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decimate means reduce by a 10th

Not necessarily.

People could say "decimate" means "blue" but that still doesn't make it right, nor contravene its etymological origins. Hard to get around "deci" in there.....

decimate means reduce by a 10th

Not necessarily.

You (or perhaps Oxford) should have put quotation marks around the invalid words.

Since I was quoting, I feel it would be inappropriate for me to modify the text. Please contact the source with your comment. Thanks.

Climate change will increase the number of volcanoes and earthquakes.

This one seemed a little too outrageous, so I looked it up. Sure enough, there's a book about it, published by Oxford University press. Written by a professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards. I'm not sure what that kind of professor does.

Here's a summary he wrote of his book, if anyone wants to read it and figure out the connection. I sure can't figure it out.

There are two issues here. The most important is individual responsibility – should a person ever be held responsible for another's suicide? If you believe in individual rights and responsibilities (as do most in the West), you should surely be against this in all circumstances.

The other is homophobia. And here is seems that things are changing, fast. A recently published book finds that school students are now more likely to lose popularity by being homophobic than to gain it.

True, this was in the UK (the author says the US is "10 years" behind). But the study concerns high-school students. It is reasonable to expect that college students – especially in elite places like Rutgers – would be ahead in this trend of tolerance.

Homophobia has been a terrible plague but it seems at last to be fading. In our hurry to condemn it we should not forget that the alleged perpetrator has rights which need protecting too.

Actually... libraries are one of the biggest purchases of books in the country. Most libraries have a new acquisitions budget in the hundreds of thousands (millions for the big regional libraries), and there are thousands of libraries across the country. A book that hits #100 on the bestseller list is probably going to be picked up by those thousands of libraries too, so once a book hits a certain critical mass, the publishers have another wave of guaranteed sales.

Yes, exactly. And it's doubly true for academic and some other specialist presses. A large minority, or often a majority, of the copies of most titles published by university and other academic presses are bought by libraries. Publishers can sometimes profit from this by jacking up the prices on books that they know lots of libraries will purchase, because they know that there wouldn't be any sales to individuals anyway, and libraries *have* to buy certain titles no matter what the cost. An example would be the new editions of the Oxford Francis Bacon. These are excellent, scholarly editions that every library that takes the history of science and/or the history of English thought seriously will have to own. They also cost $250+ per volume, for a set that will eventually be something like 15 volumes. If it weren't for libraries, there would be no way that OUP could get away with that kind of pricing. Moreover, most of the endless specialist monographs that academic presses churn out are pretty only sold to libraries. Without those sales, there would be far fewer scholarly monographs published on exotic or esoteric topics. The decline of library budgets over the last couple of decades (and the massive increase in the cost of journal subscriptions) has led to libraries buying far fewer academic titles, which has then led to fewer titles being published by some of the big presses. (Note that this might be a good thing, if it means that academics start getting tenure not for publishing scholarly monographs but for getting material into open, peer-reviewed online archives instead.)

There's more than just academic monographs. Libraries are the main consumers of reference books. Libraries are major purchasers books in translation and of titles from small and specialist presses. Libraries are major purchasers of poetry and drama. Libraries are major purchasers of art books. Libraries buy a huge amount of hardback fiction outside of just the best sellers. And these are pretty much guaranteed sales -- a publisher can estimate that he'll sell X number of copies of a new book to libraries, which gives him a safe minimum from which to start budgeting. Libraries hurt you if you're a bestseller, but they help almost everyone else.

One thing it does not do, which you may be expecting, is make any judgement about /proper/ usage. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. If you are expecting guidance as to good usage, look elsewhere.

Don't fret poor logophiles (or linguists) Oxford University Press has that covered too, Fowler's Modern English Usage, 2004 edited by R. W. Burchfield, is about as suitable as anything to be the authority in a single volume.

One thing it does not do, which you may be expecting, is make any judgement about /proper/ usage. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. If you are expecting guidance as to good usage, look elsewhere.

Don't fret poor logophiles (or linguists) Oxford University Press has that covered too, Fowler's Modern English Usage, 2004 edited by R. W. Burchfield, is about as suitable as anything to be the authority in a single volume.

Precisely, the OED is a record of language, not a guardian of it.

Obviously you are not British*. Of course Oxbridge's presses (OUP, CUP) are the guardian of English as much as L'Académie française is the guardian of the French (sorry, française) language. Don't let the Telegraph tell you any different.

* Wait, you may be. Sod it.

Linguists to the rescue...Here's an interesting, relatively well-written, and informative read on just that question...

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

and for the shorter version...

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

or

review by Melissa Katsoulis in The Sunday Times

I'm currently reading The Emergence of a Scientific Culture by S. Gaukroger. My interest stems from past readings in epistemology as a study of the methodology of science, and, my interest in Mediterranean death cult religions like Islam, Christianity and Judaism as patriarchal control mechanisms, not unlike induced schizo-affective disorders, that come into play in agrarian societies with controlling oligarchies (monarchies) ensconced in developing urban centres. It's my own take on things that's evolved from trying to understand to what extent corruption is fundamental and necessary to democracy. I'm throwing it out in this thread because I think U.K. libel laws are symptomatic of a transition from class structured, shame-face saving patriarchal societies to modern democracies that have successfully tested empirical findings and common law and are putting aside almost Shamanistic believes that words are effectively magical or Gospel.

Cleisthenes in Ancient Greek history is said to have instituted the first democracy. Sketchily put he did it by breaking up the political clout of existing clans by creating voting blocks that abstracted away from the clan bases and instituted time limits on political offices. He also, IIRC, enforced political participation. I'm sure that somewhere in the Federalist Papers there are presumptions that all of us are corrupt, or subject to corruption, and, the American Founding Fathers instituted articles and laws to form a democracy that reflected their belief in the fundamental corrupt character of us all. I'm trying to formulate a view of modern democracy from the underlying idea that as a political institution democracy best addresses corruption. This sort of links up to Churchill's famous dictum that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others because it best addresses the citizenry and politicians of modern democracies as the worst of all peoples except for all the others, and, this because it best addresses our corruptible natures.

I believe modern democracies with universal suffrage given majority and capacity on the part of it's citizens are the most viable forms of modern government because they've stood the test of history in transitioning from agrarian to post industrial urban societies. British libel laws and things like hate laws have considerable merit but reflect a more industrial/agrarian society where class structure and "face" reflect more primitive belief systems wherein words carry magical import. Going into language goes to far afield but mentioning the "debate" between Newton and Leibniz over the discovery of the Calculus and the tribal wars of industrializing Europe give some character to where I'm trying to go with this stuff.

Archeology has in it's body the idea of a three generation window for viewing past cultures. A generation is somewhere between 20 and 30 years. Three generations give a vivid insight into a culture because grandparents, parents and offspring are a highly sympathetic and even empathetic cluster that transitions cultural values. The U.K., like all viable modern democracies, is transitioning to a new perspective that has as it's foundation empirical findings in Science and tested wisdom in law but still has to deal with the fundamental corrupt nature of our kind.

je m'amuse

$295 is a bargain. It's £750 if you buy it (all 20 volumes) in print! Or £4000 for the leather-bound one.

Sample page (PDF). It's really not concise, but then it's not supposed to be.

In theory it does. In practice, not so much.

Their example usages of the word follow a verb ("to make loose", "to let loose"), without another verb it becomes inflected ("I'm going to loosen it", not "I'm going to loose it") or as oxford english dictionary says ("His speech loosed a tide of nationalist sentiment", "He loosed the straps that bound her arms")... although American dictionary entries do look different... but I'm not American... and anyway I was making a joke where I was uncorrecting somebody's perfectly correct spelling and usage, with the inverted slashdot mantra "there, I broke that for you"... what I wrote as 'loose' wasn't what the guy meant which remains primary reason why it's wrong, whatever various english variation dictionaries state.

When I was still in school, we use the Quantum Mechanics from Richard W. Robinett

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Physics/QuantumPhysics/?view=usa&ci=9780198530978

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Quantum-Mechanics-Classical-Visualized-Examples/dp/0195092023

After that would be books on solid-state

What I just told you is taught in English books published by OUP. Count/non-count is not a hard and fast rule.

Steak is a count noun in America, while it isn't in Britain (one piece of steak). Conversely, lettuce is a count noun in Britain while it's non-count in America (one head of lettuce).

I'm not talking out of my ass here. It's difficult to search for this stuff to find a reference, but there's a grammar exercise by Oxford University Press which tests what I'm talking about here. Solve questions three and five. It just depends on whether the unit of measure is understood or not (e.g. chocolate vs. chocolates or candy vs. candies).

Hello!
Since you're a mathematician, maybe you'll be interested in cosmology (=theoretical astrophysics).
Here is one recommendation:
Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction - Peter Coles (1)
http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780192854162

OTOH, the following book is quite provocative:
The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin (2)
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/08/lee-smolins-trouble-with-physics.html

BTW, http://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/09/the-trouble-with-smolin/

------------
(1) Professor of Astrophysics, University of Nottingham
(2) Researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario

Well, first of all, here's an article from 2003 that looks like it might have been on the money

Second of all, most banana plants are grown from cuttings - without the reproduction mutations resistant to these fungal infections are simply not happening on any kind of scale. "The problem is that the banana we eat is a seedless, sterile article which could slip the way of its predecessor which was wiped out by blight half a century ago."

They're sequencing the genome of the bananas eaten in africa (which HAVE seeds) but there are problems because people aren't interested in the GM varieties, saying they taste more like apple (no bad thing to me)

According to this guy, we find "contemporary writers opting for vocal chords instead of vocal cords 49% of the time". That's pretty big, and it may end up being another accepted spelling.

Circles also have chords.

Except that self-defense is not a right, and neither is fair use. Both concepts have little basis in law.

Now, as to the legal concept of being allowed to plead in the alternative, you'll never see me doing that. It's a disgusting practice that I have never yet seen an honorable purpose for.

Then again, I have a problem with plea bargaining in general, too, and only 2% of cases reach trial. So obviously my views are not well supprted in the judicial community.

Ironically, I was reading the origins of the adversary criminal trial a few days ago, and back in the day the English legal system would not allow lawyers for the defense- they were seen to do nothing more than muddy up the truth by introducing all sorts of extraneous concepts. Old-fashioned indeed, but I feel similarly about most methods of pleadings these days.

In any case, to return to the issue at hand, It is my opinion that intellectual property is a necessary creation of the state for the simple reason that capitalism as a pure system is doomed to fail. It requires a system of economic knowledge which is simply impossible. Similarly, intellectual property is basically 'regulation' of the intellectual marketplace.

Within that framework, then, you have no more right to fair use than you have to unregulated trade. It may be possible under certain circumstances when the legislative context is correct, but it's certainly not guaranteed. It is not a right at all.

Self-defense is arguably similar. The state has a monopoly on the use of force; it may be possible under certain circumstances when the legislative context is correct for an individual to wield force against another, but it's certainly not guaranteed.

I did a math paper for a mathematical modeling class during my chemistry undergrad on the BZ reaction mechanism, which is another oscillator like the system in TFA. It's not a perpetual oscillation, but with precisely controlled reagents you can get some pretty long-lasting oscillations (precisely as in on the order of hundredths of a mole, iirc). There's a really good little book in the oxford chemistry primers series (series as a whole is quite nice for accessible, focused introductions to various fields) on this topic: Oscillations, Waves, and Chaos in Chemical Kinetics by Scott.

Don't be so hard on the guy, after all group selectionist models like what you are espousing are currently on the fringes of sociobiological theory. Though you refrained from making a 'for the good of the species' argument, you still engaged in a form of it. Richard Dawkins has much to say about these types of arguments as does John Alcock who wrote a fantastic book called the triumph of sociobiology. I highly recommend it:

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Life Sciences/Ecology/AnimalBehavior/?view=usa&ci=97801 95143836

The National Summit on Video Games, Youth, and Public Policy is hosted by The National Institute on Media and the Family and Iowa State University.

First session was an overview presented by Douglas Gentile. You can buy his book here. Next, they had a session on "Violent Video Games: Effects and Public Policy" from Craig Anderson. Then they had a panel discussion with Joanne Cantor, Kim Thompson, Douglas Gentile, and one person from the ESRB.

I can go on, but it looked like a mutual masterbation get-together from the names I saw in attendance. So I can see why the games press didn't want to go.

Er, conversion to what? Islam? Muslims in India have a well-oiled Caste system already. Read about the Ashraf/Ajlaf divide The Qomiyat of Swat, Pakistan and Bengal and the jajmin/Kamin separation.

Among Muslims, the Ashraf are regarded as those descended from Arab stock and are mandated by Fatwas to be "superior" to those converted from Hinduism, called "Ajlaf". even among the Ajlaf we have the "Arzal" who are treated as untouchable. To quote a scholarly paper Arzals are those:

"with whom no other Muhammadan would associate, and who are forbidden to enter the mosque or to use the public burial ground"

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/12109.html

http://stateless.freehosting.net/Caste%20in%20Indi an%20Muslim%20Society.htm

Read this famous book by Ambedkar (I already spoke about him in a thread earlier), a Buddhist by the way, who exposes the entire Muslim Caste System in South Asia:

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00amb edkar/ambedkar_partition/410.html

Also, read:

Aggarwal, Patrap. Caste and Social Stratification Among Muslims in India.
Social Stratification Among Muslims in India by Zarina Bhatty

and "Political theory in the Delhi Sultanate by Mohamed Habib" when the Muslim Castes of Ashraf/Ajlaf/Arzal was established by religious sancation through the Fatwa-i-Jahandari.

Convert to Christianity? Dalit Christians are the among the most persecuted people in India right now. Read about Bama Faustina, a Dalit Christian, who has exposed the atrocities committed on Dalit Christians by the Christian clergy

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/09/16/stories/13160 17m.htm

http://www.womenswriting.com/writerdetails.asp?wri terid=116

In the book "Sangati":
http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/L iteratureEnglish/WorldLiterature/India/~~/dmlldz11 c2EmY2k9OTc4MDE5NTY3MDg4Mg==

Christian churches in India are largely controlled by upper caste Christian Priests and nuns. Low-caste Dalit Christians are discriminated against by the upper-caste Christians. The extent and practice of untouchability within the Indian Christian community have been researched. Chapels for Dalit Christians are often segregated from Christians of a higher caste. Other churches admit Dalit Christians, but keep separate pews for them. Dalit Christians are buried in separate cemeteries. In addition, Dalit boys are not allowed to be altar boys or lectors.In addition, there are various instances of economic discrimination where Dalit Christians are not allowed to own arable land by upper caste Christian clergy. In many Christian communities in India, bonded labor is still practiced. As a consequence of the discrimination, Dalit Christians tend to be very poor and undernourished. Dalit Christians are denied education by the Upper Caste Priests and nuns. Very few Dalit Christians are involved in administrative services, except for the few who reconverted back to Hinduism.

http://indianhope.free.fr/site_eng/article_5.php3

The only realistic religion to convert to would be Buddhism, which is no biggie because Buddhism originated in India only. However, the movement is being taken over by violent extremists and anti-Hindu bigots who have even gone so far as to side with Islamist terrorists in Kashmir who ethnically cleansed millions of Hindu

A long time ago, I attended courses taught by Joshua Meyrowitz at the University of New Hampshire. While I was there, he was working on a book entitled "Television and the Obliteration of Childhood" which appears to be either out-of-print or available at the University of North Carolina not in book form. His more recent "No Sense of Place" also speaks to this particular issue.

If Josh will be so kind as to correct any brain-scrambling on my part, it's his thesis that "childhood" may be defined as a limit on what one knows and/or can know and that, with enough knowledge one functions in society as an adult. Children, exposed to the same television programs as an adult, aren't "children," in the old-fashioned sense of the word as they are in posession of the same information that adults have. From an informational approach, videogames also serve as an "information leveler" like television and, in my case, may serve to actually increase the knowledge a child may have about the virtual world of videogames over that of an adult. I don't play video games, so my daughter may know more than me (though, at five she does not play any yet).

But just playing videogames does not necessarily confer information that is usable in society, though a recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggested that children who play games have a better chance at figuring out a risk-reward scenerio than those who do not.

So if you define "childhood" as playing ball or running around the block or playing kick the can and hide and seek, you may be on to something with respect to childhood's end. But I prefer Dr. Meyrowitz's definition. Because playing games in childhood (and adulthood) is normal behavior, whether real or virtual. My only concern about game-playing from the standpoint of a parent is that it not be something that atrophies muscles. There needs to be game-playing in childhood experience that builds muscles, too.

This is not been true of any commercial society in the modern era. It wasn't true in ancient Samaria. The Origins of Value

For all those that are seriously interested in the mathematical implications of music / musical implications of mathematics, may I advise the book Music and Mathematics From Pythagoras to Fractals?

I'm sorry it is so ridiculously expensive, but it is a really nice collection of essays of all the different roles mathematics has played in music, from the ancient Greeks to modern composition. Since it is a bundle, not every essay is a masterpiece, but most are really good.
\. readers will love the story on Daniel Strähle (duh, only a couple of lines in Wikepedia, 14 pages in the book) a Swedish craftsman who, in 1743, found a simple method for approximating the 12th root of 2. Only to te be dismissed and cast into oblivion by the mathematician John Faggot - because of an error on John Faggot's part.

Other essays I really liked were on Helmholtz' work on combinational tones and consonance, and on the patterns used in 'Ringing the changes' - the British way of ringing church bells. Be warned however that most of the composition pieces are hard to understand if you aren't into reading compositions from paper.

I used to think this way, too. Lately, though, I'm starting to believe that this is a misconception, common as it may be. Consider, for example, Unger's Living High and Letting Die.

Mike

I pulled the definitions from the online version of the OED (3rd edition) [oed.com]. (Possibly it requires a subscription -- I access it through a University system, so I'm not sure.)

It does require a subscription:

Welcome to the Personal Subscription Shop

I'll just comment on the point about starving people in India. Do you know that people starve in India, not because that govt. don't have money and can't buy them food, but because of corruption and other issues.

An indian author "amartya sen" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen also won nobel prize for a book which analzed poverty and famine http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Soci ology/Economic/?ci=0198284632&view=usain india. It clearly showed that having/saving billons will not help anybody, because if was the reason it could have been solved years ago. sane people in india, have child and earn their lives to secure his future. thats how things work. becuase they dont have social security. keeping same pace in technology upgrades the status of a nation.

I'm confused. How is "subject and idea"-oriented English geared toward girls? Do you mean that they began requiring students to actually use language rather than require rote memorization of rules for grammar drills? How odd that the boys' grades would slide when that change was made. I wonder if other curriculum changes were made at the same time might also be responsible? I don't know your gender, but if you are male, how do you explain having done well when most male students did not?

You seem like a bright individual. If you feel that your grammar and spelling are sub-par, I encourage you to work on it on your own. When I was in grade school and high school, I couldn't spell my way out of a paper bag. Now I am much better. Constant use of the spell checker is what helped me most. I would get quick feedback on what I had done wrong and could quickly correct it. Each time I would correct an error, I would look closely at the correct spelling and try to remember it. An even better way is to try to fix the word yourself until it is spelled correctly, ignoring the word processor's suggestions. Do not use word processor functions that automatically fix spelling errors; they will just reinforce your bad habits. The spelling errors in your post are almost all careless errors that a little attention to detail would have eliminated.

Grammar is harder. Good writing is harder. I recommend reading examples of good writing and trying to notice what makes it good. Practice writing. You might even consider taking a class.

BTW, if you need to work on usage, you might consider subscribing to "Usage Tip of the Day" found on Oxford Press' website. It has tips on American English usage, but they are probably helpful for Canadian usage as well.