He also confuseth a manner with a manor, and hath invented a hitherto unknown device which he calleth a "baffoon." Perhaps it is the bladder of an animal, inflated in a foolish manner (or in a foolish manor).
But on a hot summer day, who among us would not impulsively purchase a delicious Whimsicle®?
I hadn't heard of "Betteridge's Law", but it seems new. The same principle, known as Hinchliffe's Rule, has been known to physicists at least since the 1980s.
But what if you happen to want mock news on April 1? Then Slashdot and other "real-news" sites are your only hope, seeing as how The Onion prints only real news for April Fools' Day.
Certainly. In English we use nouns as adjectives all the time, and I'm trying to decide whether one of these "is" a noun or an adjective. Perhaps it depends on what the meaning of "is" is.
Maybe we can agree on noun present-participle noun-adjunct noun past-participle noun?
Still, in a discussion of grammatically ambiguous headlines, it may in fact be more relevant that the basic nature of the word "security" is nounish. One has to parse at least part of the headline in order to determine that it's being used adjectivally. In this particular case that's not the difficult part of the headline, but in another case, such as the good example that I'm too lazy to construct right now, it might be.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I think headlines everywhere have become significantly more opaque in the last decade. This one is actually better than average, having (I think) only two plausible interpretations.
Users reject security advice, that are considered rational
so if the only difference is one is udd and the other is uud, then the "mass" in each is the same I suppose.
Very nearly. The mass of the proton is 938 MeV; the neutron is 939 MeV. And the physics at a proton-neutron or neutron-neutron collider would be very similar to that at a proton-proton collider. But neutrons are neutral, as you and others have pointed out, and therefore much more difficult to accelerate.
Now you could imagine a collider with a stationary neutron target and a high-energy proton beam. But remember that what you get out depends on the energy as measured in the center-of-mass frame of the colliding particles. To reach the LHC design energy of 14 TeV, you can collide two protons, each with an energy of 7 TeV in the lab frame, or you can collide a neutron at rest and a proton with an energy of... excuse me while I dig out my TI-85... 104 PeV. Holy cow. I don't think anyone here has any idea how to get a 100-PeV beam in a working collider experiment, and I'm sure we don't have the money. So protons it is.
And each would contain roughly the same exotic particles as the other.
I think there's a misconception here. Protons (and neutrons) don't "contain" Higgs bosons, or W and Z bosons, or top quarks, or high-pT jets, or any of the other interesting things that we see at the Tevatron and will see at the LHC. These things are created from the kinetic energy of the two colliding protons. But otherwise yes, if you could find a way to build a neutron collider, you'd see pretty much the same stuff as at a proton collider of the same energy.
Oh, and I must rant:
Please don't call it the "God particle". This unfortunate nickname was coined as a marketing ploy and is not apt. Physicists do not call it the God particle. Reporters call it the God particle. And the main result is that people become confused, frightened, or angry.
I'm tempted to point out that if you're interested in a theory describing the universe we happen to live in, the Higgs boson is far more likely to be relevant than string theory. But maybe I should leave that discussion for another thread.
I don't happen to have a Sears catalog handy at the moment, but I expect they sell something containing carbon, of which the most abundant isotope is carbon-12, a bound state of six protons, six neutrons, and six electrons. 6+6+6 = 18, an even number; thus C-12 is a boson.
Do you really think they could stay in business selling only fermions? In this economy?
The ONLY way to know with certainty what the reaction to a certain stimuli is to present that person with a stimuli and see what they do.
You have presented me with the stimulus known as bad grammar. Could anyone have predicted that my response would be to complain about it two days later?
Well, somebody's gotta run in 2012, and most of the likely candidates are not too appealing. Not sure about that name though: "President eth1" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
I support the spirit of this proposal, but I worry that such an amendment would necessarily be so vague as to be easily abused. Who defines what an "issue" is? It's easy to imagine Congress defining "issue" very broadly and continuing to pass their over-9000-page porxtravaganzas, and one can also imagine a court defining issue very "narrowly" and striking down otherwise reasonable laws.
- Constitutional amendment: 10 year sunset clause on ALL federal laws.
The automatic-sunset idea is intriguing, but it's also prone to abuse. We would probably just acquire a new tradition, wherein a whole slew of laws are rubber-stamped for renewal on the first day of each Congress, with the only results being that some junior members get gavel practice and the poor President gets writer's cramp.
(create an upper bound on the number of laws that the federal gov't can maintain)
How do you choose what the upper bound should be? And what happens when the Elbonians invade and Congress can't declare war because they're already at quota? I tend to favor the approach of just sticking to the enumerated powers, although admittedly that hasn't worked out as well as one might have hoped.
- Move elections to an instant-run-off system so voters don't feel they have to try to game the system
I believe the advocates of instant runoff voting have the best of intentions but are betting on the wrong horse. IRV is the only widely proposed voting system that is arguably worse than our current system, and certainly it won't eliminate gaming the system. In my book, range voting is the best system, and approval voting is nearly as good, with the added bonus that it's very easy to understand and wouldn't require changing ballot designs (which could be relevant to persuading people to accept a change). For those who may be interested, Wikipedia has a pretty good set of articles, and check out these pretty pictures of the bizarre things that can happen under IRV.
- Move election day to July 4th. More people vote because they're off work. Can celebrate *getting* freedom and *keeping* it.
Of course they're also on vacation, at barbecues, eating dozens of hot dogs, shooting off fireworks, etc. Many will be too busy loving America by means of combustible projectiles to love America by means of throwing the bums out.
Yes, that's the great thing about English verb conjugations: so many of the forms are identical. And I think it's only in the forms of to be that the past subjunctive differs from the indicative. My grandfather used to say, "If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs." Both hads are subjunctive, but it hardly matters.
Of course they don't teach grammar in English classes, so most of my knowledge of the subjunctive mood is ported from Spanish. This means that there's always a chance that some more powerful grammarian could come along and tell me I'm confunded about something.
And by all means feel free to call me a pedant. Just don't say it like it's a bad thing.:)
When was the last time you saw someone indent a paragraph on the internet?
Today, in fact. Of course, indenting is not grammar, but a style convention. The alternate style of placing a blank line between paragraphs has also been around for a long time. I wonder whether the reason for the prevalence of the latter style is that someone once decided to make a tab character equivalent to eight spaces, which is just hideous.
Bottom line is, if a reasonable person can easily read and understand what you've written - mission accomplished. That's success.
Fixed that for you. Far too many people are too lazy to fix their spelling errors and don't realize (or don't care) that this means extra work for their readers. If you[1] write a post with a bunch of misspellings that would have taken you 10 seconds to fix, it will take me 3 extra seconds to decipher your meaning.[2] If more than 3 people read your post, that's a net loss of time. If you write for a large audience and don't proofread, you're wasting a great many man-hours, and folks are entitled to disgruntlement.
[1] "You" here does not refer to RobDude, whose comment was free of misspellings and easily comprehensible. Rather it's the general, hypothetical sort of "you", close kin to "one".
[2] These numbers are made up and not based on careful testing. The real numbers would of course depend on many variables. But my main point[3] is valid.
[3] Those who insist on saving a few seconds of their own time, at the cost of wasting comparable amounts of many others' time, are Not Nice.
"If I were an optimist" and "If I was an optimist" are both correct, but they mean different things.
If I was an optimist when I was younger, it was only because I had seen too little of the world. If I were an optimist now, I would think it likely that you would return to this thread and read my reply despite the intervening hours.
I doubt it's your geekiness; more likely it's the awful tiny sans serif fonts that have become so ubiquitous on the Tubes, and perhaps in your newspaper. Often the only way I can tell "m" from "rn" is by highlighting the text and counting the characters. (Yes, I could probably tweak my browser settings, but I'm too lazy to save myself work.) A while back there was a proposal to allow arbitrary TLDs; imagine the shenanigans that could ensue with domains like acme.corn.
Another, more recent, problem is that with poorly chosen fonts/sizes, "i" and "l" can be rendered identically, pixel for pixel.
Slashdot Mirror
He also confuseth a manner with a manor, and hath invented a hitherto unknown device which he calleth a "baffoon." Perhaps it is the bladder of an animal, inflated in a foolish manner (or in a foolish manor).
But on a hot summer day, who among us would not impulsively purchase a delicious Whimsicle®?
There's a bathroom on the right....
Okay, I've just decided that all my future passwords will consist of lyrics from "Louie Louie". That'll be completely uncrackable!
I hadn't heard of "Betteridge's Law", but it seems new. The same principle, known as Hinchliffe's Rule, has been known to physicists at least since the 1980s.
I was so shocked I split my cornflakes.
So then you had twice as many cornflakes, yes? Sounds like a good thing.
But what if you happen to want mock news on April 1? Then Slashdot and other "real-news" sites are your only hope, seeing as how The Onion prints only real news for April Fools' Day.
Your post is substantially correct, but you shouldn't say 99% when you don't mean 99%. There are plenty of words with "-tious", "-tiate", etc.
Also, whoosh.
Certainly. In English we use nouns as adjectives all the time, and I'm trying to decide whether one of these "is" a noun or an adjective. Perhaps it depends on what the meaning of "is" is.
Maybe we can agree on noun present-participle noun-adjunct noun past-participle noun?
Still, in a discussion of grammatically ambiguous headlines, it may in fact be more relevant that the basic nature of the word "security" is nounish. One has to parse at least part of the headline in order to determine that it's being used adjectivally. In this particular case that's not the difficult part of the headline, but in another case, such as the good example that I'm too lazy to construct right now, it might be.
Users Rejecting Security Advice Considered Rational
noun gerund noun noun gerund adjective - WTF!?
Nope. Noun participle noun noun participle adjective.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I think headlines everywhere have become significantly more opaque in the last decade. This one is actually better than average, having (I think) only two plausible interpretations.
Users reject security advice, that are considered rational
Now that reads like a headline from Xinhua.
I expect people to behave themselves and stay out of MY space
Fortunately, most of us want nothing more than to stay out of MySpace.
With the law, I have an excuse not to answer the phone in the car
The same excuse was available before the law.
Actually most of it seems to happen on the Internet.
so if the only difference is one is udd and the other is uud, then the "mass" in each is the same I suppose.
Very nearly. The mass of the proton is 938 MeV; the neutron is 939 MeV. And the physics at a proton-neutron or neutron-neutron collider would be very similar to that at a proton-proton collider. But neutrons are neutral, as you and others have pointed out, and therefore much more difficult to accelerate.
Now you could imagine a collider with a stationary neutron target and a high-energy proton beam. But remember that what you get out depends on the energy as measured in the center-of-mass frame of the colliding particles. To reach the LHC design energy of 14 TeV, you can collide two protons, each with an energy of 7 TeV in the lab frame, or you can collide a neutron at rest and a proton with an energy of ... excuse me while I dig out my TI-85 ... 104 PeV. Holy cow. I don't think anyone here has any idea how to get a 100-PeV beam in a working collider experiment, and I'm sure we don't have the money. So protons it is.
And each would contain roughly the same exotic particles as the other.
I think there's a misconception here. Protons (and neutrons) don't "contain" Higgs bosons, or W and Z bosons, or top quarks, or high-pT jets, or any of the other interesting things that we see at the Tevatron and will see at the LHC. These things are created from the kinetic energy of the two colliding protons. But otherwise yes, if you could find a way to build a neutron collider, you'd see pretty much the same stuff as at a proton collider of the same energy.
Oh, and I must rant:
Please don't call it the "God particle". This unfortunate nickname was coined as a marketing ploy and is not apt. Physicists do not call it the God particle. Reporters call it the God particle. And the main result is that people become confused, frightened, or angry.
I'm tempted to point out that if you're interested in a theory describing the universe we happen to live in, the Higgs boson is far more likely to be relevant than string theory. But maybe I should leave that discussion for another thread.
I don't happen to have a Sears catalog handy at the moment, but I expect they sell something containing carbon, of which the most abundant isotope is carbon-12, a bound state of six protons, six neutrons, and six electrons. 6+6+6 = 18, an even number; thus C-12 is a boson.
Do you really think they could stay in business selling only fermions? In this economy?
Absolute Seconds, which start at minus 273 seconds (minus 4 minutes, 33 seconds)
Wait, so the difference between relative zero and absolute zero is John Cage? That's spooky.
Disney distributes Studio Ghibli films in the USA, and Princess Mononoke was PG-13.
The ONLY way to know with certainty what the reaction to a certain stimuli is to present that person with a stimuli and see what they do.
You have presented me with the stimulus known as bad grammar. Could anyone have predicted that my response would be to complain about it two days later?
the Obama administration has recently appointed new chairs for the Internet
That's a relief! I was getting tired of standing around online.
Well, somebody's gotta run in 2012, and most of the likely candidates are not too appealing. Not sure about that name though: "President eth1" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
Some thoughts on your agenda:
- Constitutional amendment: single-issue bills only.
I support the spirit of this proposal, but I worry that such an amendment would necessarily be so vague as to be easily abused. Who defines what an "issue" is? It's easy to imagine Congress defining "issue" very broadly and continuing to pass their over-9000-page porxtravaganzas, and one can also imagine a court defining issue very "narrowly" and striking down otherwise reasonable laws.
- Constitutional amendment: 10 year sunset clause on ALL federal laws.
The automatic-sunset idea is intriguing, but it's also prone to abuse. We would probably just acquire a new tradition, wherein a whole slew of laws are rubber-stamped for renewal on the first day of each Congress, with the only results being that some junior members get gavel practice and the poor President gets writer's cramp.
(create an upper bound on the number of laws that the federal gov't can maintain)
How do you choose what the upper bound should be? And what happens when the Elbonians invade and Congress can't declare war because they're already at quota? I tend to favor the approach of just sticking to the enumerated powers, although admittedly that hasn't worked out as well as one might have hoped.
- Move elections to an instant-run-off system so voters don't feel they have to try to game the system
I believe the advocates of instant runoff voting have the best of intentions but are betting on the wrong horse. IRV is the only widely proposed voting system that is arguably worse than our current system, and certainly it won't eliminate gaming the system. In my book, range voting is the best system, and approval voting is nearly as good, with the added bonus that it's very easy to understand and wouldn't require changing ballot designs (which could be relevant to persuading people to accept a change). For those who may be interested, Wikipedia has a pretty good set of articles, and check out these pretty pictures of the bizarre things that can happen under IRV.
- Move election day to July 4th. More people vote because they're off work. Can celebrate *getting* freedom and *keeping* it.
Of course they're also on vacation, at barbecues, eating dozens of hot dogs, shooting off fireworks, etc. Many will be too busy loving America by means of combustible projectiles to love America by means of throwing the bums out.
Oops, competency failure. The parent should have been a reply to the great-grandparent.
Two years? Are you writing from 2006? If so, what's it like living in a solar system with nine planets?
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/overview/
Yes, that's the great thing about English verb conjugations: so many of the forms are identical. And I think it's only in the forms of to be that the past subjunctive differs from the indicative. My grandfather used to say, "If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs." Both hads are subjunctive, but it hardly matters.
Of course they don't teach grammar in English classes, so most of my knowledge of the subjunctive mood is ported from Spanish. This means that there's always a chance that some more powerful grammarian could come along and tell me I'm confunded about something.
And by all means feel free to call me a pedant. Just don't say it like it's a bad thing. :)
When was the last time you saw someone indent a paragraph on the internet?
Today, in fact. Of course, indenting is not grammar, but a style convention. The alternate style of placing a blank line between paragraphs has also been around for a long time. I wonder whether the reason for the prevalence of the latter style is that someone once decided to make a tab character equivalent to eight spaces, which is just hideous.
Bottom line is, if a reasonable person can easily read and understand what you've written - mission accomplished. That's success.
Fixed that for you. Far too many people are too lazy to fix their spelling errors and don't realize (or don't care) that this means extra work for their readers. If you[1] write a post with a bunch of misspellings that would have taken you 10 seconds to fix, it will take me 3 extra seconds to decipher your meaning.[2] If more than 3 people read your post, that's a net loss of time. If you write for a large audience and don't proofread, you're wasting a great many man-hours, and folks are entitled to disgruntlement.
[1] "You" here does not refer to RobDude, whose comment was free of misspellings and easily comprehensible. Rather it's the general, hypothetical sort of "you", close kin to "one".
[2] These numbers are made up and not based on careful testing. The real numbers would of course depend on many variables. But my main point[3] is valid.
[3] Those who insist on saving a few seconds of their own time, at the cost of wasting comparable amounts of many others' time, are Not Nice.
It's not a plural verb; it's a subjunctive verb.
"If I were an optimist" and "If I was an optimist" are both correct, but they mean different things.
If I was an optimist when I was younger, it was only because I had seen too little of the world. If I were an optimist now, I would think it likely that you would return to this thread and read my reply despite the intervening hours.
I take it you're not counting the final Selah? Otherwise we'll have to track down the elusive Mr. Shakin'.
Also, "steganography" is an anagram of "Harpy on stage, G!" Which, like, totally proves it!
I doubt it's your geekiness; more likely it's the awful tiny sans serif fonts that have become so ubiquitous on the Tubes, and perhaps in your newspaper. Often the only way I can tell "m" from "rn" is by highlighting the text and counting the characters. (Yes, I could probably tweak my browser settings, but I'm too lazy to save myself work.) A while back there was a proposal to allow arbitrary TLDs; imagine the shenanigans that could ensue with domains like acme.corn.
Another, more recent, problem is that with poorly chosen fonts/sizes, "i" and "l" can be rendered identically, pixel for pixel.