It's true Mandarin has distinct R's and L's, although just last week a Chinese friend of mine told an inadvertently hilarious story about a game that involved hitting a bell when she confused the word "bell" with "bear". I haven't noticed her making similar errors though, so it could be just that one word she was confused over, and not the "l" sound in general.
Wow, so meeting people and having a good time you consider a "gang/clique" mentality? That's quite a strange perspective you've developed there from down in your mothers basement.
Well, the summary says that the results have been perfect so far, so that's a real good sign. Frankly something like this sounds too good to be true, but every once and a while breakthroughs do happen, so we can hope!
Liberal as I am I still criticize Obama on many things, but just because there are plenty of valid criticisms to be made doesn't mean we have to ignore the fact that there are a lot of racists out there trying to veil their racism with phony political outrage. I get enough email forwards from conservatives to know that's a fact.
Why do you think the Chinese who want to support a local company had that opinion forced on them? Do you feel the same about American's who look for "Made in the USA"?
Oddly, although visiting Thailand in 1973 was more alien than going to Mars, I marveled at their culture and enjoyed the hell out of it, alien as it was. Alas, I fear that if I returned today it would be too much like the US for my liking.
It depends on where you go. The cities and resort areas are of course, sadly, not as uniquely Thai as they used to be but if you travel to the rural areas you can still experience a fairly traditional culture. Or so says my Thai girlfriend, I haven't been there yet.
That argument applies to inventions in general doesn't it? "Inventions are often dictated by the physical properties of the world we live in, so when two people solve the same problem it's not too surprising that they tend to arrive at the same solution."
It's true that gerrymandering is a problem, but Senators are still reelected about 90% of the time so there doesn't seem to be much room for it to make a huge difference in Representative reelection rates. I think the major impact of gerrymandering is influencing the party of the Representative.
The American system of government is broken. Congress has approval ratings that regularly dip below 20% and sometimes into the single digits, but incumbents are returned over 80%, sometimes over 90%, of the time.
The American voting system is completely broken, but that example you give has nothing to do with it.
As a whole Congressional approval is always low because no one likes those 98 senators and 434 representatives wasting our money on pork-barrel projects in their districts. But what we do like are those 2 senators and 1 representative bringing money and jobs to our district, thus individually they tend to have high approval and are easily reelected. That's one of the few parts of our system that actually makes sense.
It's not for primary detection of earthquakes, so they know exactly when to look for interesting data from the laptops, and they can look at the motion of the laptop before and after the earthquake and throw out any results from laptops that were moving about at the time.
The iPhone certainly doesn't outperform a Nexus One. If you compare browser rendering tests the Nexus One consistently completes loading pages quite a bit faster then the iPhone. You are probably thinking of games performance, and while it's true that the iPhone gets better frame rates, you're forgetting that the Nexus One is pushing around 2.5 times more pixels so that's not exactly an apples to apples comparison.
I mostly agree with you, but no amount of armed passengers would have made a difference if the underwear bomber's bomb didn't fizzle. It was not supposed to burn up, bombs are supposed to go boom.
From my perspective, that is kind of the point. If the U.S. government is holding someone, that person should have access to U.S. courts, or they should be subject to the Geneva Convention rules. Period.
Yeah, that's one of the things that bothers me most about Gitmo. The argument that since it's not on US territory the Constitution doesn't apply is total BS. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say it applies only to certain geographic locations. No, it applies to the US government no matter where it is operating be it in DC, Cuba, or Afghanistan. The argument that Gitmo is a haven from Federal laws is so stupid I don't see how it was ever taken seriously.
One common way in many dictionaries to look up unfamiliar characters is by first identifying a common component of the character known as a radical then count how many additional strokes are required to write the character. Then you can look up the radical and number of strokes in a table and find the character you want in the dozen or so possibilities listed. This is more difficult then looking in an alphabetical dictionary though, sometimes it's not obvious what radical a character is under.
That's wrong, most characters have a meaning on their own, but Chinese is not a mono-syllabic language. The average words is two syllables long and each syllable is represented by one character.
There a handful of characters that have different pronunciations in different contexts. For example the last characters of yinyue (music) and kuaile (happy) are the same, although in the first word it is pronounced "yue" while in the other it is "le". There are a couple others like that I've come across, but I hear it is more common in Japanese.
You can't buy new cassette players, but you can get them at tag sales and second hand shops. Not that I approve of that trend, cassettes are truly an awful format. Do they have any redeeming value? I can't think of one.
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Interesting, I didn't know about the transliteration of the LL's, that makes sense.
She is not from Beijing area so it probably wasn't the erhua, IIRC she is from a little south of Shanghai.
So you're complaint is with Facebooks use of the word "Friend" then. Pointless.
It's true Mandarin has distinct R's and L's, although just last week a Chinese friend of mine told an inadvertently hilarious story about a game that involved hitting a bell when she confused the word "bell" with "bear". I haven't noticed her making similar errors though, so it could be just that one word she was confused over, and not the "l" sound in general.
Oh please, people in China speak freely among friends. It's not like everyone has a telescreen watching them in their homes.
Wow, so meeting people and having a good time you consider a "gang/clique" mentality? That's quite a strange perspective you've developed there from down in your mothers basement.
Yeah, my girlfriend hat a pet monkey when she was younger. So jealous!
Well, the summary says that the results have been perfect so far, so that's a real good sign. Frankly something like this sounds too good to be true, but every once and a while breakthroughs do happen, so we can hope!
Liberal as I am I still criticize Obama on many things, but just because there are plenty of valid criticisms to be made doesn't mean we have to ignore the fact that there are a lot of racists out there trying to veil their racism with phony political outrage. I get enough email forwards from conservatives to know that's a fact.
Why do you think the Chinese who want to support a local company had that opinion forced on them? Do you feel the same about American's who look for "Made in the USA"?
It depends on where you go. The cities and resort areas are of course, sadly, not as uniquely Thai as they used to be but if you travel to the rural areas you can still experience a fairly traditional culture. Or so says my Thai girlfriend, I haven't been there yet.
That argument applies to inventions in general doesn't it? "Inventions are often dictated by the physical properties of the world we live in, so when two people solve the same problem it's not too surprising that they tend to arrive at the same solution."
It's true that gerrymandering is a problem, but Senators are still reelected about 90% of the time so there doesn't seem to be much room for it to make a huge difference in Representative reelection rates. I think the major impact of gerrymandering is influencing the party of the Representative.
The American voting system is completely broken, but that example you give has nothing to do with it.
As a whole Congressional approval is always low because no one likes those 98 senators and 434 representatives wasting our money on pork-barrel projects in their districts. But what we do like are those 2 senators and 1 representative bringing money and jobs to our district, thus individually they tend to have high approval and are easily reelected. That's one of the few parts of our system that actually makes sense.
It's not for primary detection of earthquakes, so they know exactly when to look for interesting data from the laptops, and they can look at the motion of the laptop before and after the earthquake and throw out any results from laptops that were moving about at the time.
The iPhone certainly doesn't outperform a Nexus One. If you compare browser rendering tests the Nexus One consistently completes loading pages quite a bit faster then the iPhone. You are probably thinking of games performance, and while it's true that the iPhone gets better frame rates, you're forgetting that the Nexus One is pushing around 2.5 times more pixels so that's not exactly an apples to apples comparison.
The Open in Browser plug-in for Firefox works for files that Firefox supports natively, not sure if it can help with PDFs.
Paperless bathrooms are already possible, toilet/bidets with built in driers have been available in Japan at least for quite a while.
I mostly agree with you, but no amount of armed passengers would have made a difference if the underwear bomber's bomb didn't fizzle. It was not supposed to burn up, bombs are supposed to go boom.
Either way, the US fails at bravery big time.
Yeah, that's one of the things that bothers me most about Gitmo. The argument that since it's not on US territory the Constitution doesn't apply is total BS. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say it applies only to certain geographic locations. No, it applies to the US government no matter where it is operating be it in DC, Cuba, or Afghanistan. The argument that Gitmo is a haven from Federal laws is so stupid I don't see how it was ever taken seriously.
One common way in many dictionaries to look up unfamiliar characters is by first identifying a common component of the character known as a radical then count how many additional strokes are required to write the character. Then you can look up the radical and number of strokes in a table and find the character you want in the dozen or so possibilities listed. This is more difficult then looking in an alphabetical dictionary though, sometimes it's not obvious what radical a character is under.
That's wrong, most characters have a meaning on their own, but Chinese is not a mono-syllabic language. The average words is two syllables long and each syllable is represented by one character.
There a handful of characters that have different pronunciations in different contexts. For example the last characters of yinyue (music) and kuaile (happy) are the same, although in the first word it is pronounced "yue" while in the other it is "le". There are a couple others like that I've come across, but I hear it is more common in Japanese.
What is so pretentious about having a turntable on display? At least it does something, unlike most decorations.
You can't buy new cassette players, but you can get them at tag sales and second hand shops. Not that I approve of that trend, cassettes are truly an awful format. Do they have any redeeming value? I can't think of one.