TFA reminds me of Greg Sniper, AKA Grass Valley Greg, the man who invented the Delete button. His company's motto was "Where ideas can hang out...and do whatever!" GVG made his employees take tofutti ice cream breaks whenever HE felt like it. There was a poster in the workplace that read "Arbeit ist spiel", "Work is play".
If I remember correctly, the sketch was based on a Microsoft executive that made his employees listen to Jimi Hendrix...whether they liked it or not.
Isn't that what happens to any conservative speaker who visits a college campus these days? Maybe you should ask Ann Coulter. I'm sure you don't agree with what she says, but doesn't she have a right to say it?
Ann Coulter spews hate-filled tirades on an almost daily basis in her widespread column and in her countless network appearances, so she can hardly be considered an oppressed voice crying out in the wilderness. In one of her college stand-up routines, many students stood up and left the hall, prompting Coulter to yell: "Yeah, that's right, leave! The anal sex classes are just down the hall!" That's a little one-liner that would have made the brownshirts proud.
If GWB was half as bad as you make yourself believe he is, you'd already be dead. Michael Moore would be thin...in line for the "Showers" at Bush's Death Camps in West Texas.
No, but under gwb and his executive orders, his government has the power to detain you indefinitely without legal representation and even to outsource you to one of a prision in Guantanamo, Syria, Egypt, Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Pakistan and various other countries in Africa and Asia; hey, now that is one distinguished list!
So until we have forced labor camps and we're filling gas chambers daily, I suggest you rethink your position and keep your mouth shut.
And
So, go ahead, join what's left of the Taliban if that is what your truly belive.
Wow, spoken like a true west texas brownshirt.
Once we have forced labor camps and we're filling gas chamber daily, it's already too late by several years, OBVIOUSLY.
What has happened in every country whose population has allowed its' government to take away its' freedoms for the sake of the illusion of a little safety is that eventually that population loses its' freedom with no benefit of safety. History only repeats itself over and over again because of ignorance. Vincible ignorance. Lazy ignorance. Mediocre ignorance. Ignorance creating fear, and this combination in turn creates a soul-destroying hatred which makes it impossible for meaningful analysis and discussion to take place.
Fortunately, the United States of America on the basis of an incredibly resilient document called The Constitution which cannot be destroyed overnight. But it can be destroyed with some time, a dash of power-crazed corporate whores, and a whole lot of ignorance from the population.
Oh, and speaking of ignorance, the Taliban controls around half of Afghanistan. The other half, the so-called good guys, the Northern Alliance (did you know that's their name, the Northern Alliance?), has in the past four years overseen the biggest bumper crops of opium in Afghanistan's history, most of it exported to Europe and Northern America. Right under the gun barrels of what's left of United States troops in the region.
I have a life-size map of the world. The legend says "1 Mile = 1 Mile".
But then, Umberto Eco noted that a life-size map of the world would alter the landscape just by existing, therefore it would have to take itself into account for it to not be immediately obsolete.
Right on. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines back in the early nineties raised the average global temperature by something like one tenth of a degree for a couple of years, I believe. Of course, many volcanos erupt every year, but Pinatubo ejected an unusually large amount of ash in historical terms. And yet, in prehistorical terms, Pinatubo was a minor eruption, compared to other volcanic events, such as the Siberian Traps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_traps) and to a lesser extent, the Toba supervolcano (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_the ory)
The contemporary scenario for global warming is a new ice age, you know.
One of the great temperature regulators for Planet Earth is the Thermo-Haline Current, which originates in the North Atlantic. An increased rate of polar icecap melting MAY dilute and weaken the brine that drives this conveyor belt, effectively stopping it. Now, this conveyor belt works its' way through the bottom of the ocean, south to the tip of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, then makes a vertical u-turn in the Pacific off the coast of China, then back to the North Atlantic through the surface of the ocean.
In a nutshell, the Thermo-Haline Current takes cold water south via the bottom of the ocean and warm water north via the surface. If we manage to disrrupt this current, there goes temperature distribution and boom!, the Northern Hemisphere will freeze up, and who knows how long it would take to kick-start the current again.
Current models effectively predict the above scenario. However, I have a question I've never read or heard mentioned: Wouldn't the lack of temperature distribution also make tropical water much, much warmer? Will we have to start getting familiar with categories 6 and 7 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale? Maybe even a year-round hurricane season?
Thank you for the eels. They were scrumptiously yummy and unmistakably regal. Sorry to mensch, but if you're finished with the hairdryer, could you pop it in the post?
Hey, you don't like a city/state/country that bans smoking in restaurants? Then move somewhere else!
Yeah, sure. And at the rate non-smoking hysterics are going, the city/state/country where you can choose to move to will ban smoking in restaurants, probably sooner rather than later.
"Move somewhere else". Sheesh. What a lazy, thick-skulled non-argument.
I really don't understand why people love or hate Steve Jobs.
Yeah, I asked myself the same question while scanning through the thread.
It's quite simple, I believe. Steve Jobs is a prominent public figure, and as such will be subjected during his lifetime to visceral (as opposed to rational) reactions from thousands or millions of people, in both positive and negative ways. Run down the list and you will find that this is generally the case, from Jesus of Nazareth to John Lennon, Bill Gates to Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King to Mahatma Ghandi.
Once dead, however, public figures are almost canonized in public folklore, society in general subconsciously responds with a little axiom in the back of the collective mind: "Do not speak ill of the dead". Hell, even Richard Nixon's reputation has been reevaluated since his death (he did some pretty good things: started the Environmental Protection Agency, opened the doors to China, etc).
The essence of your question, I guess, would be: What the hell are we afraid of? Why the human mass divides and polarizes itself into separate herds through ideologies, disregarding or ridiculing the positive aspects of opposing stances or figureheads, while augmenting the flaws. Quite a stupid reflex, really, because as time passes, the edges blur, the differences dissipate, and we have all wasted an incredible amount of energy. There are exceptions, of course, but while a few individuals may be universally hated, no individual is universally beloved.
Most of the haters seem to act as if Jobs personally took the time to kick their puppy. On the other hand, the people that love him don't seem to understand that he has serious personality flaws, and that he's just human.
Just human, like the anonymous rest of us, but we're looking at the guy through a warped magnifying glass, and never forget that many people resent his Ferrari, his Lear Jet, and most of all, the swooning hero-worship he receives from some circles.
Maybe so, but Scotsmen are the worst tennis players in the world, and it was not too long ago that Angus Podgorny received an order for two million kilts by a creature from the planet Skyron in Andromeda, who was the most hideous thing you ever saw, a quivering, glistening mass. He wasn't so much a man as he was... a Blancmange!
While kids are in the McPlayRoom sliding down the McChute, some guy will be sitting in a booth, drinking a cup of McCoffee, downloading McPorn. A group of mothers sitting in the table across the aisle will notice this. This will put the shift manager in an uncomfortable spot. How often do paying customers get kicked out of McDonald's?
Or never mind downloading porn, watersports pop-up ads will do. How often does this happen in, say, Starbucks?
There could even be a companion brown dwarf that we haven't detected so far.
A name has been proposed for just such a sister star: Nemesis. First time I read about it was in Carl Sagan's book "Comet", and Mr. Sagan expounds a theory that would explain the cyclical mass extintions Earth seems to be prone to. In a nutshell, Nemesis swings close by once every 22 million years or so, close enough to penetrate the Oort Cloud, hurtling countless comets towards the inner solar system, and at least one of those is bound to smash into the Earth. The moment I suddenly see fifty comets all at once in the sky is the moment I head towards the hills, although I doubt that would do much good.
Point taken, and I agree with you. I tried to be carefull in the way I wrote my previous post:...only three objects discovered and classified as a planet..., keeping in mind how the parent mentioned that Pluto keeps planetary status due to a matter of ego and, I would add, inertia. I seem to remember that Tombaugh himself spoke during the debate to demote Pluto from Planet to Kuiper Belt Object. Not surprinsingly, Tombaugh stance was to Keep It As A Planet.
FWIW, I've never been comfortable with the size of Pluto, its' composition, eccentric orbit and most crucially, how far it drifts out of the zodiacal plane. So yes, KBO it is for me, and surely this widely held opinion does NOT lessen Tombaugh's achievement, first human to feast his eyes on a new type of celestial body.
Now check this out: the gravity signature of Planet X would be measured by how it affects the motion of Neptune, but astronomers originally miscalculated the size of Neptune, thereby their calculations presented an anomaly that really was not there. In a nutshell, a gravity signature for Planet X has never been detected. The true Planet X not only eludes us, but it may not even exist.
Finally, I also seem to remember there was hype, ages ago, about a planet between Mercury and the Sun, tentatively named Vulcan, whose existence is now discredited. Speculative planets hold a strange fascination, there's a certain metaphysical poetry to them, question marks that appear in lines of data, and we create physical objects defined in time and space with our minds. They may vanish in paper due to more precise data, but still we remember that which never existed.
It's officially a planet due to politics: it's the first planet the US Americans discovered, and ego demands it retain its planetary status.
Well, it's one of only three objects discovered and classified as a planet within our solar system in the modern era.
1. Uranus: William Herschel (Great Britain), XVIII century.
2. Neptune: Urbain Le Verrier (France) and John Couch Adams (Great Britain), XIX century. Both Le Verrier and Adams mathematically predicted the position of Neptune owing to anomalies in the orbit of Uranus, but it was Heinrich d"Arrest (Germany) who performed the actual observation.
3. Pluto: Clyde Tombaugh (United States), XX century. As an amusing side note, Tombaugh worked for nearly 20 years searching for the elusive Planet X in Arizona; in those days, only one radio station transmitted 24 hours a day, from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, so while searching for Planet X, Tombaugh kept the radio on throughout the night and eventually became quite the authority on mexican ranchero (country) music.
Ah yes. "Eagle One to Moon Base Alpha. Mayday, mayday". The theme song was pretty cool too, in a platinum space-jumpsuit sort of way.
For those who haven't seen it, Space 1999 was british sci-fi TV from the early seventies, which went something like this: On the other side of Moon Base Alpha, there was a nuclear waste landfill which went critical mass in a gigantic way, propelling the moon out of orbit and straight out of the solar system. In every episode, our hapless heroes of Moon Base Alpha drifted past strange planets and came in contact with lifeforms much stranger than most in the original Star Trek. In one episode, they even went straight through a black hole. Many episodes were so-so, some were quite bad, but some were positively freaky in a good way. The best of the lot is one titled "Dragon's Domain".
After the success of Star Wars, Alien and the like, the creators tried to milk a couple of last drops from the franchise, which was never really successfull, splicing two episodes together into a full-length feature, renaming it Alien Attack.
Giving credit where it's due, the main actor, the commander of Moon Base Alpha, was the great Martin Landau, who later won an Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in the movie Ed Wood (and been nominated a couple of more times), which is much more than you can say for William Shatner.
Here's a few other movies made better by additional scenes:
1. Blade Runner 2. Apocalypse Now 3. The Godfather I and II 4. Donnie Darko 5. The Wild Bunch
Honorable Mention: I have to say that the digitally enhanced THX-1138 turns it from a cult classic into a straightforward classic.
There's gotta be more, I can't think of them right now.
When the T1000 shattered, I thought: "Why don't they run and grab as many frozen pieces as they can then throw them in the vat, instead of hugging each other?" I mean, Sarah Connor's been through this before, she should know a LOT better, and the T800 is no slouch, either.
As for film continuity, it would have been clever to have the rest of the finale with a shorter, hence diminished, T1000. It would have been both humorous and more suspenseful, since the T800 and T1000 would have been more evenly matched.
He's not kidding, that's the way they grill calamari in Spain, but usually they use baby squid, known as "chipirones".
Believe it or not, if you soak calamari meat in fresh water for 24 hours, then prepare it as you would an abalone filet, only a connossieur can taste the difference. Some upscale seafood restaurants are notorious for this practice, having been caught in the act.
I know a restaurant that serves calamari fried in beet and orange sauce, with ginger, garlic and chili powder, and I have to tell you, after trying it, I lost my aversion both to calamari AND beet.
For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.
You seem to have a unique, inter-related perspective on languages, given the number of them that you know. I speak a measly two languages, Spanish and English, which makes me feel quite poor, as if there's a banquet of humanity and all I have is a loaf of bread and a glass of water.
Yes, it's a good question, but I'm not clear on what you mean by 'old languages', I am assuming you refer to the very beginnings of language itself. In that respect, when you say 'complex grammatically' I am understanding 'chaotic', lacking structure at first then congealing over time into an organized whole, with the flexibility to contain countless new concepts. How does one go about achieving a grand structure for vocabulary, putting into place rules that apply everywhere within the language, seamlessly?
But then again, the challenge was probably not as daunting as it would be today, considering there were far fewer concepts that needed to be articulated in those days. Words for concepts arise as fast as the need for concepts themselves, be they concrete or abstract. As an example, we still need the concepts "water" and "fire", but my ancestors had no use for "combustion" or "interest rate" or "ironic".
Also, in regards to grammatical complexity, I'll cite the example of modern spanish, which has no less than sixteen defined verbal tenses, and if that's not grammatical complexity, I don't know what is.
So I'm not sure that there is a simplification of grammar as compared to ye olden days, as we humans have both ornate and practical tendencies in the usage of language, and language balances itself accordingly every time, but never reverting quite the same. I say this because I see tendencies towards simplification, as in OMG, WTF, LOL, in a nutshell, 133t!, a century and a half before we had Ludwig Zamenoff with Esperanto, Basic English in the 1930's, and Standard English in the 1950's and 60's (developed for aerospace industry manuals). Accordingly, we also witness simultaneous tendencies towards non-ironic adornment. This constant dynamic may have, from time to time, produced great leaps in standarization, while also producing things like the sixteen verbal tenses in spanish.
In historical terms, to steal a phrase from Will Durand, it can be described as a systolic and diastolic effect. Put in another way, and I don't mean this in a bad way as I love both: for every Bob Dylan, there's a Monty Python to take the piss back out of language again.
...the Japanese tried to destroy the Korean language(classes were all in Japanese, all published material was in Japanese etc)...
That sounds very similar to what happened in Euzkadi (the basque land) during Franco's government, which attempted to assimilate the basque culture. Euskera (the basque language) was banned from schools, from church, from television and radio, from the printed page, etcetera. After much violence over the years, this situation has thankfully come to pass.
Maybe the grammar database method could shed some light on the origins of Euskera, an isolated language that cannot be linked, via vocabulary, to any other language in Europe, or the rest of the world, for that matter. How did that come about? Where did these people's ancestors come from?
Da? Putzalut moi shzopa, balshoi durak. Ti javnó sviñá.
There is a large and ancient subculture in Mexico known as the "albur", a play of words, used mostly by men, that contains a hidden message, particularly about sexually dominating the person you are speaking to. It comes from the natives being subyugated by the spaniards, and shooting a hidden meanings at your dominator was a way to achieve minor victories every day. Nowadays, the "albur" is deeply rooted in many sectors of Mexico's working class, has become a game and secret society of sorts, and there are hundreds if not thousands of possible retorts (new ones are invented virtually every day). The point is to shoot back and forth until one of the two "players" is at a loss. There is always the danger of messing up and causing a self-inflicted goal, to use a soccer reference. Think a much subtler and faster version of "8 Mile's" rap face-offs, and you get the general idea. A few people speak like this all the time, you're trying to have a normal conversation, then suddenly whoever's around is smiling and you have absolutely no idea what the hell just happened. An extremely small percentage of foreigners are aware that the "albur" exists, much fewer still understand it, virtually none are any good at it, and this includes people from other spanish-speaking nations.
Now, Spaniards are particularly blunt and nasty in their usage of profanity, the undisputed kings of Tourette's: "Bola de jilipollas, ostia joder, que me cago en la leche de su madre". That last expression translates into "I shit in your mother's milk".
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TFA reminds me of Greg Sniper, AKA Grass Valley Greg, the man who invented the Delete button. His company's motto was "Where ideas can hang out...and do whatever!" GVG made his employees take tofutti ice cream breaks whenever HE felt like it. There was a poster in the workplace that read "Arbeit ist spiel", "Work is play".
If I remember correctly, the sketch was based on a Microsoft executive that made his employees listen to Jimi Hendrix...whether they liked it or not.
Isn't that what happens to any conservative speaker who visits a college campus these days? Maybe you should ask Ann Coulter. I'm sure you don't agree with what she says, but doesn't she have a right to say it?
Ann Coulter spews hate-filled tirades on an almost daily basis in her widespread column and in her countless network appearances, so she can hardly be considered an oppressed voice crying out in the wilderness. In one of her college stand-up routines, many students stood up and left the hall, prompting Coulter to yell: "Yeah, that's right, leave! The anal sex classes are just down the hall!" That's a little one-liner that would have made the brownshirts proud.
If GWB was half as bad as you make yourself believe he is, you'd already be dead. Michael Moore would be thin...in line for the "Showers" at Bush's Death Camps in West Texas.
No, but under gwb and his executive orders, his government has the power to detain you indefinitely without legal representation and even to outsource you to one of a prision in Guantanamo, Syria, Egypt, Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Pakistan and various other countries in Africa and Asia; hey, now that is one distinguished list!
So until we have forced labor camps and we're filling gas chambers daily, I suggest you rethink your position and keep your mouth shut.
And
So, go ahead, join what's left of the Taliban if that is what your truly belive.
Wow, spoken like a true west texas brownshirt.
Once we have forced labor camps and we're filling gas chamber daily, it's already too late by several years, OBVIOUSLY.
What has happened in every country whose population has allowed its' government to take away its' freedoms for the sake of the illusion of a little safety is that eventually that population loses its' freedom with no benefit of safety. History only repeats itself over and over again because of ignorance. Vincible ignorance. Lazy ignorance. Mediocre ignorance. Ignorance creating fear, and this combination in turn creates a soul-destroying hatred which makes it impossible for meaningful analysis and discussion to take place.
Fortunately, the United States of America on the basis of an incredibly resilient document called The Constitution which cannot be destroyed overnight. But it can be destroyed with some time, a dash of power-crazed corporate whores, and a whole lot of ignorance from the population.
Oh, and speaking of ignorance, the Taliban controls around half of Afghanistan. The other half, the so-called good guys, the Northern Alliance (did you know that's their name, the Northern Alliance?), has in the past four years overseen the biggest bumper crops of opium in Afghanistan's history, most of it exported to Europe and Northern America. Right under the gun barrels of what's left of United States troops in the region.
You reminded me of an old Stephen Wright line:
I have a life-size map of the world. The legend says "1 Mile = 1 Mile".
But then, Umberto Eco noted that a life-size map of the world would alter the landscape just by existing, therefore it would have to take itself into account for it to not be immediately obsolete.
Anyway, don't mind me, carry on...
...the cockroaches can take a shot at running the place
I, for one, do NOT welcome our new blattarian overlords.
That said, if they end up being half as dumb as humans, they'll probably mass-produce Raid for military purposes.
Right on. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines back in the early nineties raised the average global temperature by something like one tenth of a degree for a couple of years, I believe. Of course, many volcanos erupt every year, but Pinatubo ejected an unusually large amount of ash in historical terms. And yet, in prehistorical terms, Pinatubo was a minor eruption, compared to other volcanic events, such as the Siberian Traps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_traps) and to a lesser extent, the Toba supervolcano (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_the ory)
The contemporary scenario for global warming is a new ice age, you know.
One of the great temperature regulators for Planet Earth is the Thermo-Haline Current, which originates in the North Atlantic. An increased rate of polar icecap melting MAY dilute and weaken the brine that drives this conveyor belt, effectively stopping it. Now, this conveyor belt works its' way through the bottom of the ocean, south to the tip of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, then makes a vertical u-turn in the Pacific off the coast of China, then back to the North Atlantic through the surface of the ocean.
In a nutshell, the Thermo-Haline Current takes cold water south via the bottom of the ocean and warm water north via the surface. If we manage to disrrupt this current, there goes temperature distribution and boom!, the Northern Hemisphere will freeze up, and who knows how long it would take to kick-start the current again.
Current models effectively predict the above scenario. However, I have a question I've never read or heard mentioned: Wouldn't the lack of temperature distribution also make tropical water much, much warmer? Will we have to start getting familiar with categories 6 and 7 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale? Maybe even a year-round hurricane season?
My god, what a morbid yet fascinating mess.
Somebody should mod this post informative. Common knowledge, I know, but it needed to be said.
'Ein Danaergeschenk' (the Greek Gift) in German.
And then, this little beauty:
'Ein Giftgeschenk' (the Greek Poison) in German.
Dear phrotoma:
Thank you for the eels. They were scrumptiously yummy and unmistakably regal.
Sorry to mensch, but if you're finished with the hairdryer, could you pop it in the post?
Yours fictionally,
Biggles
PS. See you at the Saxe-Coburg's canasta evening.
Among other animals
Like his pet cat Eric, whose licence came from the Ministry Of Housinge and its' cat detector van.
And just you remember, Kamel Ataturk had a whole menagerie named Eric, and the late, great Marcel Proust, had an 'addock!
Proust in his bath
wrote about
wrote about...
Ahhh...Python free associating. Hours of good, clean fun.
Hey, you don't like a city/state/country that bans smoking in restaurants? Then move somewhere else!
Yeah, sure. And at the rate non-smoking hysterics are going, the city/state/country where you can choose to move to will ban smoking in restaurants, probably sooner rather than later.
"Move somewhere else". Sheesh. What a lazy, thick-skulled non-argument.
I really don't understand why people love or hate Steve Jobs.
Yeah, I asked myself the same question while scanning through the thread.
It's quite simple, I believe. Steve Jobs is a prominent public figure, and as such will be subjected during his lifetime to visceral (as opposed to rational) reactions from thousands or millions of people, in both positive and negative ways. Run down the list and you will find that this is generally the case, from Jesus of Nazareth to John Lennon, Bill Gates to Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King to Mahatma Ghandi.
Once dead, however, public figures are almost canonized in public folklore, society in general subconsciously responds with a little axiom in the back of the collective mind: "Do not speak ill of the dead". Hell, even Richard Nixon's reputation has been reevaluated since his death (he did some pretty good things: started the Environmental Protection Agency, opened the doors to China, etc).
The essence of your question, I guess, would be: What the hell are we afraid of?
Why the human mass divides and polarizes itself into separate herds through ideologies, disregarding or ridiculing the positive aspects of opposing stances or figureheads, while augmenting the flaws. Quite a stupid reflex, really, because as time passes, the edges blur, the differences dissipate, and we have all wasted an incredible amount of energy.
There are exceptions, of course, but while a few individuals may be universally hated, no individual is universally beloved.
Most of the haters seem to act as if Jobs personally took the time to kick their puppy. On the other hand, the people that love him don't seem to understand that he has serious personality flaws, and that he's just human.
Just human, like the anonymous rest of us, but we're looking at the guy through a warped magnifying glass, and never forget that many people resent his Ferrari, his Lear Jet, and most of all, the swooning hero-worship he receives from some circles.
Maybe so, but Scotsmen are the worst tennis players in the world, and it was not too long ago that Angus Podgorny received an order for two million kilts by a creature from the planet Skyron in Andromeda, who was the most hideous thing you ever saw, a quivering, glistening mass. He wasn't so much a man as he was ... a Blancmange!
While kids are in the McPlayRoom sliding down the McChute, some guy will be sitting in a booth, drinking a cup of McCoffee, downloading McPorn. A group of mothers sitting in the table across the aisle will notice this. This will put the shift manager in an uncomfortable spot. How often do paying customers get kicked out of McDonald's?
Or never mind downloading porn, watersports pop-up ads will do. How often does this happen in, say, Starbucks?
There could even be a companion brown dwarf that we haven't detected so far.
A name has been proposed for just such a sister star: Nemesis. First time I read about it was in Carl Sagan's book "Comet", and Mr. Sagan expounds a theory that would explain the cyclical mass extintions Earth seems to be prone to. In a nutshell, Nemesis swings close by once every 22 million years or so, close enough to penetrate the Oort Cloud, hurtling countless comets towards the inner solar system, and at least one of those is bound to smash into the Earth. The moment I suddenly see fifty comets all at once in the sky is the moment I head towards the hills, although I doubt that would do much good.
And note that Tombaugh did not locate Planet X.
...only three objects discovered and classified as a planet..., keeping in mind how the parent mentioned that Pluto keeps planetary status due to a matter of ego and, I would add, inertia. I seem to remember that Tombaugh himself spoke during the debate to demote Pluto from Planet to Kuiper Belt Object. Not surprinsingly, Tombaugh stance was to Keep It As A Planet.
Point taken, and I agree with you. I tried to be carefull in the way I wrote my previous post:
FWIW, I've never been comfortable with the size of Pluto, its' composition, eccentric orbit and most crucially, how far it drifts out of the zodiacal plane. So yes, KBO it is for me, and surely this widely held opinion does NOT lessen Tombaugh's achievement, first human to feast his eyes on a new type of celestial body.
Now check this out: the gravity signature of Planet X would be measured by how it affects the motion of Neptune, but astronomers originally miscalculated the size of Neptune, thereby their calculations presented an anomaly that really was not there. In a nutshell, a gravity signature for Planet X has never been detected. The true Planet X not only eludes us, but it may not even exist.
Finally, I also seem to remember there was hype, ages ago, about a planet between Mercury and the Sun, tentatively named Vulcan, whose existence is now discredited. Speculative planets hold a strange fascination, there's a certain metaphysical poetry to them, question marks that appear in lines of data, and we create physical objects defined in time and space with our minds. They may vanish in paper due to more precise data, but still we remember that which never existed.
It's officially a planet due to politics: it's the first planet the US Americans discovered, and ego demands it retain its planetary status.
Well, it's one of only three objects discovered and classified as a planet within our solar system in the modern era.
1. Uranus: William Herschel (Great Britain), XVIII century.
2. Neptune: Urbain Le Verrier (France) and John Couch Adams (Great Britain), XIX century. Both Le Verrier and Adams mathematically predicted the position of Neptune owing to anomalies in the orbit of Uranus, but it was Heinrich d"Arrest (Germany) who performed the actual observation.
3. Pluto: Clyde Tombaugh (United States), XX century. As an amusing side note, Tombaugh worked for nearly 20 years searching for the elusive Planet X in Arizona; in those days, only one radio station transmitted 24 hours a day, from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, so while searching for Planet X, Tombaugh kept the radio on throughout the night and eventually became quite the authority on mexican ranchero (country) music.
Ancient chinese proverb: To find a planet, one must first lose a city.
Ah yes. "Eagle One to Moon Base Alpha. Mayday, mayday". The theme song was pretty cool too, in a platinum space-jumpsuit sort of way.
For those who haven't seen it, Space 1999 was british sci-fi TV from the early seventies, which went something like this: On the other side of Moon Base Alpha, there was a nuclear waste landfill which went critical mass in a gigantic way, propelling the moon out of orbit and straight out of the solar system. In every episode, our hapless heroes of Moon Base Alpha drifted past strange planets and came in contact with lifeforms much stranger than most in the original Star Trek. In one episode, they even went straight through a black hole. Many episodes were so-so, some were quite bad, but some were positively freaky in a good way. The best of the lot is one titled "Dragon's Domain".
After the success of Star Wars, Alien and the like, the creators tried to milk a couple of last drops from the franchise, which was never really successfull, splicing two episodes together into a full-length feature, renaming it Alien Attack.
Giving credit where it's due, the main actor, the commander of Moon Base Alpha, was the great Martin Landau, who later won an Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in the movie Ed Wood (and been nominated a couple of more times), which is much more than you can say for William Shatner.
Here's a few other movies made better by additional scenes:
1. Blade Runner
2. Apocalypse Now
3. The Godfather I and II
4. Donnie Darko
5. The Wild Bunch
Honorable Mention: I have to say that the digitally enhanced THX-1138 turns it from a cult classic into a straightforward classic.
There's gotta be more, I can't think of them right now.
When the T1000 shattered, I thought: "Why don't they run and grab as many frozen pieces as they can then throw them in the vat, instead of hugging each other?" I mean, Sarah Connor's been through this before, she should know a LOT better, and the T800 is no slouch, either.
As for film continuity, it would have been clever to have the rest of the finale with a shorter, hence diminished, T1000. It would have been both humorous and more suspenseful, since the T800 and T1000 would have been more evenly matched.
He's not kidding, that's the way they grill calamari in Spain, but usually they use baby squid, known as "chipirones".
Believe it or not, if you soak calamari meat in fresh water for 24 hours, then prepare it as you would an abalone filet, only a connossieur can taste the difference. Some upscale seafood restaurants are notorious for this practice, having been caught in the act.
I know a restaurant that serves calamari fried in beet and orange sauce, with ginger, garlic and chili powder, and I have to tell you, after trying it, I lost my aversion both to calamari AND beet.
For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.
You seem to have a unique, inter-related perspective on languages, given the number of them that you know. I speak a measly two languages, Spanish and English, which makes me feel quite poor, as if there's a banquet of humanity and all I have is a loaf of bread and a glass of water.
Yes, it's a good question, but I'm not clear on what you mean by 'old languages', I am assuming you refer to the very beginnings of language itself. In that respect, when you say 'complex grammatically' I am understanding 'chaotic', lacking structure at first then congealing over time into an organized whole, with the flexibility to contain countless new concepts. How does one go about achieving a grand structure for vocabulary, putting into place rules that apply everywhere within the language, seamlessly?
But then again, the challenge was probably not as daunting as it would be today, considering there were far fewer concepts that needed to be articulated in those days. Words for concepts arise as fast as the need for concepts themselves, be they concrete or abstract. As an example, we still need the concepts "water" and "fire", but my ancestors had no use for "combustion" or "interest rate" or "ironic".
Also, in regards to grammatical complexity, I'll cite the example of modern spanish, which has no less than sixteen defined verbal tenses, and if that's not grammatical complexity, I don't know what is.
So I'm not sure that there is a simplification of grammar as compared to ye olden days, as we humans have both ornate and practical tendencies in the usage of language, and language balances itself accordingly every time, but never reverting quite the same.
I say this because I see tendencies towards simplification, as in OMG, WTF, LOL, in a nutshell, 133t!, a century and a half before we had Ludwig Zamenoff with Esperanto, Basic English in the 1930's, and Standard English in the 1950's and 60's (developed for aerospace industry manuals).
Accordingly, we also witness simultaneous tendencies towards non-ironic adornment.
This constant dynamic may have, from time to time, produced great leaps in standarization, while also producing things like the sixteen verbal tenses in spanish.
In historical terms, to steal a phrase from Will Durand, it can be described as a systolic and diastolic effect. Put in another way, and I don't mean this in a bad way as I love both: for every Bob Dylan, there's a Monty Python to take the piss back out of language again.
...the Japanese tried to destroy the Korean language(classes were all in Japanese, all published material was in Japanese etc)...
That sounds very similar to what happened in Euzkadi (the basque land) during Franco's government, which attempted to assimilate the basque culture. Euskera (the basque language) was banned from schools, from church, from television and radio, from the printed page, etcetera. After much violence over the years, this situation has thankfully come to pass.
Maybe the grammar database method could shed some light on the origins of Euskera, an isolated language that cannot be linked, via vocabulary, to any other language in Europe, or the rest of the world, for that matter. How did that come about? Where did these people's ancestors come from?
Yobanaya v jopu pizda, suka bliad', xuinia zadrochennaya molofeinaya, zalupa zloyebuchaya, pizdenishy pizdostradatel'nye prihujarennye, huila bl'adskij suchenysh' gnoinyj bliadopereyobannyi :)
Da? Putzalut moi shzopa, balshoi durak. Ti javnó sviñá.
There is a large and ancient subculture in Mexico known as the "albur", a play of words, used mostly by men, that contains a hidden message, particularly about sexually dominating the person you are speaking to. It comes from the natives being subyugated by the spaniards, and shooting a hidden meanings at your dominator was a way to achieve minor victories every day.
Nowadays, the "albur" is deeply rooted in many sectors of Mexico's working class, has become a game and secret society of sorts, and there are hundreds if not thousands of possible retorts (new ones are invented virtually every day). The point is to shoot back and forth until one of the two "players" is at a loss. There is always the danger of messing up and causing a self-inflicted goal, to use a soccer reference. Think a much subtler and faster version of "8 Mile's" rap face-offs, and you get the general idea.
A few people speak like this all the time, you're trying to have a normal conversation, then suddenly whoever's around is smiling and you have absolutely no idea what the hell just happened. An extremely small percentage of foreigners are aware that the "albur" exists, much fewer still understand it, virtually none are any good at it, and this includes people from other spanish-speaking nations.
Now, Spaniards are particularly blunt and nasty in their usage of profanity, the undisputed kings of Tourette's: "Bola de jilipollas, ostia joder, que me cago en la leche de su madre".
That last expression translates into "I shit in your mother's milk".