mcswell

17 ms·

331.
by mcswell 2y ago
Not sure why you think that would prove Chomsky wrong. First, languages that don't fit brains (children's or otherwise) aren't going to be spoken by humans in the first place. And second, languages that fit our brains--all
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by mcswell 2y ago
The recommendations in other replies to your post look good. If you grew up hearing certain sounds, it will usually be easy for you to hear and produce those sounds, whether it's the sounds of Arabic, click languages, or English (as na
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by mcswell 2y ago
Huh? How so?
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by mcswell 2y ago
Humans cannot ignore syntax or semantics, if that's what you're saying. Every human language has both, and no one can speak a language without knowing (usually implicitly) both. As for phonology, languages have that (even signed
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by mcswell 2y ago
I agree to a certain point, but writing (invented in the past few thousand years) has not led to more complex languages. I've worked on languages for which there was, until a few decades ago, no writing system, and they're every
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by mcswell 2y ago
"some sort of language" covers a wide range. Some song birds learn their songs, but the songs are stereotyped--the bird sings pretty much the same thing over and over, and there's no evidence that Bird A is communicating any
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by mcswell 2y ago
That's what "at least" means in the title.
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by mcswell 2y ago
Previously discussed here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43384826
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by mcswell 2y ago
Does this have implications for understanding the abilities of Neanderthals? For instance, might more advanced tools found in Neanderthal sites have been created by non-Neanderthals, and exchanged in trade or captured/ stolen?
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by mcswell 2y ago
For the same reason that chimps don't (contrary to some earlier work) learn language.
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by mcswell 2y ago
Do we have to be able to communicate--in the sense of language--with our pets?
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by mcswell 2y ago
Dust? Vaporized rock going through a vacuum is not going to be kind to the inside of that vacuum.
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by mcswell 2y ago
There's an old SciFi story here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30797/pg30797-images.ht... that uses that idea as part of the plot. The hole is not very deep, maybe 150 feet, so the "glass&qu
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by mcswell 2y ago
No disagreement, and I was probably racist back then. I'm just agreeing with an earlier comment that some of the 1950s authors were not "well adjusted", because I now think of racism as a sin.
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by mcswell 2y ago
There is a freely browsable and readable collection of stories from the 40s, 50s and 60s, and a few later, mostly from Analog, here: https://www.freesfonline.net/Magazines2.html
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by mcswell 2y ago
Campbell was a racist, and I believe bought into the theory that smokers smoked because their bodies were trying to prevent or fight off lung cancer. He also appeared to be a believer in psi. He attracted (and doubtless encouraged) author
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by mcswell 2y ago
Analog used to publish the rankings a few months after each issue came out. When the actual rankings for this issue came out, was there any correspondence to Hoen's prophesied rankings?
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by mcswell 2y ago
Seems to me that the country Trump is pushing into geopolitical irrelevance is the United States of America. Thanks to him, we're making enemies of friends and allies, throwing away our influence on the world, throwing away any claim
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by mcswell 2y ago
Correction: We're expected to pay for the ride, whether we choose to come along or not.
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by mcswell 2y ago
As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "langua
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by mcswell 2y ago
Many have claimed to have deciphered those symbols, but it's not even clear that it is a script, in the sense of a way to write a language.
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by mcswell 2y ago
Sort of like a Bussard ramjet, but using solar power rather than nuclear fusion. Something that bothered me, until I looked up some numbers: the air a VLEO satellite scoops up is presumably more or less at rest wrt the Earth below it--there
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by mcswell 2y ago
As others have said, it depends on the cause of the itch. I have an alpha-galactose allergy. This is sort of a food allergy: beef and lamb, probably venison and to a lesser extent pork, trigger it. But unlike other food allergies, this do
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by mcswell 2y ago
Still looking for hen's teeth, but they seem to be as scarce as chicken breasts. (The only breasts found so far are on mammals.)
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by mcswell 2y ago
There are cursor movement tools that use the keyboard--most obviously, the arrow keys. And at least in Windows, entire windows can be moved around or re-sized with the cursor. But it's also the case that there are keyboard remapping
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by mcswell 2y ago
Ya' know, Oly was very happy to find his farm was in Iowa, rather than Minnesota. When his friend Sven asked him why, given that taxes were higher in Iowa, Oly replied "Vell, now I don't have to put up vith those lousy Minne
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by mcswell 2y ago
You said: > We expect that about 1% of the orbital planes will be aligned so that we > can get meaningful data Somewhere below, someone used the figure of 0.01%. I assume they were mistaken, and your 1% number is about right for som
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by mcswell 2y ago
Because zero is not singular . In the context of English grammar, "plural" simply means "not singular."
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by mcswell 2y ago
I run at night on trails (during the summer, when it's too hot to run during the day). I wear a headlamp, and don't trip any more than I do in the day--despite the fact that the trails have rocks and roots. The only issue I have
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by mcswell 2y ago
I was once in the US Navy, and stood many a bridge watch. When it got dark, all outside lights except for the navigation lights (red light on port bow, green on starboard bow, a white light up top and another white light on the stern). An

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