I've used Evernote for years as part of my academic research, and I have hovered between paying for it and ditching it altogether. Every time I look into the premium version, it's clear that it's a boatload of money for features I will never use. On top of that, the "UX" gets worse and worse and it becomes less and less of a productive program, for example as they keep hiding the actual notebooks deeper behind buttons and menus. Sometimes, then, I think about jumping ship and switching everything over to OneNote, but it's hard to trust Microsoft with much of anything, and OneNote has lost data for me before.
I like classic, well-aged literature. This year I read Middlemarch by George Eliot, expecting it to be something my wife would like because of its similarity to Jane Austen. But I loved it so much and found it so theologically deep that it's probably one of my favorite books ever now--I even bought a hardcover to peruse for good quotes. My wife, however, hated it.
For a shorter, more casual read I also read Dracula, which I liked a lot more than I thought I would. The best part is at the beginning, though, and it starts to drag on after halfway. It is also not very deep.
It's been an American thing for a long time. I don't know if it is used in other English-speaking countries, but from my experience teaching college students it seems not to be typical in non-English-speaking countries, or in Africa, or even in Guam (even though it is part of the U.S.).
When one writes in a human language, one should write so that the reader can interpret what one has written correctly and, hopefully, with as little effort puzzling over it as possible.
Well said. I think the long history of people complaining over five-paragraph essays is more a sign of its success than failure. The annoying repetition is exactly what makes well-structured writing second nature for many students. I've taught plenty of college students from foreign countries or even U.S. territories where the five-paragraph essay was not enforced in high school, and this lack causes a significant and difficult learning curve for these students. They typically have trouble communicating in larger research essays because they never learned how to communicate well in five boring paragraphs. "The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones" (Luke 16:10a).
I can see what you mean, but I think I won't really understand it until it happens to me (and I hope it never happens to me). I'm on my third SSD and none has ever failed; my previous one was showing some age and was SATA so I upgraded to M.2 NVMe on Cyber Monday. Perhaps they haven't failed on me because I keep most of my data on a HDD RAID array and use the SSDs only for OS, program files, and very limited caching.
350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.
This is America! They probably have to account for the fact that the fat American driver probably also weighs 350 pounds himself.
You miss the point of language. Hebrew, like most languages, tends to use male as the default, so "them" is still masculine but by context it includes both male and female. In the same way, the singular "him" is masculine because it refers back to "man," which is masculine, but "man" is descriptive of both male and female. Likewise, the word "homo" in Latin (the source of "human") is not neuter but masculine, but even in Latin it refers to a species that is considered to be both male and female. To my understanding, gender was often so grammatical in Latin (rather than determined by the object) that in some cases you would even be forced to use a masculine word for a woman, e.g. poeta.
There's no doubt that because of gender bias people have often thought of God as though God were male. But if you actually asked an ancient Hebrew, he or she would probably have scoffed at the question. After all, the Israelites specifically differed from the religions around them because they did not see God as having a consort. They did not see sex as relevant to divinity. Because of this, the Old Testament does at times use feminine imagery to speak about God as well, e.g. Isa 49:15–16:
"Can a mother forget her infant, /
be without tenderness for the child of her womb? /
Even should she forget, /
I will never forget you.
Ha, I was worried someone would call me on that. I was thinking more of Latin audacia there. Again, not all abstract nouns as feminine, but in German and Latin there are more often feminine than masculine. Latin virtus is the best example, because it comes from vir, "man," and has a sense of "manliness," but it is grammatically feminine. In medieval culture sometimes the conceptual masculinity of the word even functioned in a sexist way; women were seen as lacking in manly virtue. On the other hand, St. Catherine of Siena still sees virtue as manliness but does not think that it is beyond women. She went so far as to scold the pope and tell him essentially to "man up."
Even intersex (hermaphroditism) is not really another gender, but a mixed expression of the two. This is because gender is not a purely static, unrelated absolute, as though "male" were definable in its own terms without reference to "female." After all, "male" is that which is oriented toward mating with "female," and vice versa. Even before all of our cultural assumptions about gender, there is a biological distinction that has everything to do with mutual relationship. Intersex, in contrast, is not one condition but many different conditions. To my understanding, there are even cases when someone with a Y chromosome will not develop fully as a male. Nevertheless, in every case we think of intersex in reference to male and female, as somehow expressing one, the other, or both. In no case is intersex something completely different with no relation whatsoever to male or female. We don't really even have a concept of a third gender, but only of an interplay of male and female that is not readily categorizable within one or the other. In Slashdot terms, intersex is more akin to a state of subatomic indeterminancy or else the non-value "null" (vs. boolean true or false).
The irony is that once we abstract from biological gender and make it into a cultural construct, we are still bound by the same duality even when we insist that gender is fluid or indeterminate or else changeable. To say that a biological man can become a woman still implies to some extent that there is something called "woman" that stands underneath and behind culture. There are of course some people who claim to be beyond male or female, or at least who refuse to be defined by those terms, but even in such a case they are definable as those who militate against male and female, and thus are still dependent on that duality.
Thank you for your comment. As a professional theologian, I definitely had the traditional idea of the Church as the Bride of Christ in mind. It no doubt did contribute to the tendency to see the Church as feminine. I would argue, also, that it's not that symbol alone that is at work here, but also something grammatical. In the Old Testament prophets, for example, the language of Israel as bride is extremely prominent. However, Israel is not exclusively spoken of female, because it is a masculine word and the moniker of Jacob. Thus Israel is also spoken of as a "son." In contrast, I think the Church became exclusively associated with femininity because of its grammatical femininity combined with feminine biblical and traditional images. The incidental contribution of human language does not diminish the revelatory character of this association, because as with all of Scripture, God allows himself to be spoken through human language. Just as the flesh of Christ is integral to salvation, so also is language the privileged vehicle of a truth that exceeds and defies all speaking.
You're partly right. In Christianity, both men and women are explicitly created in the image of God. It's the first story of creation (Genesis 1) that talks about this, and in that story both man and woman are created at the same time and both are clearly stated to be in the image of God. Only the second story of creation shows woman being created second, but even there it makes no claim that woman is somehow lesser. It does not state that woman is created to serve man, but that woman is a suitable helper or companion. It even says that "it is not good for man to be alone." Hence there is a sense in which woman completes man; man needs woman; this cannot be said about the relationship between a master and a servant. Instead, the second story of creation portrays the historical subservience of woman to man as to some extent a consequence of sin rather than as something altogether natural or divinely-willed.
In the New Testament, Paul complicates this in 1 Corinthians 11, where he says that man is the image of God, and woman the image of man. This actually runs contrary to the main point of Genesis, and Paul's point is something different. Accordingly, when the great theologians dealt with this issue, they had to see both Paul and Genesis true but in different ways. Thus Thomas Aquinas argues that in the primary and most important sense, both men and women are the image of God, and women are not less than men. For him, Paul is correct only in a secondary, lesser sense. Even in this sense, woman is not somehow less than man. Rather, it's a mere statement of origin: just as God is the beginning of man, man is the beginning of woman (because Eve was made from Adam's rib). This is somewhat symbolic of the hierarchy of the family, but it is not a statement of women's inferiority.
I do think that cultural-psychological connections underlie the association of many objects with femininity in language. This is shown in the Oxford English Dictionary's best speculation about there the word "gun" comes from: simply put, it originated from men affectionately naming their cannons "Gunhilda," a feminine name that means "war." This is not unrelated to the Oedipus Complex: men realize themselves as subjects through a relationship to the feminine embodied in the mother and spouse; thus in tangible existence they often concretize this relationship through their interaction with objects.
However, it's important to understand that in many cases the grammatical feminine does not really line up with a cultural assumption of femininity, and is not clearly explainable in cultural terms. For example, in German, Latin, and all of its child languages, all abstract nouns are typically feminine (e.g. virtue, community), even if this abstract noun is associated with masculinity (manliness, courage). It's not as though the speaker really thinks that all concepts are somehow women. Nor are concepts seen as something servile or inferior; in fact, many systems of thought such as Platonism have elevated concepts as superior to the world of experience.
Yeah, I often have trouble with Google translate for that reason. When translating English to Spanish, it tends to prefer the formal 2nd person, which is usually not what I am looking for. Of course, there's further complications with the fact that some localities use different forms for formal/informal; I believe this difference also exists in Portuguese between Portugal and Brazil.
I think the confusion is that a noun class != gender. In many languages noun classes tend to follow gendered lines, but usually not exclusively or even always predictably. In some cases this practice can lead to cultural associations that see a particular object as "male" or "female"--such as in medieval Latin the Church (ecclesia) is pretty consistently seen as female. In other cases, however, it's purely semantic and people don't necessarily even think of the object as "having" a gender even though its noun is gendered. Hence in Spanish pan ("bread") is masculine, but I don't recall ever seeing it treated as something intrinsically male.
I would wager that it's English's neuter that has actually caused the political strife over gendered language today. The tendency to see all non-living nouns as neuter has made it so that the gender of masculine and feminine nouns has become associated more closely with the actual sex of the object being described. Accordingly, it becomes natural for some to assume that if a masculine word is used about something (e.g. God) then it implies that the object is male, even though grammatically that is not necessarily the case. I've heard people with other languages object that this is not an issue in their language, and I think it's because these other languages do not treat all non-living objects as neuter. For example, the German pronoun man ("one") is seen as avoiding such a problem because it is different from the word Mann ("man"). But really man is still masculine grammatically. The real reason it is not thought of by some as offensive is simply because in German it's common for non-sexed/non-living objects to be masculine or feminine grammatically.
The language is best known for its system of noun classes, numbering four in total. They tend to be divided among the following semantic lines: I - most animate objects, men
II - women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals[7]
III - edible fruit and vegetables
IV - miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
I guess we should be more politically correct in English for those of us who consider themselves to be "edible fruit and vegetables."
It is important for it to give both in cases where both are equally valid. When I saw the headline, I was worried that it was gender-neutralizing, which is typically not helpful.
Like Comrade Ogilvy, I agree in a general way; ADHD does seem to tend to present itself alongside extraordinary intelligence and creativity. However, just as they didn't find one and only one ADHD gene, it's really not the same for everyone, and not everyone with ADHD is necessarily a genius. It's true then that eliminating ADHD would probably bring about a net loss for human culture and achievement. However, achieving the most from ADHD requires proper treatment that is well-suited to the particular person. There are many, many cases where a person might even have a particular genius but is so unable to focus it that it amounts to nothing. This kind of genetic study is good because it could help us to better understand which treatments work better for which persons.
Very true. I met my wife on the night when I was taking a break from trying to impress; I had hurt myself playing capture the flag the night before so I was feeling very lazy. I wore old sweat pants and a cheesy joke t-shirt that didn’t really match. And it worked anyway!
Slashdot Mirror
I've used Evernote for years as part of my academic research, and I have hovered between paying for it and ditching it altogether. Every time I look into the premium version, it's clear that it's a boatload of money for features I will never use. On top of that, the "UX" gets worse and worse and it becomes less and less of a productive program, for example as they keep hiding the actual notebooks deeper behind buttons and menus. Sometimes, then, I think about jumping ship and switching everything over to OneNote, but it's hard to trust Microsoft with much of anything, and OneNote has lost data for me before.
I like classic, well-aged literature. This year I read Middlemarch by George Eliot, expecting it to be something my wife would like because of its similarity to Jane Austen. But I loved it so much and found it so theologically deep that it's probably one of my favorite books ever now--I even bought a hardcover to peruse for good quotes. My wife, however, hated it.
For a shorter, more casual read I also read Dracula, which I liked a lot more than I thought I would. The best part is at the beginning, though, and it starts to drag on after halfway. It is also not very deep.
Awesome and hilarious book. I think it's sad that I wasn't introduced to it in high school.
It's been an American thing for a long time. I don't know if it is used in other English-speaking countries, but from my experience teaching college students it seems not to be typical in non-English-speaking countries, or in Africa, or even in Guam (even though it is part of the U.S.).
When one writes in a human language, one should write so that the reader can interpret what one has written correctly and, hopefully, with as little effort puzzling over it as possible.
Well said. I think the long history of people complaining over five-paragraph essays is more a sign of its success than failure. The annoying repetition is exactly what makes well-structured writing second nature for many students. I've taught plenty of college students from foreign countries or even U.S. territories where the five-paragraph essay was not enforced in high school, and this lack causes a significant and difficult learning curve for these students. They typically have trouble communicating in larger research essays because they never learned how to communicate well in five boring paragraphs. "The person who is trustworthy in very small matters is also trustworthy in great ones" (Luke 16:10a).
Wait, you mean that gigantic and obvious airfield with military planes flying around it might be a military base? Who knew.
I can see what you mean, but I think I won't really understand it until it happens to me (and I hope it never happens to me). I'm on my third SSD and none has ever failed; my previous one was showing some age and was SATA so I upgraded to M.2 NVMe on Cyber Monday. Perhaps they haven't failed on me because I keep most of my data on a HDD RAID array and use the SSDs only for OS, program files, and very limited caching.
Did anyone expect an internal investigation of Supermicro to yield anything but an "innocent" verdict?
It wasn't an internal investigation; it was an external investigation. That's what "outside" means in TFS.
New ideas are very expensive! That's why Mozilla pays the CEO big bucks to copy Google Chrome's new ideas.
350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.
This is America! They probably have to account for the fact that the fat American driver probably also weighs 350 pounds himself.
You miss the point of language. Hebrew, like most languages, tends to use male as the default, so "them" is still masculine but by context it includes both male and female. In the same way, the singular "him" is masculine because it refers back to "man," which is masculine, but "man" is descriptive of both male and female. Likewise, the word "homo" in Latin (the source of "human") is not neuter but masculine, but even in Latin it refers to a species that is considered to be both male and female. To my understanding, gender was often so grammatical in Latin (rather than determined by the object) that in some cases you would even be forced to use a masculine word for a woman, e.g. poeta.
There's no doubt that because of gender bias people have often thought of God as though God were male. But if you actually asked an ancient Hebrew, he or she would probably have scoffed at the question. After all, the Israelites specifically differed from the religions around them because they did not see God as having a consort. They did not see sex as relevant to divinity. Because of this, the Old Testament does at times use feminine imagery to speak about God as well, e.g. Isa 49:15–16:
"Can a mother forget her infant, / be without tenderness for the child of her womb? / Even should she forget, / I will never forget you.
Ha, I was worried someone would call me on that. I was thinking more of Latin audacia there. Again, not all abstract nouns as feminine, but in German and Latin there are more often feminine than masculine. Latin virtus is the best example, because it comes from vir, "man," and has a sense of "manliness," but it is grammatically feminine. In medieval culture sometimes the conceptual masculinity of the word even functioned in a sexist way; women were seen as lacking in manly virtue. On the other hand, St. Catherine of Siena still sees virtue as manliness but does not think that it is beyond women. She went so far as to scold the pope and tell him essentially to "man up."
Even intersex (hermaphroditism) is not really another gender, but a mixed expression of the two. This is because gender is not a purely static, unrelated absolute, as though "male" were definable in its own terms without reference to "female." After all, "male" is that which is oriented toward mating with "female," and vice versa. Even before all of our cultural assumptions about gender, there is a biological distinction that has everything to do with mutual relationship. Intersex, in contrast, is not one condition but many different conditions. To my understanding, there are even cases when someone with a Y chromosome will not develop fully as a male. Nevertheless, in every case we think of intersex in reference to male and female, as somehow expressing one, the other, or both. In no case is intersex something completely different with no relation whatsoever to male or female. We don't really even have a concept of a third gender, but only of an interplay of male and female that is not readily categorizable within one or the other. In Slashdot terms, intersex is more akin to a state of subatomic indeterminancy or else the non-value "null" (vs. boolean true or false).
The irony is that once we abstract from biological gender and make it into a cultural construct, we are still bound by the same duality even when we insist that gender is fluid or indeterminate or else changeable. To say that a biological man can become a woman still implies to some extent that there is something called "woman" that stands underneath and behind culture. There are of course some people who claim to be beyond male or female, or at least who refuse to be defined by those terms, but even in such a case they are definable as those who militate against male and female, and thus are still dependent on that duality.
Thank you for your comment. As a professional theologian, I definitely had the traditional idea of the Church as the Bride of Christ in mind. It no doubt did contribute to the tendency to see the Church as feminine. I would argue, also, that it's not that symbol alone that is at work here, but also something grammatical. In the Old Testament prophets, for example, the language of Israel as bride is extremely prominent. However, Israel is not exclusively spoken of female, because it is a masculine word and the moniker of Jacob. Thus Israel is also spoken of as a "son." In contrast, I think the Church became exclusively associated with femininity because of its grammatical femininity combined with feminine biblical and traditional images. The incidental contribution of human language does not diminish the revelatory character of this association, because as with all of Scripture, God allows himself to be spoken through human language. Just as the flesh of Christ is integral to salvation, so also is language the privileged vehicle of a truth that exceeds and defies all speaking.
You're partly right. In Christianity, both men and women are explicitly created in the image of God. It's the first story of creation (Genesis 1) that talks about this, and in that story both man and woman are created at the same time and both are clearly stated to be in the image of God. Only the second story of creation shows woman being created second, but even there it makes no claim that woman is somehow lesser. It does not state that woman is created to serve man, but that woman is a suitable helper or companion. It even says that "it is not good for man to be alone." Hence there is a sense in which woman completes man; man needs woman; this cannot be said about the relationship between a master and a servant. Instead, the second story of creation portrays the historical subservience of woman to man as to some extent a consequence of sin rather than as something altogether natural or divinely-willed.
In the New Testament, Paul complicates this in 1 Corinthians 11, where he says that man is the image of God, and woman the image of man. This actually runs contrary to the main point of Genesis, and Paul's point is something different. Accordingly, when the great theologians dealt with this issue, they had to see both Paul and Genesis true but in different ways. Thus Thomas Aquinas argues that in the primary and most important sense, both men and women are the image of God, and women are not less than men. For him, Paul is correct only in a secondary, lesser sense. Even in this sense, woman is not somehow less than man. Rather, it's a mere statement of origin: just as God is the beginning of man, man is the beginning of woman (because Eve was made from Adam's rib). This is somewhat symbolic of the hierarchy of the family, but it is not a statement of women's inferiority.
I do think that cultural-psychological connections underlie the association of many objects with femininity in language. This is shown in the Oxford English Dictionary's best speculation about there the word "gun" comes from: simply put, it originated from men affectionately naming their cannons "Gunhilda," a feminine name that means "war." This is not unrelated to the Oedipus Complex: men realize themselves as subjects through a relationship to the feminine embodied in the mother and spouse; thus in tangible existence they often concretize this relationship through their interaction with objects.
However, it's important to understand that in many cases the grammatical feminine does not really line up with a cultural assumption of femininity, and is not clearly explainable in cultural terms. For example, in German, Latin, and all of its child languages, all abstract nouns are typically feminine (e.g. virtue, community), even if this abstract noun is associated with masculinity (manliness, courage). It's not as though the speaker really thinks that all concepts are somehow women. Nor are concepts seen as something servile or inferior; in fact, many systems of thought such as Platonism have elevated concepts as superior to the world of experience.
Yeah, I often have trouble with Google translate for that reason. When translating English to Spanish, it tends to prefer the formal 2nd person, which is usually not what I am looking for. Of course, there's further complications with the fact that some localities use different forms for formal/informal; I believe this difference also exists in Portuguese between Portugal and Brazil.
I think the confusion is that a noun class != gender. In many languages noun classes tend to follow gendered lines, but usually not exclusively or even always predictably. In some cases this practice can lead to cultural associations that see a particular object as "male" or "female"--such as in medieval Latin the Church (ecclesia) is pretty consistently seen as female. In other cases, however, it's purely semantic and people don't necessarily even think of the object as "having" a gender even though its noun is gendered. Hence in Spanish pan ("bread") is masculine, but I don't recall ever seeing it treated as something intrinsically male.
I would wager that it's English's neuter that has actually caused the political strife over gendered language today. The tendency to see all non-living nouns as neuter has made it so that the gender of masculine and feminine nouns has become associated more closely with the actual sex of the object being described. Accordingly, it becomes natural for some to assume that if a masculine word is used about something (e.g. God) then it implies that the object is male, even though grammatically that is not necessarily the case. I've heard people with other languages object that this is not an issue in their language, and I think it's because these other languages do not treat all non-living objects as neuter. For example, the German pronoun man ("one") is seen as avoiding such a problem because it is different from the word Mann ("man"). But really man is still masculine grammatically. The real reason it is not thought of by some as offensive is simply because in German it's common for non-sexed/non-living objects to be masculine or feminine grammatically.
Interesting. Wikipedia says:
The language is best known for its system of noun classes, numbering four in total. They tend to be divided among the following semantic lines:
I - most animate objects, men
II - women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals[7]
III - edible fruit and vegetables
IV - miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
I guess we should be more politically correct in English for those of us who consider themselves to be "edible fruit and vegetables."
It is important for it to give both in cases where both are equally valid. When I saw the headline, I was worried that it was gender-neutralizing, which is typically not helpful.
But this is California! I'm sure they've discovered that underground tunnels cause cancer.
Like Comrade Ogilvy, I agree in a general way; ADHD does seem to tend to present itself alongside extraordinary intelligence and creativity. However, just as they didn't find one and only one ADHD gene, it's really not the same for everyone, and not everyone with ADHD is necessarily a genius. It's true then that eliminating ADHD would probably bring about a net loss for human culture and achievement. However, achieving the most from ADHD requires proper treatment that is well-suited to the particular person. There are many, many cases where a person might even have a particular genius but is so unable to focus it that it amounts to nothing. This kind of genetic study is good because it could help us to better understand which treatments work better for which persons.
Um, first link seems to be wrong?
"It looks like you’re writing a ransom note..."
Very true. I met my wife on the night when I was taking a break from trying to impress; I had hurt myself playing capture the flag the night before so I was feeling very lazy. I wore old sweat pants and a cheesy joke t-shirt that didn’t really match. And it worked anyway!
Now why has Google been burning my eyes and draining my batteries for years with their excessive use of all-white UXs?