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Things To Do Before You Die
Lu Xun writes "A group of British scientists has brought some meaning to our lives by providing a list of 100 scientifically-oriented things to do before you die. The suggestions include 'joining the 300 Club at the South Pole (they take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F) or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.'"
at long last. I have not failed it. One down.
'Things to do before you die' is a very apt term for this, I think.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
About the second past tense - now I know what does "C" in SCO stand for!
Homo Anonymi?
on the whole donating your car to crash tests thing? (It was listed as one of the things that you can decide to have done to your corpse after you leave this realm) What kind of research do they do with actual corpses as opposed to crash test dummies? Are the corpses that much more useful? Who has to mop up after the test is done?
Monstar L
or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.'" - I think /. moderators already speak in Choctaw, too bad most of them only learned the second past tence.
You can't handle the truth.
Operation Mayhem Drone1: "BUILD A HOUSE!"
OPMD2: "PAINT A PICTURE!"
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
"Threesome with Japanese twins"
Amen.
Free XBox, PS2
Looks like I can't die yet.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
" With a little practice - carefully explained - you may also be able to achieve multiple orgasm, "
Ok, the explanation is what makes you orgasm? Geek maybe, but isn't that going a bit far?
Meh. I'd rather do two-a-day tryouts for the Mile High Club.
with bridges and malls, I might be inclined to disagree...
Where's "get laid by 2 hot chicks at the same time"? Hello?
The common saying goes "Plant a tree, have a child, write a book" before you die. I think reading the lists is ok. Taking it seriously..Is seriously wrong ;)
Looks like Minerva isn't going to be the first to compile a list of experiences, afterall. :)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
IIRC, Korean has "two present tenses" for certainty - one for events that the speaker knows to be true, and on that they are not 100% certain of. IANAKS (I am not a Korean speaker)
When I came back from seeing this during the summer, noone believed me. Now I have somewhere to point them to...
take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F
Introduce the Celsius system to the US
I don't need a signature.
The suggestions include 'joining the 300 Club at the South Pole (they take a sauna to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F)
Wrong list... I think that's from "100 Things To Do When You've Lost Your Sanity."
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Here's there website
From the site:
What is a LifeGem?
A LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.
The LifeGem provides a way to embrace your loved one's memory day by day. The LifeGem is the most unique and timeless memorial available for creating a testimony to their unique life.
We hope and believe that your LifeGem memorial will offer comfort and support when and where you need it, and provide a lasting memory that endures just as a diamond does. Forever.
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Nothing to see here
The hardest part might be convincing the NSF to let you go to the South Pole research station just so you can run around naked.
I wonder if they go barefoot too?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
and solve the mathematical mystery of the number 137
To join that 'elite' group you need to insert another 3 in the middle.
;-)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Good luck learning to speak Choctaw. If you look *real* hard, you might find someone who speaks Choctaw -- but chances are, they are too busy running the casino to teach you anything useful.
Pick of the list
Extract your own DNA by spitting gargled salt water into diluted washing-up liquid and slowly dribbling ice-cold gin down the side of the glass. Spindly white clumps which form in the mixture are, basically, you
You know, there are easier, and much more fun, ways to create clumps of white goo that contains your DNA.
"shrinkage"?!
The list is a pretty good one, especially the one about turning yourself into a diamond after you die. I can't help but wish they had included a link to the list, or told us if it was going to be published.
I saw this article in The Mysterious Future, so I googled up this brief page with Choctaw examples.
Personally, I'd like to see some of that grammar come into common usage. At least, on Slashdot.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
... I plan to discover the Secret to Immortality.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
"then run naked to the pole in minus 100 F"
Why the *FUCK* would I want to do that??
Use your excreta to enter the amazing world of the dung beetle. Much more basic but just as fascinating for some. If you are ever caught short in the open, says New Scientist, turn the accident into an opportunity by lingering nearby and watching what happens. "It won't take long for the beetles to appear, scuttle boldly up to your deposit and begin rolling balls of it away, head-butting it and pushing it with their forelegs." Reassuringly, it gets used as food and a beetle breeding nest
I tried this in the food court at my local mall, but security showed up before I saw any beetles.
Maybe someone can clarify why this Chocktaw(sp?) is so cool....but Spanish has two past tenses, preterite and imperfect. One for an event that happened once, at one time, and one that could continually be happening, or the start/end point is not certain. (My explanation is a bit hazy im not a native speaker).
;)
Plus for every tense you have... past present, future, conditional,etc. there is the subjuntive that expresses desires and doubts. It seems to me that the argument for learning this language is rather weak as I can get a handful of confusion from Spanish, not to mention im sure there are alot more languages like this
The method to extract DNA seems pretty neat. Can anybody explain what the gin is doing?
Watching insects tinker with my poo just doesn't make my list of things to do somehow.
I'll do all that after I die.
while (!asleep()) sheep++
Tell your family and friends you're getting much better, and the doc says you have a 100% chance of pulling through. You should see the look on their faces when you croak, they'll be laughing so hard, that they totally forgot your deceased dead carcass collapsed on the floor
Was that sick? sorry.
Morbid question: Can you make a diamond from someone from Sierra Leone's ashes without it being considered a conflict diamone? There sure is a lot of corpse talk in that article for things to do BEFORE you die. Do they know something we don't?
[insert sig file here]
Hmm, and I was considering learning Haskell, a language with monadic I/O...
Actually, though, the difference described in the summary, between the past tenses, isn't actually a distinction of tenses, but rather of modality (or mood, in some writer's terminology). From the description, it seems Choctaw would have a distinction between past and non-past, at least, and a distinction between believed-to-be-true and hearsay (a distinction of evidentiality). Sort of like English distinguishes past and present and two aspects. That is, two one-bit distinctions, making for four different combinations: I eat, I have eaten , I ate, had eaten. Not to mention all the other aspects of verbal systems...
My "science" goal before I die is to work through the Messier catalogue. Unfortunately, I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, so it's not as easy as it sounds.
I wonder how this shapes the thinking of a native Choktaw speaker - for example, if George tells Fred something using the "definitely true" tense, will Fred be more likely to swallow it without thinking than if the "uncheck third-party" tense were used?
And if so, would that mean that an unscrupulous person would be more likely to use the "definitely true" tense?
Would marketing types use it exclusively?
www.eFax.com are spammers
are you not?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Read every single article and comment on /.
and try to get rid of bad karma
#include "a_life.h"
Anyone else imagined trying to get it up while balancing on a 300 foot pole in -50C ? No.. ok ill be going back to work then.
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds... that is when the world will end.
How am I supposed to do this BEFORE I die?!
Some of those things should be called:
:-D
Things you do right before you die.
If you sit over the wing of most jets, you may get to see the shockwave that forms during high-speed flight (above about Mach .8 or so). It is visible in one of two ways. First, if the sun angle is just right, the shockwave will cast a shadow on the wing that is a faint span-wise line of darkness and brightness. Second, if you are sitting in just the right location (about in the middle of the wing) you can see the shockwave by looking for visual disturbances (like a fault line in your vision). Sighting along a line of rivets or the edge of the wing or the wingtips, you can sometimes see a cleft that wavers. (For extra credit, one can also find a smaller shockwave on the engine nacelle about 6" to 12" back form the leading edge by sitting in line with the front of the engine and watching for a visual fault line in the ground scenery passing just above the engine.)
As the plane goes faster, the shockwave is pushed back toward the trailing edge. As the plane slows, it moves toward the leading edge. And during turbulence, the wave will flutter.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Ok, so its a joke.. laugh...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
then it would only be the 166.66666666666666666666 club. Doesn't sound as cool.
I guess I'm one of the weird types who would be quite content to die after getting the opportunity to go into space and see our world from an elevated perspective...
or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.
:)
For what its worth, my native language, Macedonian, has two past tenses almost exactly like the above: one for things you personally witnessed, and the other for things you don't know first hand but think are true.
I find this quite natural. Imagine like having a separate past tense form for "she was there" as opposed to "she supposedly was there".
99 things left to go.
The scientists also offer five things to get organised for your remains after death. These include...having the carbon in your ashes turned into a diamond.
Live hard, die hard...
Learn everybody to use Kelvin
Graduate from college. ;-)
'...assisting at the birth of an animal. "This is one of life's most surprising and moving experiences..."'
I grew up in a rural area where my uncle raised cattle. Consequently, I've "pulled" calves on numerous occations. My first experience, the cow projectile-shat all over me. Surprising? yes; moving? I'm not so sure.
Proverbs 21:19
(Yes, it's gecko, but I just had to leave my typo in.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Two bottles of "Hello Kitty" hand lotion doesn't count.
In Soviet Russia, old people do YOU before they die!
I didn't count 100 things to do? Anyone have the full list?
Mark
Two chicks at the same time.
I've dreamed of standing on the moon, looking at the Earthrise. I've wished to stand inside a dome on the bottom of the ocean, watching sharks swim above. I've longed for a time machine so that I could watch dinosaurs; then finished with that, I'd journey as close to the Big Bang as I could. I want to chat with an Artificial Intelligence before I die. I want to stand in a world powered by the sun or the wind or clean fusion. In 2470, I want to walk within the ruins of a 20th century city, near the aforementioned solar powered, glittering metropolis, and tell the people around me about Times Square Stores and Broadway. I want a flying car, the sporty model, that I can fly along the New Miami skyline. Tired of that, I want a submarine to visit old Miami; zipping along South Ocean watching the sharks swim by.
Is "700 club" a clue as to where they hold their meetings?
...yeah right
Care to explain why it is a ridiculous scale in comparison to "yours"?
Shrinkage
Making cheese.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
or learning Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.'"
:Adam yurumus
:-)
I think Turkish has a similar concept. (I only know a few phrases so I might mess this up, but I'm pretty certain you can say
"the man walked" : Adam yurudu
or you can say
"the man walked (allegedly)"
Must save a lot of time in avoiding libel actions
(Their storage area is already full of bare-ass frozen tourists-onna-stick with a very stupid expression on their faces.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Running from 200 degrees to -100 degrees would kill many people. And I'm pretty sure being creamated and turned into a diamond would kill you.
God spoke to me.
English has two future tenses for certainty.
What do you mean, "to tell you the truth", all that other stuff you've been telling me is crap?
pet peeve
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
...you see, I'm going to live forever, or die trying!
In Ireland: Frolick in the Heather
In Australia: Get in the Bush
In the Galapagos: Play 'Hide the dragon'
In Brazil: Spank a spider monkey
In Canada: Pet a beaver
Drink a stupid "US Irish Bar" DRY........
"NIPPLES!! I HAVE NO NIPPLES!!!" -Happy Noodle Boy
has this on the current issue as a free book. Very nice...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
too bad the list is LAME!
For one thing there are only like a dozen things on the list. For another there are no instructions about how to actually accomplish any of those things.
Hey! I'd like to suggest that everyone should cure cancer before they die! Well that's nice, dipshit, but how would you suggest everyone accomplish that?
I looked for the link to the real list that was full of 100 things to do and had contact information on how you could actually do them, but didn't find it. What a great idea this article was. Some scientific publication should actually write such an article.
I'm bitter that this article wasn't as cool as it should have been.
From the article:
Above sea level? Since the Earth's oceans form part of that 20-kilometer bulge, "sea level" isn't a constant distance from the center of the Earth either, and Mount Everest is still the highest mountain above sea level (while there is no actual sea right below either Mount Everest or Chimborazo, the shape of its hypothetical and non-spherical extension around the globe, called the geoid, can be determined mathematically).
What they mean is that Chimborazo is the place on the surface that is most distant from the Earth's center.
Prove the Euler-Mascheroni Constant to be irrational... or not. Either will work.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
Fahrenheit degrees are fairly near a reasonably perceptible change in temperature. Celsius ones are too big, so you either have to use half degrees (which most HVAC systems do) or round to a larger granularity.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Only two past tenses?
Spanish language has 5 past teses and 4 subjuntive past tenses:
Imperfecto: escribia (wrote)
Indefinido: escribí (wrote)
Perfecto: he escrito (have written)
Anterior: hube escrito (had written)
Pluscuamperfecto: había escrito (had written)
Subjuntivos:
imperfecto: escribiera (wrote)
perfecto: haya escrito (have written)
pluscuamperfecto: hubiera escrito (should written)
Star in your own Murder mystery:
Your demise is inevitable, why not make good fun of it:
- Pick a handful of suspects to frame for your "murder"
- Plant, and contrive evidence to implicate the "suspects" in your death
- Secretly make silent calls from suspect's phones, nearing the night of your demise. When questioned they will deny any knowledge of such phone calls further raising the suspicion
- Intentionally accuse potential suspects of plotting your death, say things like "I know what you're doing, you won't get away with it!," just load enough to be overheard
- Change your will to benefit the suspects, but don't make them aware, they'll deny any knowledge of the change the in the will. But it gives them a motive
Watch the hilarity ensue
"Children should be taught to consider engineering and science as cool - not the preserve of boffins"
Boffins.. yeah.
If you KNOW you're going to die, have fun with some ecstasy. Since you don't have to worry about the long term damaging effects of MDMA, you can have all the fun without any of the guilt.
There probably is no greater emotion, or feeling one could possibly feel than under the influence of E. It's something I think everyone should have the privilege of experiencing before they die.
I think people on their death-beds (cancer, pneumonia, etc) should be able to legally sign-up for it.
That one-carat rock of eternity will cost your estate $14,000. Plus tax. Sign here.
I wonder if my wife would wear me in a ring, or keep me on a nice pedestal in the foyer?
sigs, as if you care.
or have a new species named after you
Oh, no problem, give me a second while I have sex with this goat..
I wouldn't wanna clean your shorts.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
C puts 0 and 100 at the freezing and boiling points of water. Might be useful for cooking.
F puts 0 and 100 at the edges of the extreme temperature ranges experienced in my country. In January, it can get to around 0 (some years not quiet, others a bit below), and summer heat tops out at 100. So, it seems to be a better fit for describing the weather.
In Korea, only old people die!..
It's supposed to be "100 things to do before you die. And a few to do after." or something like that.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
of 100 nerdly things to do before you die.
... /.
...
43. Get a FP on
44. Modify a computer to look like something else
45. Contribute some code to an open source project
46. "Daydream" about two chicks at the same time
47. Reference the movie Office Space 400 times in a single day
That's OK, no one listens to you either, as your hell-hole of a country goes further into debt and isolation. Say a few "heils" in church for me, OK?
For about $100/month in dues and insurance payments, you can sign up for cryonics. It's a longterm experiment to determine whether a person vitrified today using state-of-the-art cryopreservative/vitrifications techniques (which eliminate or greatly reduce ice crystal formation) will be able to be revived at some indeterminate date in the future.
Although such revival is impossible today, at some day N days in the future, it may be possible to revive the experimental subjects. A happy consequence of such revival would likely be awakening into a society where humans are virtually immortal (or extremely lomglived) and machines and other technologies make it possible for humans to not have to work.
Nice payoff for that experiment!
As for the odds of success, there are too many confounding variables to make an estimation. However, the probability of success would be the product of several independent variables, such as (odds of a future society coming up with revival technology) times (odds of remaining safe in the dewar until such a time arrives) times..... etc etc.
Link? Yeah, what the heck....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Ok, those are a few items from the list, but where's the whole list? Any links?
"As the plane goes faster, the shockwave is pushed back toward the trailing edge. As the plane slows, it moves toward the leading edge. And during turbulence, the wave will flutter."
Well I'm seeing shockwaves from all that "extract your DNA" gin.
The car crash cadaver and the "murderer"-type cadavers both came straight out of that book.
It's a good read. Glad my wife gave it to me to read.
There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to -0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
The real mystery to this number, which the article hints at, is that it can be defined in a variety of interesting ways, including as (charge of an electron)^2 over (4 pi epsilon-naught h-bar c)- a formula that involves quantum mechanical (Planck's constant), relativistic (c) and mathematical (pi) constants produces a dimensionless number in the neighborhood of 1/137. The number itself is not so important (except to a bunch of people who have applied numerological methods to its study, most notably Arthur Eddington); rather, the issue figuring out the relationship between the fundamental constants that pop up everywhere in calculations (like h, c, and pi) and the universe that these calculations describe.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Choctaw has taint()! Just goes to show how failing to rely on the "-T" flag can allow your entire nation to be conquered by European invaders, overflowing your treaty buffers with cannon.
--
make install -not war
If I should die before I wake
All my bone and sinew take
Put me in the compost pile
To decompose me for a while
Worms, water, sun will have their way,
Returning me to common clay
All that I am will feed the trees
The plants, the fishes in the seas
When radishes and corn you munch
You'll be having me for lunch
And then excrete me with a grin
Chortling "There goes Lee again!"
--Lee Hayes
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
See my URL of course. :)
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
From the article...
There is also, inevitably, some crossover with the more banal lists of things to do before you die, even if the scientists' equivalent of visiting Everest is much more interesting. The Earth's rotation causes a 20-kilometre bulge at the equator, making Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador the highest mountain above sea level.
Wouldn't the sea bulge as well (if not more)? Perhaps they should say the point on Earth furthest from the center of mass.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
It should have been: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_subculture#E xample_Posts
a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true
That's not tense, that's aspect.
Link your home computer to the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico
/.ers have done that, surely?
Plenty of
They use idle CPU cycles to analyze radio telescope observations for extraterrestrial signals.
SETI@home main page
Spread Firefox team .
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Well maybe when I was a kid. I've settled on a PhD and some patents since then.
discover the formula for immortailty
The deeper into space, the better. Too bad the stuff in movie 2001 did not materialize on that schedule. I was also charmed by the adventure in Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Heinlein.
Anyway, he said that one of the motivators was that after a few months in camp, there was a fair amount built up sexual frustration, and the 300 club is co-ed. I don't know if there are attractive researchers at the Pole, but the implication was that after a few months of freezing your butt off, any thrill is a welcome diversion.
then going from 200 degrees farenheit to -100 degrees will probably kill you.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Choctaw, a language with two past tenses - one for giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else.'
..well so does Spanish, one for saying when something happened and one for saying how something happened .. then there is a few past tenses to order different occurences of events in the past as well ..
;-)
.. But I am only guessing :-)
another fine thing about Spanish is, that you can actually use it for something
I asume that girls will be more impressed about Spanish than Choctaw
As a member of the Choctaw Nation (my great-grandfather was an original enrollee), I'm proud that the language has been recognized as worth learning.
If you are interested, here is a link to Chahta Anumpa (Choctaw Language) classes via the Internet.
You can click here for more information about the Choctaw Nation.
Menage a Trois.
Before I die I need to make a Kano sandwich with two hot chicks as bread!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Oh well, I guess marketing didn't approve of it...
I'm sure learning Choctaw is a worthy endeavour, but there are other languages where verb form indicates whether you trusted the speaker or not. It's called the subjunctive, and the language is German.
Since this is /. and everything should be taken seriously...
the mean you refer will only get you an aleatory *half* portion of you.
1 -- The distinction between direct and reported speech is not one of tense
2 -- Choctaw has _three_ past tenses
This pedantry brought to you by Pedant's Revolt (tm)
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Fee! Fo! Fi! Fum!
I smell the stink of a Slashdot bum!
Be he 'live, or be he thing,
I'll compress his bones, to make my bling!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
indeed, no one cares about ice forming around 0C
Choctaw - the official language of Microsoft and George W. Bush.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It is actually the case in Turkish and all Turkic languages. There are two past tenses the one is for the things you experienced yourself and the other for the ones you heared from someone.
... and nothing good ever happens here.
real men don't use the sauna if it's under 120 celsius (~250 fahrenheit)
The number would be a lot less mysterious if they spelled it correctly: 1337
So does English, but I don't want to get into that.
In Korean, one of the past tenses roughly translates to "I saw that such-and-such happened" where "saw" can also mean "recall", "observed", "definitely concluded", or some other version of absolute proof. It is used pretty much only for testifying of fact. It really isn't that common in daily speech. Mostly they say, "such-and-such happened" without trying to claim a source or witness to it. Or they'll also come out and say literally, "I saw that such-and-such happened."
In English, we just say, "I saw that such-and-such", and by admitting to the method of observation we are admitting to its validity. I like the English way better, frankly, because in order to testify of fact, you have to admit to the method of the obtainment of that fact. (And also because it's my native language!)
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Did anyone else think this was a list made for future Darwin Awards winners?
Fun fact, -40 degrees F is equal to -40 degrees C. At these temperatures, the radio weather reports from the little town in northern Alberta where I lived use to include how many minutes it would be before exposed flesh froze (if there was a wind, the time dropped significantly, to under a minute in severe cases). Working outside at these temps is not fun. I'm just glad I didn't have to do survival training at -60C like some of my friends where were in the Military had to do.
Man... What country are you living in?
Temp range here this year so far...
-60 deg. F to 105 Deg. F
and that's in Maine... go to Florida, and the high temp increases drastically
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
...get laid by someone else, as opposed to by yourself!
That's easy - disbelieve them both.
Scientists are sometimes wrong, and sometimes right.
Marketing types always lie.
Ergo, the only solution that satifies both axioms is that the statement is false, and that the scientist is wrong.
www.eFax.com are spammers
100 degrees Fahrenheit used to be the body temperature of humans. They calibrated their instruments wrong, and so it actually ended up being 98.1 or whatever it is. 0 degrees Fahrenheit was the temperature of salt water freezing. This is water that was completely saturated with salt at 1 atm of pressure (sea level). The British figured it's easier to measure the temperature of salt water than pure water because getting pure water is very hard.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Not very amusing, perhaps, but high-tech all the same. Keep them in a safety-deposit box and make sure someone trustworthy (e.g., spouse) knows how to get them and use them.
Kiss a human female!
That's just pathetic -- so-called scientists passing on the rubbish about Choctaw. That's about on par with the Eskimo words for snow thingy (besides, as other posters have suggested, they didn't even get the Choctaw part right).
Every language I've seen so far has some way to indicate doubt or lack of authority about what you're saying. For example, many Indo-European languages use the subjunctive mood (also called "conjunctive") rather than a separate tense for that purpose, and even English still uses the past subjunctive to indicate a condition that is contrary to fact: "if I *were* god" (but I'm not). We also use the subjunctive for something that someone else wants to happen: "I insist that he *go*" (the indicative would be "goes").
Perhaps those scientists could find something more useful to do with their time, such as encouraging people to send postcards to a dying boy.
play Duke Nukem Forever! :-)
Marry Britney Spears, make the most of it, and dump her before she manages to say anything.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
I've seen Galileo's midddle finger. What I want to do before I die is help the fellow have one last posthumous laugh, and orient the finger so it faces towards the Vatican. :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Well here it's pretty safe to say that when you get down below 0C you can expect snow as opposed to rain.
The article talks about it as if it were something unique to Choctaw, but in fact, it can be found all over the globe, in unrelated languages. (I can't recall any European or African languages with evidentials right off the bat, though, but a quick Google search gets me some Asian languages, and of course Quechua has evidentials.)
This page gives a few more examples from the native languages of North America.
Actually, it really doesn't--Arizona, yes, Florida, no. I live in Orlando, and this year our high was only up to 101F. Why? Winds from the Gulf and Atlantic tend to keep it under 100F most of the year...and when the winds aren't blowing, there's usually a good enough cloud cover to keep temps in the 90s during the summer months.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
Would someone please provide a link to the original source of the report, if it exists on-line? I searched briefly but the Guardian report gives no link to the New Scientist magazine article. I would like to see all the suggestions from the scientists.
Sincerely,
Kevin
Believe it or not, it is fine for up to a minute or so and then you haul yourself out and run back into the sauna as fast as possible, pausing only to grab another beer.
In Finnish, there is no equivalent, but there are two similar constructs, the "obviousness clitic" -han/-hän, and "it's obviously false" equivalent of "allegedly", muka. They're highly useful for abusing purposes in political discussions. For example:
/muka/ muovaa syntyperäisen choktawin puhujan ajattelua? ("I wonder how /the hell/ do you think this would shape the thinking of a native Choktaw speaker?") The thing is, that people will evaluate the trustability of a person, no matter what he says.
Microsofthan on laiton monopoli. "Obviously Microsoft is an illegal monopoly."
Microsoft aikoo muka korjata sen bugin. "Microsoft is going to - no way in hell - fix that bug."
If I'd shape your message into the latter form: Kuinkahan tämä
In Finnish, marketing types don't use these constructs I mentioned, because that'd make them sound arrogant. On the other hand, I suspect in Choktaw they use whatever is the default, "I think this is true", as the marketeer doesn't want to sound like "I just heard this from some guy". OTOH, IANALinguist.
Rowan: Gareth, quick trust exercise, ultimate fantasy?
Gareth Keenan: Hmm?
David Brent: We're just doing the ultimate fantasy, we're all doing it.
Gareth Keenan: Two lesbians probably, sisters. I'm just watching.
Rowan: OK. Erm. Tim? Do you have one?
Tim Canterbury: I'd never thought I'd say this, but can I hear more from Gareth please?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I've never been in a car crash that I couldn't prepair for, and I've never been injured in a car crash (appart from a cut toe).
Crash test dummies are to crash testing what 'steet value' is to the price you pay for drugs.
Worst case senario guide lines.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Anyway, I'm going to write up my new idea and send it off to Hollywood and make mill .. Billions!
However, there are two other reasonable ways to measure the height of a mountain. You can measure the radial distance from the center of the Earth to the summit. This is the one that makes Chimborazo a winner, since the equatorial bulge counts for this measurement.
You can also measure from the height of the surrounding terrain. This is obviously trickier, since the surrounding terrain is seldom entirely flat. But it happens that there is an unambiguous winner in this category, too: Mauna Kea, the tallest peak on the big island of Hawaii. All of that island is in fact a large volcano rising from the depths of the Pacific Ocean; the overall height from base to peak (including the submerged part) is over 33,000 feet.
This site provides a nice summary of the data, with references.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Subjunctive is not a tense. The grammatical category involved here is called "mood" in English, and modo ("mode") in Spanish. I.e., indicative vs. subjunctive vs. conditional is a distinction that is orthogonal to tense.
Same sort of thing goes for perfect vs. imperfect. The difference between them is not a difference of tense, but rather, of aspect (perfective vs. imperfective).
It seems that LifeGem (turn your ashes into a diamond) is now Slashdotted, prehaps they could turn their server's melted remains into diamonds.
Slashdot could have quite the collection of "diamond servers"....
Human cadavers are used for two purposes: calibrating test instruments and assessing traumatic effects of measured forces.
There's, hem, a... third thing... they're used for...
You can't take the sky from me...
Joe Hung: Oh... I, I can't say that.
Porn Director: Say what?
Joe Hung: What they are called.
Porn Director: The Assfuck Twins?
Joe Hung: I can't say that. Can we call them something else?
Porn Director: But they're the Assfuck Twins.
Joe Hung: Well I know, but couldn't I call them the Naughty Twins or something?
Porn Director: No, you couldn't just call them the Naughty Twins. They're the Assfuck Twins. Why would you call them The Naughty Twins when they get fucked in the ass all the time?
Joe Hung: Well, that's pretty naughty.
The thing Choctaw has is called evidentials. Hundreds of languages have them, in more than one continent. I would call it "unfamiliar" (to people who speak European languages), not "curious".
Erm, leave the airplane out of it. This is Slashdot, remember ?
Humidity also plays a role, the more humid it is the more energy is required to heat a given volume of air to a specific temperature. The heat index is generally as high or even higher in parts of Florida than it is in Arizona...
Bah, you people and your silly degrees. It's 275K outside here. Toasty!
There's a word for this sort of thing. "Evidential". Lots of languages have them.
Though I suspect 148.888888888888888888888888888888889 has even less pizzaz than 166 2/3. Maybe it could be rounded off to 149?
Score: -1, Pedantic
Crash Test Cadaver Cleanup Technician.
Eeeewwwww.
The story gives a sampling of a few of the items on the list, but completely neglects to give a link to the actual complete list, or any mention whatsoever of how or where to see it.
Scientists' equivalent of visiting Everest is much more interesting. The Earth's rotation causes a 20-kilometre bulge at the equator, making Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador the highest mountain above sea level
I have always believed that Everest's height was measured wrt the sea level.Do these people mean that if the sea level at ecuador was adjusted to the sea level at Everest ?
Wanted : A Signature.
Jeez. What is so hard about the celcius system? 40 is bloody hot and 50 is very rare. So take your 100 farenheit and divide by two and (roughly) there you go.
0 is when you see ice. Not just useful in cooking!
It is only because you have never used it that it seems foreign. Doesn't it bother you that you have a system tied to wishy washy metrics instead of physical constants?
Another nice thing about Celsius: in Celsius, -30 is about as cold as +30 is hot.
Apparently there was a program in Germany where, if you were convicted of a DUI and were facing some heavy jail time, you could volunteer to be a crash-test dummy and reduce your sentence. Not semi vs. volkswagen tests, but still without a seatbelt. A teacher friend of mine would show these films to his physics class.
a reference to GERMAN CRASH FILM - Impactive film using real people to portray the effectiveness of safety belt protection in actual crash situations - 12 minutes
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Yes on the distinction between tense and mood, but the active/passive distinction is called "voice," not "tongue." In the strictest sense, English only has two tenses, present and past. The "future" is not a true tense in English but an example of a conditional mood. 'Will' is a present-tense verb. The progressive system (e.g., "I am going") is also sometimes, inaccurately, called a tense, but it's more properly an aspect. The perfective (e.g., "I have gone") is also usually considered an aspect by linguists, although again, it's frequently lumped in with the basic tenses.
>...the British
A clue for you:
From the first Google hit on "Fahrenheit biography".
..... if only it could happen!
1 -- The distinction between direct and reported speech is not one of tense
2 -- Choctaw has _three_ past tenses
This pedantry brought to you by Pedant's Revolt (tm)
That sure was interresting, but it ain't informative at all.
What's the 3rd tense? "I dunno: I was drunk"?
You can't take the sky from me...
Just take a piss...
I can't see why anyone'd want to do any of the things in the article, except perhaps multiple orgasm, which sounds like it might be fun. Clone a cat?? Run naked to the south pole??? Feed dung beetles??? What the fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuckity-doodah?????
Let's compose a list of 100 things for scientists to do instead of fannying around with this sort of nonsense. I'll start...
1: design a zip that doesn't snag on the surrounding material.
According to this Fahrenheit chose 96 degrees as the human body temperature. The article gives a brief explanation.
Turkish has identical "past tense" structure.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
... glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate.
... moments will be lost ... in time, like tears ... in rain.
... to die.
I watched C-beams
All those
Time
"There must - probably - be a reason why the number describes the strength of electromagnetism through calculations involving the charge of the electron, Planck's constant - the fundamental constant of nature arising in quantum mechanical problems - and the speed of light" What is the author trying to say? Thanks.
I though you said "discover the Secret of Immorality"
I prefer Celsius myself, but HUH? What are you referring to?
If you're referring to how they feel, I disagree. Where I live the temperature is usually between -30 and +30 C, which are both uncomfortable, but -20 is too cold while +20 is perfectly reasonable.
!!!
You are correct about the zero. I was taught in thermodynamics that Mr. Fahrenheit set zero to be the coldest temperature he could reach with the technology of the day, ice mixed with salt water. 100 was (no kidding) the temperature he measured from the back end of a horse.
My rights don't need management.
Not to be the big loser of the day, but where is the full list, I cant find a link to it anywhere.
Thanks to whomever will post the link.
000. Find out where the list is
:)
001. Go swimming in cold fricken waters (where sharks with laser beams don't even go)
002. Get yourself turned into a diamond.
SO back to item 000... Where is the list
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
A friend of mine did that many years ago (just for the hell of it) and said it was a life-changing experience.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
... before one dies was given in the movie My Life Without Me. You should watch it some day.
Not only is a 1-C change noticeable, but a 0.5-C change is as well, which is why the F scale is more natural. This is why A/C units let you set by the 0.5 C increment. I'm not sure if 10 to 11 in particular is noticeable, but 27, 27.5, 28, and 28.5 are distinctly different temperatures to set your A/C at.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In America: Supersize it
In England: Find a mate
In Denmark: Make bacon
In Scotland: Toss your caber
In Hawaii: Get into a grass skirt
In Switzerland: Ski down the pink run
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
"F puts 0 and 100 at the edges of the extreme temperature ranges experienced in my country"
In Celsius it is about -20 to 40. In any system you can get your subjective calibration. Mine is:
-20 C ultra cold
-10 C very cold
0 C freezing
5 C cold
10 C coldish
15 C cool
20 C warmish/coolish
25 C warm
30 C hot
35 C very hot
40 C ultra hot
There is no need to have it calibrated from 0 to 100. Celsius scale is definitely arbitrary but it is based on properies of water. And water is, well, important for us.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
FINALLY get a story accepted on /.
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
-20 C ultra cold
haha, pussy
All European languages have something like that, but applying to all tenses. In English you usually only use it with if, eg:
"I don't think he knew that at the time. If he had known, he wouldn't have done what he did."
The speaker doesn't say "knew" he says "had known" because he is not sure whether the guy knew or not.
In German tey use it all the time when quoting people in news stories.
Another one of those incredibly stupid "facts" you get in the popular press.
Pretty much everything is derived from water in SI, the meter, the gram, the liter.
IIRC 1 liter == 1 kg water.
You don't use the SI system, don't call it a fucking liter. It's spelt litre.
I heard something like this once. I heard that the 0 and 100 deg. marks were set by Fahrenheit as he mesured temperature extremes around the Amsterdam area over a (several?) years. I heard this from a guy who was INSISTANT that that was the original definition of the scale, yet I have found no other mention of that basis other than from that man. Has anyone else heard this and can corroberated it with a source?
I have read over and over that it is based on the freezing of equal of a salt & water mixture. But this post (which I am inclied to beleive because it sounds more scientific with it's specification of pressure etc.) says it's just as much salt as can be saturated in water. I think this is interesting how hard it has been to find a standard explination of how the scale is setup.
On another note, it is only this year (in my thermodynamics course) that I found out that 0 deg. C is not just the freezing point of water but the TRIPLE POINT of water (the temperature at which ice, liquid water, and water vapor can exist). I wonder why I had never heard that in the past.
Also, on other unit scales, why is it that the definition of the kilogram has moved from being defined as 1000cc (1L) of water at maximum density (4 deg. C) and gone to being defined by this chunck of platinum in the NIST valut. These standards are supposed to be easy to reproduce, where as I cannot easily reproduce the weight of the platinum chunk if I don't have it to compare to.
I understand (from a first-hand account) that there's one big drawback to joining the 300 degree club: because of the cold, one might experience... ahem... "significant shrinkage".
Now it makes sense.
-FL
Turkish has two past tenses too, for exactly the same purpose.
Turkish has a similiar system of tenses.
Konustu -- he talked
Konusmus -- supposedly, he talked (or, apparently, etc)
Is it anywhere online/public?
"Build a house."
"And you?"
(still my #1 favorite movie of all time
Nathan's blog
If you're here in this life to do something, then the chances are you already either know what that thing is, or you have a strong inkling. Get the heck on with it. Courage is needed, we're on a serious clock and every contribution is vital. Climbing mountains while reciting scigeek-lore is no better than spinning in circles.
-FL
Wouldn't this same bulge effect occur in the sea as well?
No matter what you 'donate' your body for, most likely it will get sold off piece by piece, not unlike what happens in an auto chop shop. The original institution may not actually do anything with the cadaver, but they will certainly make a lot of money with it when it's all said and done. The mother of a friend of mine had her body donated to a medical school, apparently under the assumption that it would be used in the education of future physicians. The family was disturbed to find out that mom was 'parted out' and sold to corporations & institutions all over the place. The same is true for abortions. Selling body parts is big business.
Use your excreta to enter the amazing world of the dung beetle.
This may not be obvious to those of us who are presently working on their monitor tan: do not attempt this indoors.
Thank you.
Everytime I read about delays or funding problems with the NASA Pluto probe under preperation, I keep thinking, "Hurry up guys, I want to see Pluto snapshots before I croak". If they do it soon enough, they can use Jupiter's gravity to shorten the trip to about 12 years after launch. If they wait too long, Jupiter will not be in position and it could be something like 30 years. The men in my family history tend not to live long lives, so I hope that probe is not delayed again.
And, I want to live long enough to see real AI become a reality. Based on computation power figures and extrapolation of Moores Law, it will be about 2030 when low-budget research computers reach the computing ability of the human brain. One AI author (can't find link) suggests that it takes low-budget research machines to allow enough researchers the opportunity to make/find nearly full AI use of the computer based on past AI project patterns.
Table-ized A.I.
For things which may be true.
'One time in band camp'....
Anyone know where I can find one of those lakes?
Preferably in north america?
Googling it only finds one reference to some bays in puerto rico...
JC
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
-tfa- "With a little practice - carefully explained - you may also be able to achieve multiple orgasm, or, for £35,000, clone your pet cat." -/tfa-
The multiple orgasm one was the only one that appealed to me.. So long as the precticing mentioned doesn't involve said cat.
best.. volunteer medical research opportunity.. ever
(null)
I can see trading in diamonds made from famous people. How much do you think a diamond made from Einstein, Gallileo, Shakespeare, Da Vinci would go for? It could be interesting to have a diamond made from Cy Young put on the trophy that bears his name.
Of course there could be a certain amount of abuse - like Ted Williams' kid paying to keep his head frozen by selling off parts of his body as diamonds.
I know if I get turned into a diamond, I'll be treated like a ring on "The Lucy Show", you know get flushed down a sink, pass through a dog, get baked into a meatloaf.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Maybe digitalhermit dreams of someone giving a spin to the moon? Sure, it's a lot of energy and angular momentum, but are time machines which can visit the Big Bang any less possible?
Besides, who knows what boondoggle projects the Solar Congress of 2470 will be involved with? Properly terraforming Venus might involve speeding up the planet's rotation. If you consider changing the rotation of a planet to be impossible, calculate the relative magnitudes of the angular momentum of its spin, and of its orbit around the sun. Moving some of the anglular momentum from the orbit to the spin can change a planet's orbit slightly while changing its spin drastically. This process can either release energy or require it, depending upon the direction of change. If the process releases energy, it might be used as a power source in 2470...
In a programmer's life
Three things must be done:
Write two lines of APL
And make the buggers run.
How about joining the mile high club instead? It's alot more fun than running naked in -100F Temps, plus you get to watch a movie when when your done.
Researchers in Manchester have almost succeeded in developing Velcro-like pads to fix to the feet of volunteers who will then be able to scuttle over the town hall or the Guardian's northern headquarters like lizards, with no risk of falling.
Well, then I'll "almost" be able to complete this task.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
English, too, has a grammatical construction for hypothetical, uncertain, desired, or rhetorical actions, too: it's called the subjunctive mood -- but few people can be bothered to use it these days, and, were they to do so, it probably wouldn't be recognised anyway...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Bulgarian has something like that too -- all tenses (not just past tense) have witness and non-witness forms. Bulgarian also has implied pronouns on verb conjugations (i.e. you can 'hear' the conjugation for every verb, so you are allowed to leave out the I, he, she, they, etc.). And yes, there is a first-person singular non-witness conjugation. I have heard some Bulgarians call this "drunk tense," generally while giggling hysterically.
:-).
As an example, you can say "Bil sum se napil", which means I got completely drunk, and is in non-witness form. Basically, you got so drunk that you don't actually remember having done it, and heard about it afterward.
One Bulgarian grammar book pointed out that this is also a handy tense for politicians. "My opponent said that I have defrauded the voters." By placing 'I have defrauded the voters' into non-witness form, you've already denied it
Acius the unfamous
Coming Soon:
A list of Things to do in Denver When You're Dead.
Look, it's enough that we've been making an effort to learn your crazy system of units based on gonzo things like the hyperfine structure of cesium-133 and the properties of a platinum-iridium rod. Don't confuse us any further with your met-trays and lit-trays. Next you'll be trying to push "grammes" or "secondes" or some such nonsense on us, and we'll just turn around and go back to furlongs, foot-pounds, slugs, and acre-feet.
I would like to eat at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe before I die. I would probably have the steak, as I hear it's quite good, and then watch the destruction and rebirth of it all. Would anyone like to join me?
http://www.accelerateglobalwarming.com
Actually, that's not quite correct. When Gabriel Fahrenheit did his research and developed the system he was in the Swiss Alps and so the water had a bunch of minerals and the pressure was lowered signifigantly. He wanted to do 360 degrees(like a circle) but thought that doing so would get unwieldy so he used 180. At least, that's what my high school chem teacher told me.
Just have to do it twice then...
"Visit Shark Bay in Western Australia to see fossil mounds of algae which were among the earliest living things on Earth. Seeing them, I can marvel at how human thought transcends the here and now.They act as a ruler of time stretching back into the past"
This algae are not fossils, but living fossils. These mounds of algae are alive and not fossilized. Living fossils are defined as species which once were widespread, but now are relagated to a small region. Two examples of this are the coelacanth and the crinoid.
Google News doesn't show any article with a link to the original.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Ummmm. Bah. Bah. BAH!
bah.
bah.
BAH! BAH! BAH! BAH! BAH!!!!!!
Err.... uhhh...... bah.
Bah.
Thanks. I feel better now. Bah.
I cannot even get one thing done, let alone a cool 100, some of which certainly won't get you to grow old. But I must have mistaken the title :)
Live
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
(assuming you mean to "watch the hilarity ensue" whilst being alive)
You must remember that only Elvis has successfully faked his own death.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
It isn't just two or three times I've ran from 130 degrees Centigrade sauna to hole in the sea - no matter if it was minus twenty or forty outside, it really doesn't matter when you plunge into sub-zero water and make couple dives...
Seriously, if your heart doesn't stand doing this at least dozen times in a row, don't try to challenge regular Finns.
...at the same time.
Dialectician. Archology.
1. See attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. 2. Watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. 3. Look manly while crying in the rain. Bruce
Wow, wonder where they are doing that? At STP, water freezes at 32 degrees F.
Let's see. Since -100 F is basically 200 Kelvin, we can consult our phase diagram for water and see what the pressure would have to be in order for water to be a liquid at that temperature!
...
Oh. Looks like you were just wrong. Either that or "water" means "antifreeze".
I lived in Finland for two years, and learned some interesting things.
1) The sauna was invented in Finland. (Not the Turkish steam room, which most people think is a sauna. A sauna must have an extremely hot oven (85+ degrees C) to heat the rocks so that when you throw water on the rocks, it evaporates instantly into steam. This is fundamental because the instant humidity + temperature change causes you to sweat so much, you actually clean out your own pores with sweat. My friends and I had the cleanest pores while living in Finland (we sauna'd every week). Supposedly something about the steam, lots of water, antioxidants, and negatively charged ions helps your body get rid of free radicals, but I don't really understand that. It also helps you get rid of toxins and raise your white blood cell count.
2) Hitting yourself with birch twigs (vihta, vahta, or vitsa - pick your dialect) isn't just weird, it feels good and it's healthy. It stimulates blood flow to the skin and increases circulation.
3) You can cook food (meat, sausage, etc) in the sauna while you are saunaing!!!
4) The best part is jumping out of the sauna into the lake or snow. This is why most saunas are built next to a lake (if possible). Finland has 188,000 lakes, so it's not really an issue. Incredibly, no one in Finland ever worries about blood pressure. I always wondered why Americans make such a huge deal about that kind of thing when entire populations seem to think there's no problem with it. Maybe because they're not all obese.
5) Incredibly, the sauna has no sexual connotations. Saunaing is almost always non-co-ed, and if you go with your girl/boyfriend/spouse, no one would even consider having sex in there.(It's hot and the wood boards are uncomfortable.)
6) Finns always sauna naked. It's just better that way. Trust me.
The average "best" temperature most Finns give is 85C. I personally liked it around 95, but many Finns think that's too hot. Once we got ours all the way up to 128 degrees Celcius. Believe me, we were not in there long. I burned my hand from touching my hair when I finally came running out which had basically boiling water in it. I then proceeded to stand outside on my balcony naked in -30 degree Celcius weather for about ten minutes to cool off.
So, 128C is 262 degrees F, and -30C is -22F, so there's a difference of 284 degrees F. Only 16 off... I think enjoying the Finnish culture sure beats going to Antarctica.
Sigs are lame.
The simple past tense is the "definitely true" tense.
The "unchecked" tense, which is generally referred to as the narrative tense, is very commonly used by the news media.
The simplest way to tranlate that idea conveyed by that tense is by prefixing the word "reportedly" or "apparently" to the verb in a normal English sentence.
Example
--
Factual: Merkeziye gitti.
(He went to the store.)
Narrative: Merkeziye gitmis.
(He [apparently] went to the store.)
In the first case, I either saw him enter the store, or at least subconsciously assumed he did in fact go because he left the house with a shopping list, or he always goes to the store on Saturday afternoons.
In the second case, I'm either relating something someone told me, or I saw him leave with no obvious indication that he's going to the store, but that's what I think he did.
I wonder if that means we'll decide all the mountains are twenty feet shorter after the Greenland Ice Sheet melts in the next couple of decades?
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity