I think that the question isn't "which" language you know, but "how many" you know. The more languages you know, the more perspectives of the world you can see. Each language, like you mentioned, has encapsulated their cultures and belief systems. This language does shape the users of the languages, and the users also shape their ever-evolving language.
That being said, it doesn't make one language objectively "better" than another -- it just means that one language has a different focus than another. Sure, from the evolutionary standpoint of languages, whichever language lasts longer may facilitate a more lasting culture, but for many languages, it's just that each has a different way of looking at life. I would love to learn several languages, just to have several different perspectives on the world and life.
The US culture, for example, is all about active voice. We hate passive voice, because nobody takes the blame or responsibility for them. If someone says, "The vase was broken", we immediately react with "By whom?" (well, we'll probably say, "Who did it?", but still..) In Spanish, we use, "Se me rompió el jarrón." The direct translation is, "The vase broke itself to me." In the grammatical construction, we let people know that it wasn't intentional. The Spanish language isn't as blame-focused as English. Does it make it better? Worse? That's up to the users. Does it make it last longer? Time will tell.
There isn't a way to objectively rank language by "betterness", unless you have a set goal that you want to accomplish. Only cultures get to decide what their own goals are, and they will shape their own language by their own goals.
TL;DR Languages are only limited by what their culture's priorities are. If the culture's priorities change, the languages will too, effectively removing said limitations. Language is only seen as limiting if you're on the outside, wanting the culture to change to be more like you.
I think there are probably two main things keeping more people from trying golf.
1) The Image. Like you said, many people consider it to be boring and pointless. Other people consider it a game only for the elite (or those who consider themselves the elite) of society.
2) The Cost. Unlike mini-golf, you generally have to supply your own equipment that can get prohibitively expensive. A friend of mine wanted to try golf because his work was having a golf outing together. He had to shell out $80 for somebody else's used clubs. $80 to TRY a game? Another of my friends went to the same golf outing and brought one club and everybody laughed at him. He had a blast, but he wasn't doing the game like everybody else.
If my friends enjoyed golfing and the golf course lent you clubs for cheap, I'd definitely try it with them. As it stands, I'll keep to frisbee golf (a very fun game, by the way), where the only cost to entry is a $12 heavy frisbee that you can lend to whoever else you want to play with. Like golf, there's plenty of room to grow, with specialty discs for different kinds of throws. Once I realized I like the game, I bought like five discs. I generally only use two of them, but I have five, so I can bring a bunch of people with me and we can all have fun for cheap.
this is completely me. I have three people I follow. 1) My wife. She logged in and followed herself on my account. 2) a band I like 3) DDO (D&D MMO) because it tells me when there are special deals, because I think that their normal prices are too high, but I enjoy the game. I never post. I just check every once in a while to see if they have posted anything interesting recently.
Just seeing mention of OS/2 jarred my brain of an old memory. When I was in college, an old couple from my church asked me over to their house to see if I could help them with their computer. It was running OS/2 and it was the first time I had ever seen it. I had everything figured out in about 5 or 10 minutes and was able to show them how to use it. Fast Forward to a year or so ago, the first time I met up with Windows 8 was completely different. A friend of mine handed me thier laptop and asked for help getting it to play movies on a TV connected to it. I tinkered around on it for 20 minutes before I gave up and Googled the answer (turns out the default movie player can't play movies on a second monitor. You need to dig around and use Windows Media Player, which for some reason isn't the default player). It seems like the "It Just Works" thing only works with older stuff.
sorry to reply to my own post, but I just thought of another anecdotal piece of information. I had heard of kids with terrible vocabulary and spelling skills who spent a Summer Vacation reading lots of books coming back to school with fantastic writing skills. Just seeing and hearing correct usage can build the patterns in our brains for correct usage and grammar. Many foreign-language-learning experts (not the Rosetta Stone people -- the people actually learning all kinds of language) recommend high quantities of almost-comprehensible input in order to stretch your language abilities.
I very rarely used a dictionary as a kid, and when I took my college entrance placement exam, they gave me this huge obscure vocabulary test and I got 100% on it. I think just having good context-clue-finding skills can really be a huge benefit to vocabulary acquisition. I remember my elementary school teachers harping about context clues every time someone asked what a word meant, and now I'm super glad that they did, because it's caused me to learn a lot of words just from reading a lot. I've been living in a Spanish speaking country for the past 6 months, and those skills have been a huge help in learning a foreign language as well.
I think it's more of a personal evolution thing. My wife, and the parent poster, still read lots of long books, so they can still do it just fine. Those of us who only read five or six novels (or less!) a year may tend to agree with the original summary. I still have times when I like to get back and re-read my favorite books, but I've found that I can keep the attention better by listening to it in audiobook form than by paper-book reading. Maybe I just need a good reading chair again and I'd be able to re-brain-plasticity my way back to being a long-book reader, but for now, I'm fine with audiobooks.
I used to always love reading long books. Now, I do have to admit that I have a harder time keeping with reading for extended periods of time. It'll take me two or three weeks to read the Hobbit, when it took me about as many days to read it the first time. However, with the always-connected Internet and all, I find myself "reading" the classics, like the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, by listening to audiobooks while doing something that doesn't require verbal focus, like playing video games with the sound turned off. I can perfectly pay attention to the story I'm hearing, while playing video games, and in a couple days, I'll listen to the entire audiobook.
Without going into whether I agree with what you say, it seems to me that whenever people say "Most people...", it is typically to say that most people have opinnions that are close to the speaker's opinnions, even when most people are not really like that at all.
However, most people spend most of their time with people who think relatively similar to themselves, adding to their own thoughts that "most people" are like them. I'd say that "most people" (and I admit, I fall into the exact same bias that I mentioned before) just want to be left alone to do whatever they want to do. Sure, people like government to do this or that (police, roads, teach kids and stuff), but by in large, I think people just want left alone. I've been doing some travelling to some various cultures, and noticing how, as much as people are different, we're all pretty much the same. People just want to do their thing and not have to be bothered.
Have you noticed that not too many years ago, Americans would hear about some neat new technical military thing and think, "Wow, I'm glad that's on OUR side!" And now, they just expect it to be used for domestic purposes.
I know this is completely off-topic, but I had to share it. Pizza Hut pizza in Costa Rica is twice as good at Pizza Hut pizza in the United States. (It also costs almost twice as much).
Wow, thank you very much. I stand completely corrected. I remember seeing something early about it last year, but I hadn't realized how far it had come. Thanks a lot!
My first thought seems to be opposite of most of the people I've seen post on this. Everyone keeps pointing out that it would be hard for the PS4 to be able to produce the desired effect due to the technical specifications of the console. I haven't been following the PS* close enough to comment on this, but I have been checking in on the VR headset scene on and off for quite some time. The technologies have been coming for years and years, and many gaming rigs have multiple-monitor capability (for stereoscopic potential), so it seems to me that if there was a potential market for this type of game, we would have seen a more public attempt at it in PC games by now. As it is, the widest-spreading VR item I've seen was that weird, red-lines VR mobile platform that Nintendo put out a while back. And that was a very niche item.
TL;DR -- I don't know if the tech is powerful enough, but I just don't think there's enough market for the thing.
I am currently living outside of the U.S.. I still have a Google Voice number, because my permenant address is still in the United States. With Google Voice, we can make calls to people living in the United States still for free. That's a pretty epic usage.
My appologies for not being very clear. I don't have my tools here, nor do I have random spare parts to change out and test which components have problems with my system at the moment. The two laptops could have had different problems, but the net result was that the screens on both were no longer functional. It was my presumption (as I said, I don't have my tools to verify) that excess heat was the cause of my computer issues. For that reason, I would prefer to have a cooler-running laptop, so I don't feel compelled to use additional cooling. My presumptions could be completely wrong, and I fully admit the deficiencies in my explanation.
I've toasted two laptop monitors because of trying to play too many high-needs video games on them. Both of the monitors theoretically were good enough for the games by specs, but both of them burnt out within two years of when I bought them (admitedly, they were both a couple years old when I purchased them). With the first laptop, I just thought it was an age thing and didn't think enough of it, but with the second one, I realized the sad pattern. Now, I play my games with an external fan running, blowing cool air under the laptop, with the laptop on a stand to increase airflow. (I'd stick to playing games on desktops, but I'm living abroad at the moment, and a desktop takes up too much room in the suitcases)
All this being said, it seems like each new generation of laptop video card is more powerful, but I would just like to know of a mid-range card that ran really cool. That would help me much more than power.
Anyone who I have known who wanted to buy a new computer, I have told them to make sure they get windows 7. Those people have been pretty ok. If Microsoft wasn't trying to kill their good product (Win 7) by pushing everyone to Win 8, they'd be fine.
When I was little, I used to imagine what it might be like to somehow connect a radar system to my gameboy and watch as we drove down the road. As I was typing that, it seemed relevant. Now, I'm not too sure.
In all reality, it seems more that the laws that give corporations the same rights as individuals are the ones that are at fault. It is through those laws that copywrite laws don't expire with the author. Sell your patent/copyright (I know, they're different, but they're the same in this argument) to a corporation? It's like selling to a potentially-immortal person, with laws based on the lifetime of the "creator" (with those "creation rights" sold to this immortal being). There's no, "I'm just doing this to keep the money in the family, to give my grandchildren a college education."
On a side note, for those of you who want to feel more justified in your hatred of big business, check out "The Corporation" on Google Video. It's a three hour documentary on the corporate system. Obviously, it's changed my viewpoint on things, and it's been six months since I've seen it.
Coincidintally, I was watching this on google video yesterday. It's a presentation by a researcher in the field talking about stem cells (for the record, she used stem cells and "progenator" cells seemingly-interchangably) and she mentioned that particular study. It's about 60% of the way through the video if I remember right. Anyway, while there was an improvement when placing stem cells into the heart along with the surgury, the improvement was in the area of 5.5% improvement, with 3.5% using a saline placebo. So yes, technically, the poster was right with the improvements, we're still quite a ways away from having developed any sort of new human treatments.
I mainly learned C because I played MUDs. When a friend of mine showed me that he was working on hacking on mud code, I downloaded the base code for the type of MUD I liked and ran from there. Games are fun, when presented with the possibility that something I could do could add some neat-o functionality to a game that was already built, it really sparked my interest.
On that note, I think the easiest intro to programming should just be tweaking someone else's code or script and seeing that you have the power to make things happen. Once you've got to that point, you're good to go towards creating stuff of your own.
It actually makes me a little bit sad for the first few posts of April 1st. I tend to be one of those idealistic people that just really want to believe people (until they give me reason not to), and so I hear about all these cool techs and stuff and then, I figure out that they're all not real. *sigh* I used to try that on a friend of mine though -- tell them a bunch of potentially-real-sounding things that turned out not to be true, and then tell them a true-but-not-real-sounding thing, and they'd just sit there, trying to decide whether it was true or not.
Man, when y'all told me (I think it was last year) about those playable two-headed Ogres for WOW, I thought it was so cool... then I figured it out... *sigh*
That whole laughs last==thinks slowest thing and all.
There's also the fact that most MUDs change with the nature of their users. Smaller muds tend to add new features and change their focuses depending on the desires of their users (who, like you said are a very close-knit group), whereas larger ones tend to stay more static.
Bands that are popular with smaller groups, although they might not change their songs for their various audience, at least they'll have alot more interaction with the fans on an individual basis than larger groups.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the question isn't "which" language you know, but "how many" you know. The more languages you know, the more perspectives of the world you can see. Each language, like you mentioned, has encapsulated their cultures and belief systems. This language does shape the users of the languages, and the users also shape their ever-evolving language.
That being said, it doesn't make one language objectively "better" than another -- it just means that one language has a different focus than another. Sure, from the evolutionary standpoint of languages, whichever language lasts longer may facilitate a more lasting culture, but for many languages, it's just that each has a different way of looking at life. I would love to learn several languages, just to have several different perspectives on the world and life.
The US culture, for example, is all about active voice. We hate passive voice, because nobody takes the blame or responsibility for them. If someone says, "The vase was broken", we immediately react with "By whom?" (well, we'll probably say, "Who did it?", but still..) In Spanish, we use, "Se me rompió el jarrón." The direct translation is, "The vase broke itself to me." In the grammatical construction, we let people know that it wasn't intentional. The Spanish language isn't as blame-focused as English. Does it make it better? Worse? That's up to the users. Does it make it last longer? Time will tell.
There isn't a way to objectively rank language by "betterness", unless you have a set goal that you want to accomplish. Only cultures get to decide what their own goals are, and they will shape their own language by their own goals.
TL;DR Languages are only limited by what their culture's priorities are. If the culture's priorities change, the languages will too, effectively removing said limitations. Language is only seen as limiting if you're on the outside, wanting the culture to change to be more like you.
I think there are probably two main things keeping more people from trying golf.
1) The Image. Like you said, many people consider it to be boring and pointless. Other people consider it a game only for the elite (or those who consider themselves the elite) of society.
2) The Cost. Unlike mini-golf, you generally have to supply your own equipment that can get prohibitively expensive. A friend of mine wanted to try golf because his work was having a golf outing together. He had to shell out $80 for somebody else's used clubs. $80 to TRY a game? Another of my friends went to the same golf outing and brought one club and everybody laughed at him. He had a blast, but he wasn't doing the game like everybody else.
If my friends enjoyed golfing and the golf course lent you clubs for cheap, I'd definitely try it with them. As it stands, I'll keep to frisbee golf (a very fun game, by the way), where the only cost to entry is a $12 heavy frisbee that you can lend to whoever else you want to play with. Like golf, there's plenty of room to grow, with specialty discs for different kinds of throws. Once I realized I like the game, I bought like five discs. I generally only use two of them, but I have five, so I can bring a bunch of people with me and we can all have fun for cheap.
this is completely me. I have three people I follow. 1) My wife. She logged in and followed herself on my account. 2) a band I like 3) DDO (D&D MMO) because it tells me when there are special deals, because I think that their normal prices are too high, but I enjoy the game. I never post. I just check every once in a while to see if they have posted anything interesting recently.
Just seeing mention of OS/2 jarred my brain of an old memory. When I was in college, an old couple from my church asked me over to their house to see if I could help them with their computer. It was running OS/2 and it was the first time I had ever seen it. I had everything figured out in about 5 or 10 minutes and was able to show them how to use it. Fast Forward to a year or so ago, the first time I met up with Windows 8 was completely different. A friend of mine handed me thier laptop and asked for help getting it to play movies on a TV connected to it. I tinkered around on it for 20 minutes before I gave up and Googled the answer (turns out the default movie player can't play movies on a second monitor. You need to dig around and use Windows Media Player, which for some reason isn't the default player). It seems like the "It Just Works" thing only works with older stuff.
sorry to reply to my own post, but I just thought of another anecdotal piece of information. I had heard of kids with terrible vocabulary and spelling skills who spent a Summer Vacation reading lots of books coming back to school with fantastic writing skills. Just seeing and hearing correct usage can build the patterns in our brains for correct usage and grammar. Many foreign-language-learning experts (not the Rosetta Stone people -- the people actually learning all kinds of language) recommend high quantities of almost-comprehensible input in order to stretch your language abilities.
I very rarely used a dictionary as a kid, and when I took my college entrance placement exam, they gave me this huge obscure vocabulary test and I got 100% on it. I think just having good context-clue-finding skills can really be a huge benefit to vocabulary acquisition. I remember my elementary school teachers harping about context clues every time someone asked what a word meant, and now I'm super glad that they did, because it's caused me to learn a lot of words just from reading a lot. I've been living in a Spanish speaking country for the past 6 months, and those skills have been a huge help in learning a foreign language as well.
Faaitnstc Psot! Thkans for bnieg one of the poelpe who add vluae to Ssdlaoht!
I think it's more of a personal evolution thing. My wife, and the parent poster, still read lots of long books, so they can still do it just fine. Those of us who only read five or six novels (or less!) a year may tend to agree with the original summary. I still have times when I like to get back and re-read my favorite books, but I've found that I can keep the attention better by listening to it in audiobook form than by paper-book reading. Maybe I just need a good reading chair again and I'd be able to re-brain-plasticity my way back to being a long-book reader, but for now, I'm fine with audiobooks.
I used to always love reading long books. Now, I do have to admit that I have a harder time keeping with reading for extended periods of time. It'll take me two or three weeks to read the Hobbit, when it took me about as many days to read it the first time. However, with the always-connected Internet and all, I find myself "reading" the classics, like the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, by listening to audiobooks while doing something that doesn't require verbal focus, like playing video games with the sound turned off. I can perfectly pay attention to the story I'm hearing, while playing video games, and in a couple days, I'll listen to the entire audiobook.
Without going into whether I agree with what you say, it seems to me that whenever people say "Most people...", it is typically to say that most people have opinnions that are close to the speaker's opinnions, even when most people are not really like that at all.
However, most people spend most of their time with people who think relatively similar to themselves, adding to their own thoughts that "most people" are like them. I'd say that "most people" (and I admit, I fall into the exact same bias that I mentioned before) just want to be left alone to do whatever they want to do. Sure, people like government to do this or that (police, roads, teach kids and stuff), but by in large, I think people just want left alone. I've been doing some travelling to some various cultures, and noticing how, as much as people are different, we're all pretty much the same. People just want to do their thing and not have to be bothered.
Have you noticed that not too many years ago, Americans would hear about some neat new technical military thing and think, "Wow, I'm glad that's on OUR side!" And now, they just expect it to be used for domestic purposes.
I know this is completely off-topic, but I had to share it. Pizza Hut pizza in Costa Rica is twice as good at Pizza Hut pizza in the United States. (It also costs almost twice as much).
Read the first 5 "paragraphs" and the last 2. All the rest is repitition of the same thing in different orders.
Wow, thank you very much. I stand completely corrected. I remember seeing something early about it last year, but I hadn't realized how far it had come. Thanks a lot!
My first thought seems to be opposite of most of the people I've seen post on this. Everyone keeps pointing out that it would be hard for the PS4 to be able to produce the desired effect due to the technical specifications of the console. I haven't been following the PS* close enough to comment on this, but I have been checking in on the VR headset scene on and off for quite some time. The technologies have been coming for years and years, and many gaming rigs have multiple-monitor capability (for stereoscopic potential), so it seems to me that if there was a potential market for this type of game, we would have seen a more public attempt at it in PC games by now. As it is, the widest-spreading VR item I've seen was that weird, red-lines VR mobile platform that Nintendo put out a while back. And that was a very niche item.
TL;DR -- I don't know if the tech is powerful enough, but I just don't think there's enough market for the thing.
I am currently living outside of the U.S.. I still have a Google Voice number, because my permenant address is still in the United States. With Google Voice, we can make calls to people living in the United States still for free. That's a pretty epic usage.
My appologies for not being very clear. I don't have my tools here, nor do I have random spare parts to change out and test which components have problems with my system at the moment. The two laptops could have had different problems, but the net result was that the screens on both were no longer functional. It was my presumption (as I said, I don't have my tools to verify) that excess heat was the cause of my computer issues. For that reason, I would prefer to have a cooler-running laptop, so I don't feel compelled to use additional cooling. My presumptions could be completely wrong, and I fully admit the deficiencies in my explanation.
I've toasted two laptop monitors because of trying to play too many high-needs video games on them. Both of the monitors theoretically were good enough for the games by specs, but both of them burnt out within two years of when I bought them (admitedly, they were both a couple years old when I purchased them). With the first laptop, I just thought it was an age thing and didn't think enough of it, but with the second one, I realized the sad pattern. Now, I play my games with an external fan running, blowing cool air under the laptop, with the laptop on a stand to increase airflow. (I'd stick to playing games on desktops, but I'm living abroad at the moment, and a desktop takes up too much room in the suitcases)
All this being said, it seems like each new generation of laptop video card is more powerful, but I would just like to know of a mid-range card that ran really cool. That would help me much more than power.
Anyone who I have known who wanted to buy a new computer, I have told them to make sure they get windows 7. Those people have been pretty ok. If Microsoft wasn't trying to kill their good product (Win 7) by pushing everyone to Win 8, they'd be fine.
When I was little, I used to imagine what it might be like to somehow connect a radar system to my gameboy and watch as we drove down the road. As I was typing that, it seemed relevant. Now, I'm not too sure.
In all reality, it seems more that the laws that give corporations the same rights as individuals are the ones that are at fault. It is through those laws that copywrite laws don't expire with the author. Sell your patent/copyright (I know, they're different, but they're the same in this argument) to a corporation? It's like selling to a potentially-immortal person, with laws based on the lifetime of the "creator" (with those "creation rights" sold to this immortal being). There's no, "I'm just doing this to keep the money in the family, to give my grandchildren a college education." On a side note, for those of you who want to feel more justified in your hatred of big business, check out "The Corporation" on Google Video. It's a three hour documentary on the corporate system. Obviously, it's changed my viewpoint on things, and it's been six months since I've seen it.
Coincidintally, I was watching this on google video yesterday. It's a presentation by a researcher in the field talking about stem cells (for the record, she used stem cells and "progenator" cells seemingly-interchangably) and she mentioned that particular study. It's about 60% of the way through the video if I remember right. Anyway, while there was an improvement when placing stem cells into the heart along with the surgury, the improvement was in the area of 5.5% improvement, with 3.5% using a saline placebo. So yes, technically, the poster was right with the improvements, we're still quite a ways away from having developed any sort of new human treatments.
I mainly learned C because I played MUDs. When a friend of mine showed me that he was working on hacking on mud code, I downloaded the base code for the type of MUD I liked and ran from there. Games are fun, when presented with the possibility that something I could do could add some neat-o functionality to a game that was already built, it really sparked my interest.
On that note, I think the easiest intro to programming should just be tweaking someone else's code or script and seeing that you have the power to make things happen. Once you've got to that point, you're good to go towards creating stuff of your own.
It actually makes me a little bit sad for the first few posts of April 1st. I tend to be one of those idealistic people that just really want to believe people (until they give me reason not to), and so I hear about all these cool techs and stuff and then, I figure out that they're all not real. *sigh* I used to try that on a friend of mine though -- tell them a bunch of potentially-real-sounding things that turned out not to be true, and then tell them a true-but-not-real-sounding thing, and they'd just sit there, trying to decide whether it was true or not.
Man, when y'all told me (I think it was last year) about those playable two-headed Ogres for WOW, I thought it was so cool... then I figured it out... *sigh*
That whole laughs last==thinks slowest thing and all.
There's also the fact that most MUDs change with the nature of their users. Smaller muds tend to add new features and change their focuses depending on the desires of their users (who, like you said are a very close-knit group), whereas larger ones tend to stay more static.
Bands that are popular with smaller groups, although they might not change their songs for their various audience, at least they'll have alot more interaction with the fans on an individual basis than larger groups.