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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.'"
Here's there website
From the site:
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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.
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The 131 Club?
Self portrait, but you were close...
If you buy New Scientist magazine this week (ie before Thursday 2nd December) then you'll find the book attached to the front of it...
The imperfect tenses in Spanish (and other latin-derived languages such as Italian and French, I think) describe uncertainty about the current state of the "thing" mentioned, not of its truth value. As you stated, the past imperfect is used when you do not know if the event you speak of has finished happening. It has absolutely no relationship with the truth of the statement.
As a quick example, I cannot think now of a big difference between the past imperfect "Yo comía" and the English "I was eating". As far as I know, they are equivalent.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
You'll find that most turkic languages out there, including Uzbek have these two distinct preterite tenses. One is used for an event to which you were an eye-witness, and the other is used to report events that you did not witness, hence, less believable events.
This feature of the language actually served to insulate the people during the years of Soviet occupation. The news (i.e. propaganda) would be reported in the "I saw it first-hand" tense, thus nobody would believe it.
It's a shame that these languages, or at least the advanced features of such languages are dying out. Everybody should try to take at least two quarters of say Uzbek or Kazak in university (prior to death) to keep the awareness alive - see Professor Cirtautus.
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.
> the other for passing on material taken without checking from someone else
And how exactly is this different from the German Konjunktiv?
Unless I'm very much mistaken, if you were standing on the moon, the earth would appear to be fixed in place in the sky. If you start from the far side and then run towards the near side, you'll see an earthrise. Run backwards to see an earthset.
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.
I've wished to stand inside a dome on the bottom of the ocean, watching sharks swim above.
Visit the Bahamas. I don't remember the exact location (visited on a cruise) where you take an elevator down to the seafloor and then you can watch the reef life and sharks. Contact a sales rep for the Norwegan Cruise Line. They may have a brochure. Been there, done that. I personaly prefer to take a sub. The ones in the Cayman Islands were great (before Ivan pitched one ashore).
The truth shall set you free!
Since this is /. and everything should be taken seriously...
the mean you refer will only get you an aleatory *half* portion of you.
No, I wouldn't say it's close at all. The trait of the Choktaw tenses that the article mentioned is the distinction between first-hand, definite observations and second-hand ones. The Spanish distinction is something like this:
The preterite refers to a specific time; the imperfect refers to habitual actions.
So Spanish has two past tenses, yes, but not similar to Choktaw's. In fact, Spanish has more past tenses than that. The past subjunctive comes to mind.
You probably even use more English tenses than you realize; look at a good grammar book. Ever said "I wish I were rich?" Then you've used the subjunctive tense. Roughly, it's used to talk about unlikely things. "I wish I was rich" might convey a sense that it's more likely to happen (or simply that you're not aware of this tense; it's less common nowadays).
Choctaw does have two past tenses, but they are not differentiated in the way claimed. The regular past tense, written -tok (or -tuk in older orthogrophies) is used for completed events ranging back about a year. The other suffix -ttook is for events that were completed more than a year ago. Furthermore, events that happened within the past few minutes and are still relevent for the current situation are often marked as "present" (-h).
Choctaw, and a huge number of other languages in the world, also have what are called evidentials. These are suffixes that indicate how you know the statement is true. In Choctaw, there is a first-hand knowledge suffix -hlih, used when you have direct evidence of the claim (you saw it, heard it, smelled it, etc). There is also the suffix -ashah which indicates that you are guessing that it is true -- you have some indirect evidence, such as hearsay, or very circumstantial evidence.
Tense and evidentiality are definitely distinct, as you can find tense and evidentiality marked at the same time on the verb.
Checkout the papers by a Choctaw expert: Aaron Broadwell.
Or add ".03599976" to the end, although those last two or three digits may be subject to change.
At -30, again, not much of a problem if you're shovelling snow - shovelling gives you a real workout.
Mind you, in high school I came in first in our version of the polar-bear dip - 5 minutes swimming in a lake with ice floating around. The runners-up were 30 seconds and 10 seconds. Sometimes the skinny nerd IS tougher.
Office Space.
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.
Sorta ... the Earth does move in the lunar sky due to libration, but not much. From a position on the moon where the Earth is near the horizon the Earth will appear to rise and fall over a 29 day period. I'm not sure if it moves enough for the entire disk of the Earth to be completly above or below the horizon.
Hope this makes sense!
Yahbut, 0 F is when the roads ice up even when they've been salted. That's an important temperature.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It meant braving a sauna at about 100C and then going through an air temperature of -20C to go into water at almost freezing
A sauna at 100C would cook you quit quickly Recall that 100C is boiling point for pure water at sea level. At 70C, water takes 1 second to get third degree burns. The first post in the thread was correct in stating 'Things to do before you die' is a very apt term for this, I think.
FWIW, most saunas are kept bettween 110F and 125F.
IIRC, it's just outside of Nassau. I've been there, and that's the port the ship stopped at.
Yes, air is mostly vaccume, and as such is one of the most effective insulating materials available, as long as you can keep it in place. If you put a FAN in a sauna you could cook a finn in 1/3rd the time at the same temperature... Because the circulation of the hot air changes it's energy transfer potential... oh hey and the steam on the rocks help prevent your sweat from actually drying off, which helps to prevent you from dehydrating by causing the air to reach 100% relative humidity. and since you're actually cooler than the air sweating isn't really helping you cool off anyways...
FWIW, the hotel is called Atlantis.