panglott

81 ms·

721.
by panglott 11y ago
Indeed, "earth similarity" should not be taken as "potential habitability", if Earth's unique geological history (the Theia collision) means that it is at the lower bound of mass for a habitable planet. Already ther
722.
by panglott 11y ago
This is why I never play Scrabble: the Scrabble dictionary.
723.
by panglott 11y ago
...and thus embiggen the dictionary itself.
724.
by panglott 11y ago
What you get in Toki Pona is a series of lexicalized phrases from word compounds. In a natural language, you would get these along with the borrowings or coinages, to a greater or lesser extent based on the culture's attitude toward le
725.
by panglott 11y ago
Scheme is the first Lisp?
726.
by panglott 11y ago
Used for what purpose? You can probably meet a stranger and exchange some pleasantries on a hike together. You won't write a physics textbook. But languages can be used in different functional domains, and that's fine.
727.
by panglott 11y ago
I think she speaks English, French, and Esperanto. IIRC, many of the English words came through Tok Pisin, and English-based creole of New Guinea.
728.
by panglott 11y ago
Plenty of human languages get by with a palette of dark/black, light/white, and red. It's likely that the only we have such a large palette of basic color terms is that we have a large dying/painting industry and can thu
729.
by panglott 11y ago
Of course Basic English cheats by including all the phrasal verbs, without considering that they are usually separate lexical items. "pick on" or "pass for" aren't easily decipherable based purely on their component
730.
by panglott 11y ago
If we can spend a few decades doing robotic mining and construction, why would we send humans to Mars?
731.
by panglott 11y ago
Or at least CobolScript. https://github.com/ajlopez/CobolScript
732.
by panglott 11y ago
Thanks for this link. I really hate it when Web site splash screens fail/refuse to show you what they're about unless you sign up. And sorry, but the page-flipping animation immediately puts me in a critical mood: it's not ev
733.
by panglott 11y ago
Yea, the page-flipping behavior is my least favorite thing about iBooks vs. Kindle. I wonder if there are really good technical reasons for it, or merely if iBooks was developed during the era when Apple still liked skeuomorphic designs.
734.
by panglott 11y ago
I can't select/highlight text because it triggers the page-flip animation? Your analog metaphor is ruining my digital experience. It's putting flash before substance.
735.
by panglott 11y ago
Copyrights aren't natural rights, they are limited government monopolies created for the purpose of encouraging creative and commercial activity. They make sense in publishing because it is easy for other publishers to pirate and profi
736.
by panglott 11y ago
This makes no sense to me as an American. Copyright is about the right to publish an original work. And buildings aren't published, they are built! They're standing right there! Maybe if someone was trying to build an exact duplic
737.
by panglott 11y ago
Wow, I did not think that copyright law could get worse than in the United States. Thinking in US terms, it sounds like the argument that if you take a picture of your kids with a building in the background, the picture is a derivative work
738.
by panglott 11y ago
The eruptions happened in 563 AD? That is almost a century ~after~ what it regarded as the "Fall of Rome". Italy was being governed by Germans, at that point. What a clickbaity title. Maybe it made life harder for Constantinople,
739.
by panglott 11y ago
If we don't treat poor people like dirt, how will they have sufficient incentive (i.e., desperation) to accept whatever horrible jobs are available? Such as being on call 24/7 for a part-time job at sub-living wages. But honestly,
740.
by panglott 11y ago
A related question is why all this space is being taken up providing government-subsidized parking for cars rather than decent housing for humans. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/1
741.
by panglott 11y ago
A lot of the advances of the 1880s involve the "variations on a theme" of the widespread adoption of electric motors, which became reliable and commercially viable in the 1870s. But electrification is quite a consequential theme!
742.
by panglott 11y ago
Coinciding with the Long Depression of 1873-1896? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression Those good old technological explanations for secular stagnation don't look great over longer timescales.
743.
by panglott 11y ago
Oh, man, they're discontinued, but I guess of course they are. I remember shopping around for an AlphaSmart 10 years ago and never bought one. Now all my ideas for Raspberry Pi projects are things like "build an AlphaSmart."
744.
by panglott 11y ago
It's certainly true that I've read more of Chomsky himself than the immense literature he spawned; and most of my reading of the generativist literature is at its messy edges where those explanations tend to be pretty unconvincing
745.
by panglott 11y ago
Plato made plenty of bad arguments, too, and there are a lot of arguments that go back to his time. Anyone who is learning a language receives a constantly stream of feedback about how their communication is perceived, whether or not this f
746.
by panglott 11y ago
"Why do we all have to speak the biggest language? Why can’t we speak a language that talks to you about connections, about history?" Pretty cool.
747.
by panglott 11y ago
Perhaps. It's kind of a trope these days to deride pre-Chomsky linguists as a bunch of wrong-headed behaviorists. But Skinner was advocating a theory of psychology. Most linguists prior to Chomsky were not really committed to behaviori
748.
by panglott 11y ago
I suspect this relates to the debate over the 'poverty of the stimulus' argument. It's a pretty fundamental premise of Chomskyan innatist arguments that seems to me totally wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
749.
by panglott 11y ago
Oh man, all the endless loading screens when going home. A simple trip to drop some stuff off and go took four loading screens.
750.
by panglott 11y ago
There's just no unambiguous way to distinguish various dialects, sociolects, and other linguistics varieties into discrete "languages" easily. "Mutual intelligibility" is also problematic. In a highly multilingual c

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