I know that Mandarin is slowly taking over in China with its a hundred plus dialects of Chinese. Even dialects with millions of speakers are falling into disuse by the younger people who prefer to speak Mandarin instead of their native dialect. The government has put no effort into this but since they use Mandarin in school everyone in my generation can speak it. It then becomes a networking effect or Metcalfe's law. Mandarin is just much more useful than the other dialects because you have a billion speakers instead of just a few million. Why bother using those?
Why not be bilingual, proficient both in Mandarin and in the local dialect? At this point the politics of the state do come into play - does it support bilingualism, does it actively try to weed out the local dialects, or does it do nothing and let social networking effects and Mandarin take over (which would be somehow consistent with a national agenda as well, without costing anything)? You say yourself that the old dialects are a vast cultural resource, and market forces aren't always good at avoiding short-term benefits for long-term ones. Allowing accessibility of cultural resources to somehow regulate itself is a bit like letting timber companies take care of the rainforest. Or, in a Chinese example, the local dialects are the cultural equivalent of the Panda.
Bilingualism, for example, is much more common than we think. ("We" meaning Westerners, and/or Chinese, raised in the model of the Western nation-state with its one person/one nation/one language model - I know there are exceptions to this, but this by far the prevalent model). It's quite a strong assumption that it is somehow the normal condition for the human mind to have only one native language. I have worked extensively in Central Asia, where on some region it's completely normal that persons with no education at all are proficient in two or three languages, simply because they're surrounded by them and it's considered normal that you can speak them. To the average American (or French, or English, or German, for that matter) this may seem like an abnormal situation, but for a large percentage of the world's population it is the normal way of life.
Wouldn't this be a good thing? Less languages will mean more people speaking the same one, thus promoting better communication.
You could say that all the Welsh or Cornish should be happy to be speakers of English, or that all the Jews should have been happy speakers of German or Polish or whatever, and still for some reason a lot of effort has been and is being poured into revival efforts - some of them rather successful and enjoying rather wide acceptance. Your language is an important part of your identity, and apparently large numbers of people discover this simple fact only quite late.
(Norwegian eurodance circa 1995-2005 is impossible to get)
I know you were probably joking, or rather I hope, but in fact it it s surprisingly and disturbingly easy to get. (The genre is usually referred to as Bubblegum dance, and here's a list of well, "artists".)
If you have something special you're looking for, sites such as musiconline.no are there for your service. (If you value your sanity, don't look at their "Dancehall" section.)
the Soviet Union is gone and you can't be officially a citizen of that state. Who modded that informative?!
You are only half right. There are several ways that this can happen. For example, I have several friends in Uzbekistan (former Soviet republic) who don't have the Uzbek citizenship. This was because they moved, for example, from the newly independent republic of Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan in the early 1990s when the old Soviet passports were still valid (as you probably know, they didn't invalidate the old passports in 1991). Uzbekistan didn't give them Uzbek citizenship because they weren't born there, but immigrated after the independence of the country in 1991, and Kazakhstan didn't give them theirs because they didn't apply for it while they were living there, and now aren't living there anymore.
The Uzbek state issues them an "residence permit for persons without citizenship". In Russian it's called "vid na zhitelstvo". This is a little gray book that looks like a passport but isn't one. Regardless of the name, it has an entry called "citizenship", where it officially says "Citizen of the Soviet Union", because that's the last regular passport these persons happened to be holding.
It had EVERYTHING to do with being able to go over the North Pole and hitting Alaska/Canada/the DEW line. Considering that they ALL are based in northern siberia, that makes sense.
They weren't. During Soviet times, the twenty or so that were actually deployed were based in Priluki, which is in Ukraine, about 100 km east of Kiev. Not far from Chernobyl, incidentally, and not exactly northern Siberia. After the breakup of the USSR part of those planes were scrapped, the remainder were given to Russia in exchange for gas debts. The Russian Tu-160s are based at Engels-2, which is on the eastern shore of the middle Volga opposite Saratov, south of Kazan' in European Russia, also not exactly northern Siberia.
... but network effects mean that the number of connections in a heavily populated mesh grow exponentially.
No, quadratically with the number of phones.
Assuming that most connections are between two phones, and that while a connection is open the participating phones mostly don't phone any other phones, in a real-world situation the bounds are even lower. Assuming only 1:1 connections, the worst case would be a topology with all phones in a row, one in the middle, and everybody on the left calling someone on the right. In that case, assuming n phones, a maximum of (n/2) connections go through the phone in the middle. Even if you have a few conference calls, SMSes being passed around to multiple recipients etc., it doesn't get that much worse.
The most compelling one to me is the black triangle incident with the Belgian Air Force, where the government has come right out and said that they have no terrestrial explanation for what all of their radar installations and two F16s witnessed, and that really leaves very few alternative explanations.
That incident is apparently also quite ambiguously interpreted; for another opinion you might be interested in reading this page (brought to you by dodgy AOL, but it does have references) on the 1990 Belgian UFO incidents, which calls the validity of the BAF report into question and does offer alternative explanations.
An UFO sighting is primarily just somebody seeing something he is unable to identify. That's fine. The conjecture that it is actually aliens (and the resulting assumptions about worldwide conspiracies, the miraculous efficiency of otherwise quite inefficient governments to keep things covered up, etc.) is where UFO enthusiasts tend to lose me; it's such a violation of Occam's Razor that I have a very hard time taking much of it seriously.
When talking about the cost of healthcare, it doesn't help much to know that if you can't quantify it. What's the value of not having a broken leg? Your daughter not having measles? Your other daughter not having bone marrow cancer?
I can't remember if it was specifically mentioned in the Russian "Solyaris"
It wasn't. Tarkovsky's movie in this respect sticks to the original novel, which has the visitors consist of neutrinos and doesn't explain much in the way how these hold together, except that they can be dissolved with otherwise rather harmless results.
Quoted from Hardy "So the real tragedy of Ramanujan was not his early death at the age of 32, but that in his most formative years, he did not receive proper training, and so a significant part of his work was rediscovery..."
At the same time, Hardy acknowledged that "on the other hand he would have been less of a Ramanujan, and more of a European professor, and the loss might have been greater than the gain." (From Hardy's article in "The American Mathematical Monthly" 44.3 (1937), p. 137-155.)
Whereas I am sick and tired of people trotting out this 'We're all a bit Aspergers' line because we're in IT. [...] There's a huge problem with people self-diagnosing autistic spectrum disorders, they read a paragraph or two on Asperger's and then they have the 'omg that's me!' moment. [...] Repeat after me - Wikiepdia is not a fucking doctor, it cannot diagnose you.
Straight on. I had a girlfriend once who was manically depressive and who made life very difficult for herself by talking herself into thinking she was a borderliner when every medical professional told her she wasn't.
I think the best description of what happens when people diagnose themselves is in the first chapter of Jerome K Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat":
"It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into some fearful, devastating scourge, I know and, before I had glanced half down the list of premonitory symptoms, it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever read the symptoms discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vituss Dance found, as I expected, that I had that too, began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Brights disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaids knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadnt I got housemaids knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaids knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to walk the hospitals, if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted mys
He was the Russian space program. It all went downhill after that. The US had no way of knowing, of course, but his death signalled the end of the space race and the US had won.
Not exactly. It just shifted. (And frankly, the Russians got a lot more "firsts" than the USA.) The Russians managed to get a lot of experience in running space stations over extended of periods of time that nobody else has to this day. Of course, the motivation for that was fundamentally military in nature.
While I agree that Korolev was a great mind, his N-1 heavy launcher was fundamentally broken with its 30 engines.
This is the plan that the Russian space agency announced last year: take a Souyez up to a space station, refuel it, do a flyby of the Moon. With another refueling in Lunar orbit, you can land and takeoff. You don't need a heavy launch vehicle to do a Moonshot.. it just makes it a lot easier.
If you want to run a moonbase, how do you get lots of fuel into Earth orbit? And into lunar orbit? Doesn't sound terribly efficient.
This device is fairly well known by now. Google generates 455.000 hits on the Antikythera and has more than 800 images, including a 2005 X-ray image at Wikipedia.
This device is fairly well known by now. Google generates 455.000 hits on the Antikythera and has more than 800 images, including a 2005 X-ray image at Wikipedia.
There is a possible benefit in a heavily multilingual society, if the machine can be programmed with instructions in a variety of languages and can record selections on a generic ballot. That saves the problem of having to estimate precisely how many ballots in English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, et al are necessary.
Huh?
I don't see how you could need ballots in twenty languages. After all, they only have to contain a name and a box to make the X. How's your Spanish name different enough from your English and Vietnamese one to be confusing? All you might need is ballots in multiple alphabets, and then you rarely need more than two or three, which will comfortably fit on one ballot. Definitely not a problem.
I don't know how India does it, as it has a lot of national languages with their own alphabets, but they probably print them on a per-state or per-county basis.
There are a few ways that a business computer could be made unable to receive TV or radio streams. Are these sufficient to avoid the tax?
There is a piece of software currently being under development called GEZ Filter (link in German, unsurprisingly) that basically blocks streaming video and audio at the IP level. The main criterion is that it needs to be non-trivial to remove, so it's designed in such a way that it's not removable at all without reinstalling Windows. The software costs money (40 EUR for the "basic" and 80 for the "enterprise" edition), but even this is more efficient for larger companies which use PCs in multiple locations, as each location gets charged 5 EUR a year.
The company got three different independent law experts to write a statement whether this would render the PC sufficiently unable to receive streamed TV and radio broadcasts, and all three are in agreement that it does. Unsurprisingly, the German TV fee administration agency (Gebühreneinzugszentrale, GEZ) disagrees about this, so it looks as if this is going to be disputed in court.
On a different note, many politicians at the moment actually agree that this kind of fee is outdated in the age of rapidly-evolving technology, and the EU is looking into whether the present mode of financing is compliant with EU law on illegal state subsidies given the services offered by some TV stations (such as lotteries etc.), so there is a lot of discussion going on at the moment about changing it into a per-household fee that is paid regardless of whether you have a TV or not. Basically, this would be a TV tax. Since (a) it would make the GEZ redundant and (b) nobody wants to pay taxes, it's (a) the GEZ and (b) the general populace that is against this per-household solution, even though it would be a lot easier and prevent much redundant discussion every couple of years as soon as someone comes up with a new technology.
My wife's uncle used to be power engineer on a Shuka-B nuclear submarine and now since retirement lives in Severodvinsk on the White Sea in a flat overlooking the harbour. (He also has two healthy children and says he was actually pleasantly surprised that all they have is poor eyesight.) He said these plans are quite old, and the Russians used ship-mounted reactors in the North for power generation since the late 1980s. This is just a civilian rehash of an older idea.
Incidentally, since there are large submarine shipyards in Severodvinsk, the overall radiation level there is higher than in Chernobyl region (not in the immediate vicinity of the reactor, of course). I would be worried about safety with these things; at least the navy has a rather poor track record with both nuclear accidents and nuclear waste disposal.
This approach has been popular for quite some time now. For example, there is a research group at CAESAR in Bonn, Germany, called Combinatorial Material Science that has been doing something similar for the last five years or so in the field of material science, especially regarding thin films.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not be bilingual, proficient both in Mandarin and in the local dialect? At this point the politics of the state do come into play - does it support bilingualism, does it actively try to weed out the local dialects, or does it do nothing and let social networking effects and Mandarin take over (which would be somehow consistent with a national agenda as well, without costing anything)? You say yourself that the old dialects are a vast cultural resource, and market forces aren't always good at avoiding short-term benefits for long-term ones. Allowing accessibility of cultural resources to somehow regulate itself is a bit like letting timber companies take care of the rainforest. Or, in a Chinese example, the local dialects are the cultural equivalent of the Panda.
Bilingualism, for example, is much more common than we think. ("We" meaning Westerners, and/or Chinese, raised in the model of the Western nation-state with its one person/one nation/one language model - I know there are exceptions to this, but this by far the prevalent model). It's quite a strong assumption that it is somehow the normal condition for the human mind to have only one native language. I have worked extensively in Central Asia, where on some region it's completely normal that persons with no education at all are proficient in two or three languages, simply because they're surrounded by them and it's considered normal that you can speak them. To the average American (or French, or English, or German, for that matter) this may seem like an abnormal situation, but for a large percentage of the world's population it is the normal way of life.
You could say that all the Welsh or Cornish should be happy to be speakers of English, or that all the Jews should have been happy speakers of German or Polish or whatever, and still for some reason a lot of effort has been and is being poured into revival efforts - some of them rather successful and enjoying rather wide acceptance. Your language is an important part of your identity, and apparently large numbers of people discover this simple fact only quite late.
I know you were probably joking, or rather I hope, but in fact it it s surprisingly and disturbingly easy to get. (The genre is usually referred to as Bubblegum dance, and here's a list of well, "artists".)
If you have something special you're looking for, sites such as musiconline.no are there for your service. (If you value your sanity, don't look at their "Dancehall" section.)
The Uzbek state issues them an "residence permit for persons without citizenship". In Russian it's called "vid na zhitelstvo". This is a little gray book that looks like a passport but isn't one. Regardless of the name, it has an entry called "citizenship", where it officially says "Citizen of the Soviet Union", because that's the last regular passport these persons happened to be holding.
They weren't. During Soviet times, the twenty or so that were actually deployed were based in Priluki, which is in Ukraine, about 100 km east of Kiev. Not far from Chernobyl, incidentally, and not exactly northern Siberia. After the breakup of the USSR part of those planes were scrapped, the remainder were given to Russia in exchange for gas debts. The Russian Tu-160s are based at Engels-2, which is on the eastern shore of the middle Volga opposite Saratov, south of Kazan' in European Russia, also not exactly northern Siberia.
Looks like Kansas is finally going bye bye.
That incident is apparently also quite ambiguously interpreted; for another opinion you might be interested in reading this page (brought to you by dodgy AOL, but it does have references) on the 1990 Belgian UFO incidents, which calls the validity of the BAF report into question and does offer alternative explanations.
An UFO sighting is primarily just somebody seeing something he is unable to identify. That's fine. The conjecture that it is actually aliens (and the resulting assumptions about worldwide conspiracies, the miraculous efficiency of otherwise quite inefficient governments to keep things covered up, etc.) is where UFO enthusiasts tend to lose me; it's such a violation of Occam's Razor that I have a very hard time taking much of it seriously.
When talking about the cost of healthcare, it doesn't help much to know that if you can't quantify it. What's the value of not having a broken leg? Your daughter not having measles? Your other daughter not having bone marrow cancer?
It wasn't. Tarkovsky's movie in this respect sticks to the original novel, which has the visitors consist of neutrinos and doesn't explain much in the way how these hold together, except that they can be dissolved with otherwise rather harmless results.
No, but you still need to use all of (E)scape (M)eta (A)lt (Control) (Shift).
WHOOOSH!
(Still made a couple of good points though.)
At the same time, Hardy acknowledged that "on the other hand he would have been less of a Ramanujan, and more of a European professor, and the loss might have been greater than the gain." (From Hardy's article in "The American Mathematical Monthly" 44.3 (1937), p. 137-155.)
Straight on. I had a girlfriend once who was manically depressive and who made life very difficult for herself by talking herself into thinking she was a borderliner when every medical professional told her she wasn't.
I think the best description of what happens when people diagnose themselves is in the first chapter of Jerome K Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat":
"It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into some fearful, devastating scourge, I know and, before I had glanced half down the list of premonitory symptoms, it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever read the symptoms discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vituss Dance found, as I expected, that I had that too, began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Brights disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaids knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadnt I got housemaids knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaids knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to walk the hospitals, if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted mys
The explanation is easy, of course. Blizzard is at war with Oceania. Blizzard has always been at war with Oceania.
The Tupolev 160 is 177 feet long and still in operation.
The XB-70, which is no longer in operation, was 185 feet long, but then the Concorde was 202 feet long.
Not exactly. It just shifted. (And frankly, the Russians got a lot more "firsts" than the USA.) The Russians managed to get a lot of experience in running space stations over extended of periods of time that nobody else has to this day. Of course, the motivation for that was fundamentally military in nature.
While I agree that Korolev was a great mind, his N-1 heavy launcher was fundamentally broken with its 30 engines.
If you want to run a moonbase, how do you get lots of fuel into Earth orbit? And into lunar orbit? Doesn't sound terribly efficient.
More so, Google generates more than 110 hits on the Antikythera on slashdot.org (I hope the link is functioning this time)
And Google generates ">more than 110 hits on the Antikythera on slashdot.org.
Huh?
I don't see how you could need ballots in twenty languages. After all, they only have to contain a name and a box to make the X. How's your Spanish name different enough from your English and Vietnamese one to be confusing? All you might need is ballots in multiple alphabets, and then you rarely need more than two or three, which will comfortably fit on one ballot. Definitely not a problem.
I don't know how India does it, as it has a lot of national languages with their own alphabets, but they probably print them on a per-state or per-county basis.
There is a piece of software currently being under development called GEZ Filter (link in German, unsurprisingly) that basically blocks streaming video and audio at the IP level. The main criterion is that it needs to be non-trivial to remove, so it's designed in such a way that it's not removable at all without reinstalling Windows. The software costs money (40 EUR for the "basic" and 80 for the "enterprise" edition), but even this is more efficient for larger companies which use PCs in multiple locations, as each location gets charged 5 EUR a year.
The company got three different independent law experts to write a statement whether this would render the PC sufficiently unable to receive streamed TV and radio broadcasts, and all three are in agreement that it does. Unsurprisingly, the German TV fee administration agency (Gebühreneinzugszentrale, GEZ) disagrees about this, so it looks as if this is going to be disputed in court.
On a different note, many politicians at the moment actually agree that this kind of fee is outdated in the age of rapidly-evolving technology, and the EU is looking into whether the present mode of financing is compliant with EU law on illegal state subsidies given the services offered by some TV stations (such as lotteries etc.), so there is a lot of discussion going on at the moment about changing it into a per-household fee that is paid regardless of whether you have a TV or not. Basically, this would be a TV tax. Since (a) it would make the GEZ redundant and (b) nobody wants to pay taxes, it's (a) the GEZ and (b) the general populace that is against this per-household solution, even though it would be a lot easier and prevent much redundant discussion every couple of years as soon as someone comes up with a new technology.
My wife's uncle used to be power engineer on a Shuka-B nuclear submarine and now since retirement lives in Severodvinsk on the White Sea in a flat overlooking the harbour. (He also has two healthy children and says he was actually pleasantly surprised that all they have is poor eyesight.) He said these plans are quite old, and the Russians used ship-mounted reactors in the North for power generation since the late 1980s. This is just a civilian rehash of an older idea.
Incidentally, since there are large submarine shipyards in Severodvinsk, the overall radiation level there is higher than in Chernobyl region (not in the immediate vicinity of the reactor, of course). I would be worried about safety with these things; at least the navy has a rather poor track record with both nuclear accidents and nuclear waste disposal.
Philipp
This approach has been popular for quite some time now. For example, there is a research group at CAESAR in Bonn, Germany, called Combinatorial Material Science that has been doing something similar for the last five years or so in the field of material science, especially regarding thin films.