Is it common for people sleeping in tents in such weather to be practically naked, or wearing nothing more than underwear?
Isn't it more reasonable to sleep dressed in pants and sweatshirts, etc. If so, then it means that they got undressed before escaping the tent - that wouldn't make sense.
At this point I'm not sure if you're fooling around or are just misinformed, I will assume the latter.
Romanian is a language, and Cyrillic is a form of writing. You can write Romanian using a Cyrillic alphabet if you really want to, but that's not how Romanians themselves do it.
If you read the first paragraph of Wikipedias's articles on {Rroma, Romanian, Cyrillic} - you'll figure it out.
I did read your post, and as a guy who speaks Romanian and has been to Romania and lives in a neighbor country - I am pretty confident in the fact that I understand this matter.
The plural of 'Rroma' (also spelled as 'Roma') is 'Romani', not 'Romanian'.
This is a conclusion reached by Anatol Rapoport, a fellow who was studying these things (he is the author of tit-for-tat, among other things). He provides some examples in his book "Certainties and doubts", which is a very interesting read. Here is a relevant excerpt (this is a public album, you don't need a Facebook account to see the pics)
I am sorry to hear that. I have had a similar experience, after a very painful breakup I went through the same process.
The thing that caused it was the fact that I had no idea why it happened. So my days were spent asking "why? why? why?" - this was not very productive, the inner voice had no reasonable answer except "I did something wrong". Then it became "What did I do wrong?".
What worked for me was the ability to understand what happened. I had to ask some really direct questions and get some really direct answers (from my ex-partner and from my best friend, who is an ex-best friend today). As soon as I understood what happened, I knew it wasn't something that I had done wrong - so there was no reason to worry that I made a mistake (and that I could repeat it in the future).
I could sleep, I could eat, I didn't feel like the most evil wrongdoer on the planet and most importantly - I began thinking about building new relationships.
A few poems later, the case was resolved and I was involved in a new relationship and became a person again.
I guess it worked for me because I like to analyze things and understand the causes of every effect.. Without understanding, I find myself worrying about things that are outside of my control. I hope this helps.
What you write makes sense, and this is the approach taken by the researches mentioned above. I suspect that the method should work, because there are similar stories (related to other types of issues) discussed in: - the brain that changes itself - Dr. Ramachandran's stories about his patients
How long did it take you to learn to influence it that way?
I've done some similar experiments and I sometimes can make it less loud, just by imagining that it fades out into silence. I was never able to shut it off completely, at least not yet.
I have it too and I've been experimenting with various methods of living with it. It does not bother me during the day, when there are various ambient sounds, but it becomes a problem when I am trying to fall asleep.
On a side note, there are quite a lot of comments posted by people with this condition. Does it feel that Tinnitus is a common "feature" among Slashdot readers? Perhaps there is something in our life-style that causes it?
I have been to a few music concerts in my life (say, 10) and I never go to discos, I am quite puzzled by the origin of my Tinnitus.
You should also: - watch Nice guys finish first by Richard Dawkins, then - read "Evolution of cooperation" by Robert Axelrod (the organizer of the tournament), then - read "Certainties and doubts" by Anatol Rapoport (the submitter of tit for tat).
Can you provide more recommendations of this kind? I've recently moved here and I would love to expose myself to all the cool things Seattle has to offer.
I don't see a reason for perceiving the term in a negative way.
You and I are humans, and we also know that some humans are assholes. When I call you a human, it doesn't mean that I lump you into the same category as "asshole".
"Atheist" is just a word that means "without god". Whether you want it or not, the description fits. For everything else, there are other words.
No one forces you to attend any meetings, you are just a person with a reasonable point of view. That doesn't change the fact that "atheist" applies to you, does it?
One way to look at the problem is to take into account the knowledge a civilization can gather while exploring the world. As long as you keep discovering new things and laws - you're either in: - a 'real universe' - or in a simulation
Assuming that the 'real universe' does not boil down to some discrete elements, it means it will always have some undiscovered secrets, there will always be a way to 'zoom in' and find something new.
If, at some point in time you realize that you haven't discovered anything new for a long time, and you can formally prove that there is nothing else to discover- it means that you've reached the boundaries of a simulation.
Hey, thanks for the elaborate reply. What you write makes sense and it is clear to me that you know what you're talking about.
The "language problem" is a very big deal to a large number of people here in Moldova, which is why I took some time to dig around various resources and build a picture by myself, instead of relying on what the media wants us to think.
Before I go further, I must point out that Russian is my first language (even though my family is not of a Russian descent and Russian wasn't my parents' first language), I then learned Romanian. I have no special feelings for either of these languages, they're just a way to encode and decode an idea when interacting with another person...
I once embarked on a quest to figure out the story behind the diacritics used in Romanian and understand why they sometimes write "î" and other times ”â”. That is how I stumbled upon Neacshu's letter and the fact that all religious texts at that time were in Cyrillic.
There are some ideas that I'd like to discuss with you. One of them is the "biased sample" aspect.
- If I were an alien who landed somewhere in Russia after an uber-nuclear war that wiped out pretty much everything on the planet... and if I stumbled upon some pieces of source code, I would look at something like ``import this; for item in range(10): print item``. I would then conclude that the people who lived in this area wrote their texts using this type of symbols. I would extrapolate from one data point, which is not very good; but if you have no other data samples - then "what the heck, why not?"
Then there's a "survivor's bias".
- The church is a powerful entity that can afford to store their records and update them, transfer them to new type of storage media, make backups, etc. Books were very very expensive back in the days, which is why the church tried very hard to preserve them. A mere mortal, on the other hand - was probably illiterate. If they knew how to write, would anyone go out on a limb to preserve their records, when they had more important problems to take care of? This could explain why you only see Cyrillic script in the books.
A few other ideas: - Neacshu was a fan of "security through obscurity", that's why the letter was written in Cyrillic:-) - If somehow one would manage to stumble upon "gr8dude's letter to his sister" - they would observe that it is written in English with Latin script; even though both people involved in the interaction are a part of a culture that uses a different language and is pretty far away from England.
Another aspect to keep in mind is that when you read about this problem, say, here - http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortografia_limbii_rom%C3%A2ne, you find out that there are claims that Romanian was originally written with runes, and over the years it has shifted from to other forms. I never managed to find any evidence about it being written in runes, but there's an episode that can be traced back and verified.
The transition to Cyrillic was the result of a church-related matter, caused by the split of Christianity into Catholicism and Orthodoxism. To a modern person, such disputes are like arguing whether Terminator will defeat Robocop in a fight, or whether Spiderman is stronger than Batman... However, back in the day when the average person was uneducated and literacy was scarce, all this church business was of a great importance, for no one wanted to end up burning in hell, where there was gnashing of teeth and crying.
The turning point is somewhere in ~1400, when Alexandru cel Bun ordered all the books to be burned and replaced with ones that used Cyrillic script. I know it sounds crazy, burning all the books - a non-trivial mission. But... with books being so rare - it was a very easy job. Just iterate through all the churches, and you're done.
Pulling this off today would be much much more complex, I'm not lettin
> The only failing it has is that it uses letters similair to > latin letters to mean completely different things, which > leads to an inevitable amount of brain bonk when you > are trying to learn it. Yeah, this can be tricky.
To a beginner this feels like looking at code that has `#define True False` somewhere in the fine-print.
Da, davno takih ne videl... vymerli kak mamonty:-)
I didn't know Lenin was planning to do that. Can you share some background information on this subject? What was his rationale?
This sounds a bit weird to me, given the historical trends... Russia usually did things the other way around: as the empire expands, they run "convert --force KOI8" against any piece of text they can get their hands on. I am from a country that went through a period in which the alphabet was switched from Latin to Cyrillic. They also closed most of the schools that taught in the native language and made Russian an only option; all the administrative documentation is also switched to Russian.
To this day, some parts of the capital city have street names in Russian; in some cities this is the norm. This also has some serious side effects, such as the dilution of national identity. That's a long story.
I am very curious about Lenin's arguments. Why would he want to do that?
I use it extensively since I got an Android phone, but one problem with it is that it doesn't support video or audio calls.
People who use other clients see me in their list of contacts, but the video/audio call option is grayed out. That is strange, because the phone has a video camera, the Internet connection is reasonably fast, and Skype works well on it.
Is there some magic checkbox I have to tick to enable audio calls on the GTalk client for Android?
Nextel iDEN SIM cards use a different format for the storage of contacts, which is not compatible with the format described in GSM 11.11 (for regular 2G SIM cards), nor with the 3GPP spec for 3G USIM cards. If you read EF ADN (the abbreviated dialing numbers file), you will see just one entry, called "See iDEN phbk", while the actual phonebook is elsewhere and has a completely different structure.
If you want to migrate your iDEN phonebook to another SIM card, export them to a CSV file, or upload them to Google Contacts or Yahoo Contacts - you can rely on SIM Manager - it supports all card types and can exchange data between them.
My colleagues have reverse-engineered the format, and to the best of my knowledge - there is no other software that can read Nextel iDEN cards. I must point out that I find the iDEN phonebook format much more reasonable - it is a linear file (in smart card terminology, it is a file that is made from N records of a fixed length), each record contains all the data about a given contact.
In contrast, the phonebook of 3G USIM cards is scattered across multiple files (emails, secondary names, secondary numbers, etc), which have different lengths, thus they require additional files to correctly map records to a phonebook entry. This has a lot of side-effects, such as "sometimes not all phonebook entries can have an email" or "some mobile operators issue SIMs that don't have all the USIM phonebook files", or "depending on the phone's way of handling the phonebook, sometimes you may end up with orphaned entries that cannot be removed", etc.
I never used Nextel's services so I can't comment on their coverage or call quality, but I do know that the engineers who designed the phonebook format kept it simple. For a comparison - implementing support for 3G USIM phonebooks (with the specs available) took longer than implementing support for Nextel cards (with no documentation at all).
p.s. I hope no one will reply with a link to the spec, because we've tried our best to find it before deciding to do it the hard way (-:
Slashdot Mirror
SkyDrive can be mounted via WebDAV, which is a standard protocol - that makes things a little bit better.
Is it common for people sleeping in tents in such weather to be practically naked, or wearing nothing more than underwear?
Isn't it more reasonable to sleep dressed in pants and sweatshirts, etc. If so, then it means that they got undressed before escaping the tent - that wouldn't make sense.
> but it is strangely limited and it isn't free to use all the features or download more than a few maps.
If you download it via F-Droid, then there are no limitations.
Even prior to figuring that out, the limitations of the version distributed via Google Play were not a problem for me - I found them reasonable.
At this point I'm not sure if you're fooling around or are just misinformed, I will assume the latter.
Romanian is a language, and Cyrillic is a form of writing. You can write Romanian using a Cyrillic alphabet if you really want to, but that's not how Romanians themselves do it.
If you read the first paragraph of Wikipedias's articles on {Rroma, Romanian, Cyrillic} - you'll figure it out.
I did read your post, and as a guy who speaks Romanian and has been to Romania and lives in a neighbor country - I am pretty confident in the fact that I understand this matter.
The plural of 'Rroma' (also spelled as 'Roma') is 'Romani', not 'Romanian'.
> Romanian (i.e. gypsy)
These are different things. Perhaps you are confusing 'Rroma' with 'Romanian'?
With this condition you will always be exposed to some other forms of sound - would this prevent the hallucinations?
After all, your senses are not fully deprived of input.
It works in Europe, but only for texting (you cannot make calls).
The program won't install itself using via the market, so you have to install the APK manually.
I've been using it for several years now.
This is a conclusion reached by Anatol Rapoport, a fellow who was studying these things (he is the author of tit-for-tat, among other things). He provides some examples in his book "Certainties and doubts", which is a very interesting read. Here is a relevant excerpt (this is a public album, you don't need a Facebook account to see the pics)
I am sorry to hear that. I have had a similar experience, after a very painful breakup I went through the same process.
The thing that caused it was the fact that I had no idea why it happened. So my days were spent asking "why? why? why?" - this was not very productive, the inner voice had no reasonable answer except "I did something wrong". Then it became "What did I do wrong?".
What worked for me was the ability to understand what happened. I had to ask some really direct questions and get some really direct answers (from my ex-partner and from my best friend, who is an ex-best friend today). As soon as I understood what happened, I knew it wasn't something that I had done wrong - so there was no reason to worry that I made a mistake (and that I could repeat it in the future).
I could sleep, I could eat, I didn't feel like the most evil wrongdoer on the planet and most importantly - I began thinking about building new relationships.
A few poems later, the case was resolved and I was involved in a new relationship and became a person again.
I guess it worked for me because I like to analyze things and understand the causes of every effect.. Without understanding, I find myself worrying about things that are outside of my control. I hope this helps.
There is a university in Texas that works on a solution to this problem, please consider making a donation: http://www.utdallas.edu/~kilgard/tinnitus.htm
What you write makes sense, and this is the approach taken by the researches mentioned above. I suspect that the method should work, because there are similar stories (related to other types of issues) discussed in:
- the brain that changes itself
- Dr. Ramachandran's stories about his patients
How long did it take you to learn to influence it that way?
I've done some similar experiments and I sometimes can make it less loud, just by imagining that it fades out into silence. I was never able to shut it off completely, at least not yet.
What caused the bruxism?
I have it too and I've been experimenting with various methods of living with it. It does not bother me during the day, when there are various ambient sounds, but it becomes a problem when I am trying to fall asleep.
The method I found reasonably effective is falling asleep while playing an audiobook or podcast, for details: http://railean.net/index.php/2012/11/30/tinnitus-and-audiobooks
On a side note, there are quite a lot of comments posted by people with this condition. Does it feel that Tinnitus is a common "feature" among Slashdot readers? Perhaps there is something in our life-style that causes it?
I have been to a few music concerts in my life (say, 10) and I never go to discos, I am quite puzzled by the origin of my Tinnitus.
Languages have a lot of quirks and edge cases, how about 'gist'?
You should also:
- watch Nice guys finish first by Richard Dawkins, then
- read "Evolution of cooperation" by Robert Axelrod (the organizer of the tournament), then
- read "Certainties and doubts" by Anatol Rapoport (the submitter of tit for tat).
Can you provide more recommendations of this kind? I've recently moved here and I would love to expose myself to all the cool things Seattle has to offer.
Thank you!
I don't see a reason for perceiving the term in a negative way.
You and I are humans, and we also know that some humans are assholes. When I call you a human, it doesn't mean that I lump you into the same category as "asshole".
"Atheist" is just a word that means "without god". Whether you want it or not, the description fits. For everything else, there are other words.
No one forces you to attend any meetings, you are just a person with a reasonable point of view. That doesn't change the fact that "atheist" applies to you, does it?
One way to look at the problem is to take into account the knowledge a civilization can gather while exploring the world. As long as you keep discovering new things and laws - you're either in:
- a 'real universe'
- or in a simulation
Assuming that the 'real universe' does not boil down to some discrete elements, it means it will always have some undiscovered secrets, there will always be a way to 'zoom in' and find something new.
If, at some point in time you realize that you haven't discovered anything new for a long time, and you can formally prove that there is nothing else to discover- it means that you've reached the boundaries of a simulation.
A more elaborate version of the story is here: http://railean.net/index.php/2010/12/31/simulated-universe-argument-limitation
Hey, thanks for the elaborate reply. What you write makes sense and it is clear to me that you know what you're talking about.
The "language problem" is a very big deal to a large number of people here in Moldova, which is why I took some time to dig around various resources and build a picture by myself, instead of relying on what the media wants us to think.
Before I go further, I must point out that Russian is my first language (even though my family is not of a Russian descent and Russian wasn't my parents' first language), I then learned Romanian. I have no special feelings for either of these languages, they're just a way to encode and decode an idea when interacting with another person...
I once embarked on a quest to figure out the story behind the diacritics used in Romanian and understand why they sometimes write "î" and other times ”â”. That is how I stumbled upon Neacshu's letter and the fact that all religious texts at that time were in Cyrillic.
There are some ideas that I'd like to discuss with you. One of them is the "biased sample" aspect.
- If I were an alien who landed somewhere in Russia after an uber-nuclear war that wiped out pretty much everything on the planet... and if I stumbled upon some pieces of source code, I would look at something like ``import this; for item in range(10): print item``. I would then conclude that the people who lived in this area wrote their texts using this type of symbols. I would extrapolate from one data point, which is not very good; but if you have no other data samples - then "what the heck, why not?"
Then there's a "survivor's bias".
- The church is a powerful entity that can afford to store their records and update them, transfer them to new type of storage media, make backups, etc. Books were very very expensive back in the days, which is why the church tried very hard to preserve them. A mere mortal, on the other hand - was probably illiterate. If they knew how to write, would anyone go out on a limb to preserve their records, when they had more important problems to take care of?
This could explain why you only see Cyrillic script in the books.
A few other ideas: :-)
- Neacshu was a fan of "security through obscurity", that's why the letter was written in Cyrillic
- If somehow one would manage to stumble upon "gr8dude's letter to his sister" - they would observe that it is written in English with Latin script; even though both people involved in the interaction are a part of a culture that uses a different language and is pretty far away from England.
Another aspect to keep in mind is that when you read about this problem, say, here - http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortografia_limbii_rom%C3%A2ne, you find out that there are claims that Romanian was originally written with runes, and over the years it has shifted from to other forms. I never managed to find any evidence about it being written in runes, but there's an episode that can be traced back and verified.
The transition to Cyrillic was the result of a church-related matter, caused by the split of Christianity into Catholicism and Orthodoxism. To a modern person, such disputes are like arguing whether Terminator will defeat Robocop in a fight, or whether Spiderman is stronger than Batman... However, back in the day when the average person was uneducated and literacy was scarce, all this church business was of a great importance, for no one wanted to end up burning in hell, where there was gnashing of teeth and crying.
The turning point is somewhere in ~1400, when Alexandru cel Bun ordered all the books to be burned and replaced with ones that used Cyrillic script. I know it sounds crazy, burning all the books - a non-trivial mission. But... with books being so rare - it was a very easy job. Just iterate through all the churches, and you're done.
Pulling this off today would be much much more complex, I'm not lettin
Are you talking about the conceptually new BolgenOS and its aesthetically pleasing wallpapers?
> The only failing it has is that it uses letters similair to
> latin letters to mean completely different things, which
> leads to an inevitable amount of brain bonk when you
> are trying to learn it.
Yeah, this can be tricky.
To a beginner this feels like looking at code that has `#define True False` somewhere in the fine-print.
Da, davno takih ne videl... vymerli kak mamonty :-)
I didn't know Lenin was planning to do that. Can you share some background information on this subject? What was his rationale?
This sounds a bit weird to me, given the historical trends... Russia usually did things the other way around: as the empire expands, they run "convert --force KOI8" against any piece of text they can get their hands on. I am from a country that went through a period in which the alphabet was switched from Latin to Cyrillic. They also closed most of the schools that taught in the native language and made Russian an only option; all the administrative documentation is also switched to Russian.
To this day, some parts of the capital city have street names in Russian; in some cities this is the norm. This also has some serious side effects, such as the dilution of national identity. That's a long story.
I am very curious about Lenin's arguments. Why would he want to do that?
Thanks for the feedback. I thought so too, but I believe that is not the case - I have 2.3.7, Cyanogenmod 7.1.0.1.
My version of Google Talk is 1.3, can you tell me if yours is newer?
I use it extensively since I got an Android phone, but one problem with it is that it doesn't support video or audio calls.
People who use other clients see me in their list of contacts, but the video/audio call option is grayed out. That is strange, because the phone has a video camera, the Internet connection is reasonably fast, and Skype works well on it.
Is there some magic checkbox I have to tick to enable audio calls on the GTalk client for Android?
Nextel iDEN SIM cards use a different format for the storage of contacts, which is not compatible with the format described in GSM 11.11 (for regular 2G SIM cards), nor with the 3GPP spec for 3G USIM cards. If you read EF ADN (the abbreviated dialing numbers file), you will see just one entry, called "See iDEN phbk", while the actual phonebook is elsewhere and has a completely different structure.
If you want to migrate your iDEN phonebook to another SIM card, export them to a CSV file, or upload them to Google Contacts or Yahoo Contacts - you can rely on SIM Manager - it supports all card types and can exchange data between them.
My colleagues have reverse-engineered the format, and to the best of my knowledge - there is no other software that can read Nextel iDEN cards. I must point out that I find the iDEN phonebook format much more reasonable - it is a linear file (in smart card terminology, it is a file that is made from N records of a fixed length), each record contains all the data about a given contact.
In contrast, the phonebook of 3G USIM cards is scattered across multiple files (emails, secondary names, secondary numbers, etc), which have different lengths, thus they require additional files to correctly map records to a phonebook entry. This has a lot of side-effects, such as "sometimes not all phonebook entries can have an email" or "some mobile operators issue SIMs that don't have all the USIM phonebook files", or "depending on the phone's way of handling the phonebook, sometimes you may end up with orphaned entries that cannot be removed", etc.
I never used Nextel's services so I can't comment on their coverage or call quality, but I do know that the engineers who designed the phonebook format kept it simple. For a comparison - implementing support for 3G USIM phonebooks (with the specs available) took longer than implementing support for Nextel cards (with no documentation at all).
p.s. I hope no one will reply with a link to the spec, because we've tried our best to find it before deciding to do it the hard way (-: