bloak

22 ms·

361.
by bloak 3y ago
This is an interesting thought experiment. I've done similar ones. However, I think it would be very feasible for humans, given a large corpus of an unknown language, a computer, and standard methods from computational linguistics fr
362.
by bloak 3y ago
"It's okay" isn't what I mean by a "rule": I'm talking about the kind of "rule" that tells me (or any other speaker) when to use "they". There certainly are people using "they&quot
363.
by bloak 3y ago
I can't tell from that example what rule the speaker might be following. Are they perhaps using "they" because the listener doesn't know the friend's gender? I came across another, different case in which a young
364.
by bloak 3y ago
It may make sense to distinguish more than two usages: 1. Referring to an expression like "everyone" or "someone" (not a noun): "If everyone minded their own business". This usage goes to back to Middle English
365.
by bloak 3y ago
Interesting. Seeing as you need a licence to export certain works of art and antiques (from the UK) I wouldn't be surprised if there's a rule to prevent people from destroying a painting. However, I've never heard of such a r
366.
by bloak 3y ago
Interesting. Modern optical microscopes, even cheap ones, do 1000x, though I seem to remember, from playing with a cheapish one, that it was very hard to get a worthwhile image at 1000x. Amazon.co.uk has a microscope for £54.59 that does &q
367.
by bloak 3y ago
In England many of the school buses are basically historic vehicles. They are the same vehicles that were used as service buses 40 years ago. Even a newer diesel vehicle would be cheaper to run, but they're only doing a few miles a wee
368.
by bloak 3y ago
And Yiddish (as opposed to "Eastern Yiddish" and "Western Yiddish") has "99,999,999" speakers in .... "Sweden"!
369.
by bloak 3y ago
There are languages like Finnish and Hungarian in which gender is almost entirely absent, and there are languages like French in which a binary masculine-feminine distinction permeates everything. Gender in Esperanto is similar to gender in
370.
by bloak 3y ago
What are they saying instead of th, when did this start, and is it particular parts of Britain or particular social groups? (Using f/v instead of th has long been a feature of some London dialects, and using t/d instead of th has
371.
by bloak 3y ago
Potentially there could be some problem with copyright, patents or trademark law (which are, of course, very different things) in a particular case but people have been cloning software since time immemorial and the world would be a worse p
372.
by bloak 3y ago
Can you give an example of a law being deemed unlawful on common law basis? My understanding is that typically precedent is used in the absence of statute law and for the interpretation of statute law, so a new law will typically overri
373.
by bloak 3y ago
Perhaps some people find monosyllabic words embarrassing. Another word sometimes misused instead of "use" is "leverage", and you'll often find "ubiquitous" in the same paragraph in engineering/marketi
374.
by bloak 3y ago
Where did they have "1.2 million people per square kilometer"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_cities_by_popula... only goes up to about 80 thousand ... and the city with the highest population de
375.
by bloak 3y ago
Mercury Autocode is perhaps a "missing link" between assembler and Fortran, though I'm not sure of the dates and whether the people developing Fortran knew about Mercury Autocode. Things developed quite fast in the 1950s.
376.
by bloak 3y ago
I'd like to know why Spanish was only 85% for reading in this study. Did they use Spanish texts that were full of English words or foreign names or something like that? Or did they consider some informal colloquial pronunciation to be
377.
by bloak 3y ago
This matches fairly closely (my concept of) Received Pronunciation (which is basically a standardised kind of posh southern English from the early 20th century, still used in dictionaries). The differences are: * There's no schwa, whic
378.
by bloak 3y ago
Of course there are also stories of people who claim to have left their body and seen the operating theatre from above and to have noticed some unexpected object on top of a cupboard or in some other location visible only from on high ... a
379.
by bloak 3y ago
With physical goods it's probably enough to check the age of the person taking delivery. Presumably the people who deliver groceries know what to do if the groceries include a crate of beer and the person who opens the door looks as if
380.
by bloak 3y ago
This is interesting! But how does a dense crowd of people compare to a queue of lorries carrying cement or building materials in terms of mass per square metre? Let's try to find some data ... ... ... A fully loaded Hanson cement lorry
381.
by bloak 3y ago
Not revising a film "based on modern sensitivity" is one thing, but what about films being released in a multitude of different versions right from the start? It annoys me when I discuss a film with someone else who's seen it
382.
by bloak 3y ago
Another thing I hate: user interfaces in which the visual/audible feedback is independent of whether the input has taken effect. This is distressingly common. Even self-checkout tills in supermarkets do this. For example, you touch a b
383.
by bloak 3y ago
Yes, but there are only about 24 German nouns that form their plural just by adding two little dots like that (Umlaut). Four of them mean close relatives and are recognisable to English speakers: Vater, Mutter, Bruder, Tochter. A while ago
384.
by bloak 3y ago
Yes, but "Dark" (Netflix) doesn't have a lot of words spoken per hour, as I recall, so perhaps it's not so good for language learning. There's also "Beat" (Amazon) with a somewhat gruesome main storyline.
385.
by bloak 3y ago
True, but they are beautiful, in my opinion, and if you're going to have to spend some time working on a text it helps if the text is something that you're willing to spend time on. Also, although the "Kinder- und Hausmärchen
386.
by bloak 3y ago
Perhaps a good API would return some coordinates plus a distance, to give an idea of the accuracy, and if the most likely location is on private property but there is a public place close to the most likely location within the probable regi
387.
by bloak 3y ago
If a Perl script is written and maintained by just one person, or a few people who can agree with each other, then features like that are not a problem: you just agree not to use them. They are, however, an argument for not using Perl for a
388.
by bloak 3y ago
I know that sounds logical ... but it doesn't work in practice and that's why the law doesn't work like that. We don't want a situation in which newspapers and other powerful organisations can avoid being sued for libel
389.
by bloak 3y ago
Ethan Watters looks at how mental illness is to some extent determined by culture in "Crazy like us", though he looks at Japan rather than China. Do you know that book?
390.
National test of the UK Emergency Alerts service(gov.uk)
4 points by bloak 3y ago|0 comments

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