatments or gay surrogate mothers for any and all LGBT couples is another drop in the raising costs of healthcare in the USA
Container houses can be stacked 6 to 8 high, which allows for fairly cheap apartment building too. Three such side by side can turn into a nice 1,200 soft apartment
She honest to God called me a fascist hehe. It's one of my fondest memories of college. We all had had too much alcohol though. In vino veritas, etc, etc.
But my former boss (who votes Democrat) who is also a friend calls me a Liburtard and for some reason believes I am a Pacifica listener Bernie voter
I know it's very old guy of me to say this, but there are certain elements of artistic appreciation that apply to all visual arts, like painting and sculpture, and including architecture, that induce a pleasant aesthetic experience .
These elements are somehow ingrained in our brains, and are present in all art we see from Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, Grecoroman, Gothic, Renaissance all the way to Picasso, Calder, Pollock or Moore.
Balance, volumes and rhythm are part of those elements. A Picasso and a Raphael both follow the same aesthetic rules, because if they didn't, they would look ugly in our eyes. A child's drawing mostly doesn't, and no one but their parents think it's pretty.
Don't they teach Artistic Appreciation in High School here? Really, I did learn all that in high school. (Actually in 7th and 8th grade - we had to endure two years of the fishing thing).
If older means pre massive car (like my inner ring Houston suburb) there is no contradiction.
By the West I was thinking more Texas or Colorado or Nevada, or Southern California. San Francisco was a big city in its own right in the XIX century, and followed the patterns of late XIX century suburb formation. No contradiction there either.
I'm saying there are two separate problems, albeit related, an that both need to be attacked at the same time. I understand that you are saying that we will only know if the second problem exists when we fully solve the first. Until then, we not only don't know if there is a problem, but we cannot even try to find if there is a problem, because the act of inquiring is blaming the victim and sabotaging the efforts to solve the first problem.
If my reading is correct, I don't think you and I can get any closer to an agreement than where we stand right now.
The Breakers is tacky. But there are a couple of smaller houses in Newport that are absolutely fantastical gems.
Biltmore I like. The interior though is a little poor compared to the structure. My guess is that the family stripped out the good things before leaving the house behind.
This is how suburbs developed in the XIX century, when the paterfamilias would take the train or the tram to the city, but the family had to stay and shop, go to school or church in the suburb. Not only groceries, but clothes, hardware, toys, books, medicines, had to be available at walking distance. They had to be fully self sufficient, like villages were. So the suburbs started by converting existing nearby villages, and they by creating new ones.
Post WWII the car culture changed that. People could drive long(er) distances for their necessities, and had space to carry their shopping back home. My neighbourhood was developed in the late 1940s and includes a schools area, a churches area (with like seven different churches one next to the other) and a shopping area. But shortly thereafter developers no longer needed to include a downtown in their planned communities. And therefore they stopped doing it. In the West, were cities and town were far from each other, there were no villages to turn into suburbs, so we skipped all the old style suburbs and went directly into sprawl.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Linky Friday #180: The Liberal Arts”
A couple of months ago a pub in England got into the news by installing a Fraday Cage that blocked wifi and cell phone signals. They claimed thT mobiles
Phones were killing the pub experience of people talking to people -either to strangers or TO THE ACTUAL people they walked into the pub with.
They were prepared to lose a lot of customers. They weren't prepared for the actual increase in the number of customers.
"
Plus you really like Spell Bees
All good, friend
"
Anecdata
Every Latin American country has its peculiar accent (and I can recognize most of them) but there is no issue of dialects or difficulty in understanding the words. You never have to ask ¿Qué? because you don't know what the other person said. The music and tone might be different, but every letter can be heard in its proper place.
Go to the West Indies, Trinidad or Jamaica, and unless they are making an effort to talk to you, I promise you won't understand half of what they say. You have troubles even when they are making an effort.
"
I yield to few in my love for Tolkien, but I prefer much more the symbolism and philosophical meta of the Ainulindale and The Silmarillion, that the action packed Lord of the Rings.
But if you want a complete -and very intelligent- counter to Tolkien's lookback to the pre industrial Shire and his not totally Christian (*) outlook, you probably can't do better than Kiril Eskov's The Last Ringbearer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer ). I truly vow that it will make you think.
(*) There is no Jesus in Tolkien, God does not redeem mankind. Mankind redeems itself, because, as Tolkien says "through the works of Men, all shall be completed, up the last and smallest" (**)
(**) Going on memory here, I'm quite sure I didn't get the quote right
"
Actually, phonetical orthography helps prevent drifting accents become drifting dialects becoming separate languages.
I have a hell of a time with my Ulster in-laws. I can understand my mother in law with some difficulty, but for the life of me I cannot understand a word my father in law says, so I stand there looking like a deer in the headlights until someone takes pity on me and translates English into English.
"
T1
I'm quite sure we do not know yet how the brain stores and processes information. But my basic understanding of computer information storage and processing, I feel brains and computers do it quite different. Neurons are simultaneously bits of information, transistors operating an algorithm and connecting wire, and that doesn't feel right to me.
Tl/dr I don't think you can replicate a brain in a computer, unless they change the way computers are structured.
"
If you make the Cone of Silence illegal, then you let KAOS win.
Though it can be argued that banning the Cone of Silence is needed for CONTROL to win the War on Terror.
More seriously, you can't ban talking inside a chicken coop, which is a decent enough Faraday Cage
"
L4 again
What's with the orthography, guys? It's fine to say that in Shakespeare's time everyone more or less made up how to spell a word, but it's been fishing 400 years. There's been plenty of time to put that in order.
The Turkish sat down in 1922 to select an alphabet, and now have one single letter for every Turkish sound. And you spell every word exactly as it sounds. That wasn't that hard(*).
(*) Talking about Turkish, I love that for everything that existed before the 1700s there is a Turk word, but for everything newer, apparently the Turks just gave up and started using French words. Things like insurance, cars or high schools are just said in French, properly transcribed phonetically to the Turkish alpabeth (since the French, their precious Academy notwithstanding, are not that good in correlating spelling and sound). It makes reading billboards in Turkey quite amusing, because you know that they are talking about insurance or cars, but have no clue what's going on about them.
"
L4:
Englsh is a classical creole language. Just a surprisingly old one. Things like dropping gender and conjugations are typical of creole languages like Papiamento (world's most recent Romance language).
For those that want a feeling of what original English would be now, the classical Paul Anderson's technical paper Uncleftish Beholding is a must go. Caution: High schhol chemistry strongly suggested
https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ
"
F2: I had heard that The Lion King was Hamlet and thought that's what you meant. I had completely forgotten about the Simba cartoons, even though I had watched them as a kid (never fond of them, but it was television. In the long forgotten world of two or three TV channels, it beat turned off TV by a wide margin)
The article is true. It's a complete rip-off. If I were Disney I would have made sure to quietly buy the bankruptcy creditors and thus to hold any possible claim. The Lion King is too valuable a franchise to even allow a lawsuit to come forward, even if they know they will win at the end.
"
C3: Space awesome. And totally true.
It's a thing of beauty when you apply rigorous thinking to fantastic woolgathering. It's when Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams happen.
On “Morning Ed: United States {2016.08.18.Th}”
That's why gay marriage had to be invented. You understand now?
"
In my memory there's a scene of Hillary, either in the 1992 campaign, or shortly after inauguration, saying something about she wasn't going to discuss her favorite cookie recipes because she didn't bake cookies.
In my memory, the republic and cried to high hell about her dissing of cookies.
Did all that happen, or was it a sweet dream?
I don't think Hillary is at all impressed with Melania's cookie recipes.
"
@aaron-david
Not completely in the eye of the beholder. What pleases the eye is the same in most visual expressions, even in fashion (rythm, balance, volume, texture, color harmony, etc.)
Without properly combining these elements, the result is not pretty, even though pretty encompasses infinite combinations
"
That I can agree with. I can also agree when the ectopic pregnancy is added to the mix. But just saying after two years of unprotected lesbian sex we aren't pregnant as a bridge too far for me
"
At the risk of being misinterpreted again, at some point fertility treatments should be more like cosmetic surgery than heart surgery.
And as much as I fully, absolutely, totally, no questions asked ever, support gay equality, I don't think insurance should pay fertility treatments for people that are infertile only because they are not doing it right.
They don't need to stay childless. They can pay for it themselves, they can go turkey baster (and the law should get the turkey donor off the hook forever no ifs, ands, or buts) or they go the adoption route.
For insurers to bake into the policy prices the (potential) paying for lesbians fertility treatments or gay surrogate mothers for any and all LGBT couples is another drop in the raising costs of healthcare in the USA
"
Container houses can be stacked 6 to 8 high, which allows for fairly cheap apartment building too. Three such side by side can turn into a nice 1,200 soft apartment
"
She honest to God called me a fascist hehe. It's one of my fondest memories of college. We all had had too much alcohol though. In vino veritas, etc, etc.
But my former boss (who votes Democrat) who is also a friend calls me a Liburtard and for some reason believes I am a Pacifica listener Bernie voter
I guess in average, I come out as average.
"
I made the plans to my house that were submitted to the city and to the HOC. My contractor got a guy to sign them for a couple of hundred dollars.
I changed them slightly during construction and didn't bother to tell anybody.
"
I know it's very old guy of me to say this, but there are certain elements of artistic appreciation that apply to all visual arts, like painting and sculpture, and including architecture, that induce a pleasant aesthetic experience .
These elements are somehow ingrained in our brains, and are present in all art we see from Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, Grecoroman, Gothic, Renaissance all the way to Picasso, Calder, Pollock or Moore.
Balance, volumes and rhythm are part of those elements. A Picasso and a Raphael both follow the same aesthetic rules, because if they didn't, they would look ugly in our eyes. A child's drawing mostly doesn't, and no one but their parents think it's pretty.
Don't they teach Artistic Appreciation in High School here? Really, I did learn all that in high school. (Actually in 7th and 8th grade - we had to endure two years of the fishing thing).
"
If older means pre massive car (like my inner ring Houston suburb) there is no contradiction.
By the West I was thinking more Texas or Colorado or Nevada, or Southern California. San Francisco was a big city in its own right in the XIX century, and followed the patterns of late XIX century suburb formation. No contradiction there either.
You are an honorary East Coaster Saul
"
I'm saying there are two separate problems, albeit related, an that both need to be attacked at the same time. I understand that you are saying that we will only know if the second problem exists when we fully solve the first. Until then, we not only don't know if there is a problem, but we cannot even try to find if there is a problem, because the act of inquiring is blaming the victim and sabotaging the efforts to solve the first problem.
If my reading is correct, I don't think you and I can get any closer to an agreement than where we stand right now.
But my reading might be off by a lot...
"
Marble House and Rosecliff are particularly beautiful. Expensive, but tasteful. And "small" enough to actually count as summer houses
"
The Breakers is tacky. But there are a couple of smaller houses in Newport that are absolutely fantastical gems.
Biltmore I like. The interior though is a little poor compared to the structure. My guess is that the family stripped out the good things before leaving the house behind.
"
This is how suburbs developed in the XIX century, when the paterfamilias would take the train or the tram to the city, but the family had to stay and shop, go to school or church in the suburb. Not only groceries, but clothes, hardware, toys, books, medicines, had to be available at walking distance. They had to be fully self sufficient, like villages were. So the suburbs started by converting existing nearby villages, and they by creating new ones.
Post WWII the car culture changed that. People could drive long(er) distances for their necessities, and had space to carry their shopping back home. My neighbourhood was developed in the late 1940s and includes a schools area, a churches area (with like seven different churches one next to the other) and a shopping area. But shortly thereafter developers no longer needed to include a downtown in their planned communities. And therefore they stopped doing it. In the West, were cities and town were far from each other, there were no villages to turn into suburbs, so we skipped all the old style suburbs and went directly into sprawl.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.