"Our language certainly doesn't come innately from our brains." I suspect you know that language (not individual languages, like French or Chinese, but the overall ability of humans to learn language) has been argued for fifty years to be innate. And when deaf children are brought together, they make up a sign language which within a space of ten or twenty years becomes every bit as complex as any other human language. The first generation may be speaking more of a pidgin language, but it soon matures to a creole, complete with grammar etc.
Astonishing. You can use "I" in a variety of sentences, and you can use "want" in still another variety of sentences, and you can use "up" in still more. And you still don't think you know what they mean? Granted, at least "want" and "up" are polysemous, and you might think a long time without coming up with every sense, but I still think native speakers have a fairly good idea what content words mean (and I'm counting "I" and "up" as content words in these contexts). Telling you what function morphemes (case markers, tense markers, auxiliary verbs, prepositions) is quite different, and indeed most native speakers can't tell you what those things mean.
If you take a cynical view, that may be what human history is *about*, but it's definitely _not_ what human oral history *is*. Go to any language group on the face of the Earth, and regardless of whether they have a written language, they will have a great deal of oral history. The Waorani of Ecuador, who before the 1960s were one of the most isolated peoples in the world, could tell researchers who their ancestors and relatives were for several generations back, and what each one died of. (Generally, their ancestors died as a result of grudges, but they knew a lot more than most of those ancestors.)
There was a story in Analog science fiction magazine, probably back in the 60s, on this topic. The gist was that a police officer was given a new "law wagon" with face recognition. Early in the shift, it "recognized" a notorious and dangerous criminal, called out "Not so fast, John Harrison" (or whatever the criminal's name was), then proceeded to arrested, try, convict, and execute him. The officer was impressed. Later in the shift, the law wagon "recognized" a criminal again. Again the "Not so fast, John Harrison". The officer realized something was wrong, but couldn't stop it in time. He attempted to disable the law wagon, and it turned towards him and said, "Not so fast, John Harrison".
Your wish is my command. Ok, it was someone's command. Here: http://www.freesfonline.de/Mag.... Far from every issue, I'm afraid, but I'm still working my way through after discovering this some years ago.
In the interest of 1up, I've dropped my Nokia on concrete several times, had pieces pop off and the battery fall out. Put it back together, and it still ticks.
So agreed, the Nokia phones are, in my experience, darned good.
Strange, I switched from an Android phone to a Windows 8 phone several years ago, and found the Windows phone's interface far more intuitive, easy to use, lacking bloatware (and no warnings that my phone would stop working when I tried to uninstall a piece of said bloatware). In short, I find the Win8 interface much better than the Android.
I have a Nokia running Win8 (not enough memory to upgrade to Win10). It's by far the favorite phone I've ever owned, much preferable to the Androids I used to own (YMMV, and no, I've never put out the $ for an iPhone). But I would part with my precious Nokia for, oh, say, $1000 (which would allow me to upgrade to a newer Windows phone).
Blindseer wrote: "If natural gas goes down then oil will go down." To which angel'o'sphere replied: "It is actually the opposite way around. When oil prices go up, the gas prices go up."
I don't get it. Blindseer said that the oil price goes in the same direction as the gas price, and you are saying the same thing. That's hardly the opposite.
But maybe this is supposed to be a joke? Like the line: "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
"the new format removed snippets of the stories from the article blocks so you cant tell whether it really is something you want to read or not": Ah, but it's clean! 97% cleaner!
At least that's what the reviewers say. Me, it's contentless. I'm with you, Joe.
Thought experiment: How much energy could you store by lifting very large concrete blocks, and then lowering them through a resistance when you need the energy back? Maybe having them push screws down that would spin generators on their way down. Or maybe use the energy to pump water up past a dam, and recover it through turbines when you need it. How efficient would that be, and what would the energy density be, compared to batteries?
How do you know it was regional? We have records in Europe because there were people exploring the Arctic, and indeed living in the Arctic or near-Arctic. We don't have any records from Alaska, because nobody there was writing. And we don't have records from the Antarctic, because nobody was exploring there at the time. And we don't have records that would bear on the issue from anywhere else, because the temperature differences were too small for people to notice. All we're left with from the rest of the world is proxies, which seem to be pretty unreliable.
Slashdot Mirror
"Our language certainly doesn't come innately from our brains." I suspect you know that language (not individual languages, like French or Chinese, but the overall ability of humans to learn language) has been argued for fifty years to be innate. And when deaf children are brought together, they make up a sign language which within a space of ten or twenty years becomes every bit as complex as any other human language. The first generation may be speaking more of a pidgin language, but it soon matures to a creole, complete with grammar etc.
Astonishing. You can use "I" in a variety of sentences, and you can use "want" in still another variety of sentences, and you can use "up" in still more. And you still don't think you know what they mean? Granted, at least "want" and "up" are polysemous, and you might think a long time without coming up with every sense, but I still think native speakers have a fairly good idea what content words mean (and I'm counting "I" and "up" as content words in these contexts). Telling you what function morphemes (case markers, tense markers, auxiliary verbs, prepositions) is quite different, and indeed most native speakers can't tell you what those things mean.
If you take a cynical view, that may be what human history is *about*, but it's definitely _not_ what human oral history *is*. Go to any language group on the face of the Earth, and regardless of whether they have a written language, they will have a great deal of oral history. The Waorani of Ecuador, who before the 1960s were one of the most isolated peoples in the world, could tell researchers who their ancestors and relatives were for several generations back, and what each one died of. (Generally, their ancestors died as a result of grudges, but they knew a lot more than most of those ancestors.)
You don't need a language to communicate, but you do need a language to communicate more than a few things.
and one year olds will generally have figured out whether their parents' language is tonal (or their parents languages, for that matter)
You will find that it is you who are mistaken, my young Jedi--about a *great many things.*
There was a story in Analog science fiction magazine, probably back in the 60s, on this topic. The gist was that a police officer was given a new "law wagon" with face recognition. Early in the shift, it "recognized" a notorious and dangerous criminal, called out "Not so fast, John Harrison" (or whatever the criminal's name was), then proceeded to arrested, try, convict, and execute him. The officer was impressed. Later in the shift, the law wagon "recognized" a criminal again. Again the "Not so fast, John Harrison". The officer realized something was wrong, but couldn't stop it in time. He attempted to disable the law wagon, and it turned towards him and said, "Not so fast, John Harrison".
I wish I could find that story...
Your wish is my command. Ok, it was someone's command. Here: http://www.freesfonline.de/Mag.... Far from every issue, I'm afraid, but I'm still working my way through after discovering this some years ago.
I know what you're thinking, and it isn't so.
Contrariwise, if it was so it might be, and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. Now that's logic!
Jag talar inte Svenska.
Sir (or madam, as the case may be), my first job out of college was programming Konrad Zuse's Z3. Very much like your vaporators in most respects!
Or not, but you get the idea.
In the interest of 1up, I've dropped my Nokia on concrete several times, had pieces pop off and the battery fall out. Put it back together, and it still ticks.
So agreed, the Nokia phones are, in my experience, darned good.
Strange, I switched from an Android phone to a Windows 8 phone several years ago, and found the Windows phone's interface far more intuitive, easy to use, lacking bloatware (and no warnings that my phone would stop working when I tried to uninstall a piece of said bloatware). In short, I find the Win8 interface much better than the Android.
YMMV.
No, no, no!!! I'm the second user!
Unless--gasp--there are more than two of us! But no, that wouldn't fit the \. ethos, so it couldn't be true.
Maybe it *is* April 1st.
I have a Nokia running Win8 (not enough memory to upgrade to Win10). It's by far the favorite phone I've ever owned, much preferable to the Androids I used to own (YMMV, and no, I've never put out the $ for an iPhone). But I would part with my precious Nokia for, oh, say, $1000 (which would allow me to upgrade to a newer Windows phone).
got it, thanks for the clarification!
Blindseer wrote: "If natural gas goes down then oil will go down."
To which angel'o'sphere replied: "It is actually the opposite way around. When oil prices go up, the gas prices go up."
I don't get it. Blindseer said that the oil price goes in the same direction as the gas price, and you are saying the same thing. That's hardly the opposite.
But maybe this is supposed to be a joke? Like the line: "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
Hmm, what's your first language? Chinese maybe?
Here's the dictionary definition of the word of the year:
deprovement (n) 1. Google. Antonym: improvement.
No, we were smarter than that in the 1970s. We even knew how to use white space.
"the new format removed snippets of the stories from the article blocks so you cant tell whether it really is something you want to read or not": Ah, but it's clean! 97% cleaner!
At least that's what the reviewers say. Me, it's contentless. I'm with you, Joe.
But...but...didn't you learn in school that "the medium is the message"?
No, I never really knew what it meant, either.
Holes in the ground could work too.
Thought experiment: How much energy could you store by lifting very large concrete blocks, and then lowering them through a resistance when you need the energy back? Maybe having them push screws down that would spin generators on their way down. Or maybe use the energy to pump water up past a dam, and recover it through turbines when you need it. How efficient would that be, and what would the energy density be, compared to batteries?
How do you know it was regional? We have records in Europe because there were people exploring the Arctic, and indeed living in the Arctic or near-Arctic. We don't have any records from Alaska, because nobody there was writing. And we don't have records from the Antarctic, because nobody was exploring there at the time. And we don't have records that would bear on the issue from anywhere else, because the temperature differences were too small for people to notice. All we're left with from the rest of the world is proxies, which seem to be pretty unreliable.