Icelandic is a North Germanic language. English is a West Germanic language (whose root is confusingingly called "North Sea Germanic")) with significant influence from Old Norman and a lot of minor influences). Both of their main roots, however, are Proto-Germanic.
I think it's pretty obvious that the French aren't re-coining the imported technical terms based on roots in a manner that just happens to sound essentially identical to the English. They're just simply taking the English terms and making minor spelling adjustments.
....
Although English is a Germanic language something like 3/4 of its vocabulary is Romance in origin, either borrowed from French or coined from Latin (in the case of many modern scientific terms).
The word "telephone" was coined in French, and English borrowed it. You are painting with far too broad a brush.
Keep in mind that English accents in actual Britain are already more diverse then several language groups. In fact one of them has been promoted a language. When my grandmother grew up in Arbroath in the 20s and 30s everyone in the County spoke English with a pronounced Scots accent. Now they speak the Scots language.
"Already"? Methinks you are reversing the history of English in Britain.
The diversity of dialects in Britain are of ancient origin. 1200 years ago, when they were still speaking Old English (a different language from Modern English for certain) there were major regional variations - particularly between southern England and the north (Northumbria and lowland Scotland).
When Old English evolved into Middle English, a new language, the Middle English spoken in the north was quite different from that spoken in the south, and as Modern English developed was well on its way to splitting off into a separate language. The Act of Union with England in 1707 put a stop to that, and from that time on (actually the process started earlier, aided by the printing press) the divergence between Scots English, and the English of southern England became steadily less divergent.
You are observing ancient linguistic divisions that are in the process of vanishing, not new divisions that are emerging.
If the Scots dialect has replaced Standard English (as it is known) in Arbroath in recent years it is the conscious revival of a dying dialect, not the development of "new language".
Also about the claim that dialects (not accents) in England are more diverse that several language groups... well, [citation needed].
I submit that Triangulum, the triangle, does indeed look exactly like a triangle. So that makes at least two. The image of Orion, the hunter, is also very easy to visualize.
I do not know what you are talking about regarding the "name change" of the constellation Scorpius, it has been called that for all of the modern era. Are you confusing it with the astrological sign Scorpio?
I found it odd that the writer asserted that the only thing she missed from the Northern sky was the Big Dipper. She is also missing one of the most spectacular sights in the sky, M31 (the Andromeda galaxy), and also M33 (the Triangulum galaxy) - not as spectacular, but still the third largest galaxy in the Local Group to which we belong.
Which is: there are no good technical histories of computer science.
Read TFA - he spends the majority of the article explaining in detail why Knuth is right - that there are indeed no good technical histories of computer science, and little prospect of any.
Where Haigh takes issue with Knuth is in arguing that the histories of computers and software, which are not technical histories, are nonetheless valuable in their own right, and thus Knuth's dismay at their publication is misplaced. But he otherwise agrees with Knuth has to say.
I see a lot of "fool and his money" posts and it's nonsense or pseudoscience. And I see a lot of posts on "Fusion being 20, 30, or even 40 years away" from posters when stories on hot fusion are posted here.
So given the lack of progress in hot fusion after billions have been spent and decades wasted,...
Thermonuclear fusion has made progress - the evidence so far is that the tokamak system can be scaled up to commercial plant size. It is the only fusion technology to currently be in the running to do this. So there is progress. Unfortunately even if current plans pan out as expected it will be the most expensive energy in the world, exceeding the cost of every means of energy production currently in use (and some of them will be getting still cheaper in the mean time).
if a low cost fusion alternative can be found then it should be researched. After all what do you have to lose?
...
But given that the payoff for a relatively minor amount of funding is so massive, harsh criticism for research into the phenomenon is counterproductive. It should in fact be encouraged by anyone who considers themselves a person who supports clean energy.
Nothing wrong with investing effort in long-shot ideas, and questionable 'anomalies'. That definitely should go on. But there is a huge difference between legitimate scientific research, which requires well designed experiments with high quality controls, openness, peer review, providing the means to reproduce results, etc. and these claimed "trade secret" scams that share none of the traits of legitimate research, but are trolling for 'investors'.
Not all people working in this field are evident scamsters. There scores of researchers working in this area for decades - with no convincing results to show for it. The fact that there seems to be a mutual exclusion between well designed experiments and positive results suggest that this is a social phenomenon of marginal researchers finding something to do, not a scientific one.
Final point: we are still just looking for convincing evidence that some low energy reaction phenomenon actually exists. There is no reason to suppose that even if it does, we are looking at a promising new source of energy. That is a pitch line for someone selling snake oil.
... I'm hard pressed to believe that there is an advantage for colorblindness that would have been selected for in the earliest mammals.
There didn't have to be an advantage for partial colorblindness (they were never totally colorblind), there just doesn't have to be any penalty for the trait to be lost. Same with the inability of some mammals to synthesize vitamin C, no particular advantage to losing it, but with a vitamin C rich diet there was no penalty either and so it could get lost over time. Color vision only works in bright light. Mammals spent a lot of their early evolutionary history as nocturnal creatures, and so could lose this trait without penalty. In fact it appears there were multiple function S cone loss events in the mammalian line, not just one (genomics gives us powerful insights into this today). The article does point out though that "the fact that these gene mutations have spread throughout the populations allows the possibility that the loss of S cones may in some way enhance visual fitness". It is entirely possible that processing of images in dim light could be better optimized through evolution with the loss of the unneeded bright-light color vision baggage.
unfortunately, history has shown for at least 2500 hundred years that government bureaucracies always devolve into political quagmires, where empire building and ass-kissing trump sound business practices.
If you had actually bothered to read the article you linked to, you would have noticed that Congress is preventing them from taking cost savings measures the USPS wishes to implement. Congress controls the prices they can charge. Congress mandates six day deliveries. Congress prevents them instituting their own health insurance plan (which an organization the size of the USPS can easily do). Congress mandates pre-paying health and pension benefits many decades into the future (the only case of this occurring in the U.S. government, and also all but unknown in the private sector).
And then there all the Constitutionally-derived mandates for keeping unprofitable rural branch offices open, and delivering mail to every household everywhere, every mail-day. Things no private business will do.
When Congress's package of restrictions and controls essentially requires an organization to run a deficit, efficiency alone cannot turn the situation around.
Let's look at an "evil government" index to determine the "evilness" of Cuba among authoritarian regimes. A good one is the Democracy Index put out by the Conservative economics journal "The Economist".
Cuba ranks at 124, which puts it in the top 20% of authoritarian regimes, so 80% of them are "more evil". We certainly don't do any business with those 80% do we? Near the bottom of that list is our old friend Saudi Arabia, a regime we absolutely should not support right? Others in the "evil 80%" are Nigeria, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Tunisia, China, Qatar, Oman, Vietnam, and the UAE. No way we do we have diplomatic relations, do any business, or offer any support to any of those guys!
Of course six of these Evil Nations have oil, which makes everything good, correct? Well, it turns out that Cuba has useful offshore oil as well, so geology automatically promotes them to Tolerable Oil Nation, even if their much higher democracy ranking does not.
Rather that being a display of "good intentions" the message appears to me to be just an ad for Greenpeace. It is one thing to promote a message, and then take credit/blame for it - this just looks like advertising pure and simple.
Even to many who generally support the same causes as Greenpeace, they are often full of self-importance and recklessness. A very flawed messenger.
Because Earth has very unusual moon. Some good models exist to explain how it came it existence, and how the present system evolved, and can explain the isotope and elemental composition data we have for the Moon, and explain all currently discernible features of the system rather well. But they start with a massive planetoid collision on the early Earth that lofted enough material (combined from Earth and the impactor) to create that little twin planet of the Earth called Moon. Available evidence favors this model much more strongly than any contenders, and this collision event would have driven off the volatiles. It is a very difficult conclusion to escape from, and requires later acquisition of material.
Seems far-fetched? "Fetch distance" is not generally a useful tool to judge a theories plausibiity.
You are probably right about the confirmation bias. But one should be able to make that argument without hounding someone out of a profession. That is more-or-less what happened here.
No, it isn't. Watson proved himself incapable, after a good 39 years as Chancellor of the Cold Harbor Laboratory, a publicly funded scientific research institution, to continue to successfully function in that position. Like it or not, carrying out such a prominent, highly-paid job puts demands on a person to act and speak responsibly, with the object of maintaining the image of the institution who trusts him to represent it.
A programmer who can no longer the job he is paid to perform gets fired.
A scientist who can no longer the job he is paid to perform gets fired.
A Chancellor who who can no longer the job he is paid to perform, well, he becomes Chancellor Emeritus with a $375,000 salary.
NB: The claim that it is up to everyone else to debunk Watson is incorrect. As a man of science he had the responsibility of being able to support his assertion.
Sorry, affirmative action for influential wealthy white men does not wash. Nothing unfair here.
And in the words of the article he "draws a $375,000 base salary as chancellor emeritus" which according to this calculator puts him in the top 2% of Americans. This is assuming that he had no other academic income which we do not know to be the case. Heck, The Double Helix is available right now in five different formats, and so must being in some income.
Efforts to pain Watson as beleaguered and impoverished are bizarre to say the least.
You don't have to go back in history at all. Consider present day Saudi Arabia. Its society is quite alien to the experience of modern Americans, and the status of women right now is as bad, or worse, than any historical examples given here, and quasi-slavery (various forms of trafficking and forced servitude) are still practiced.
For nearly 40 years I have read TNR off and on, trying to divine why it was regarded as a thought leader among Liberal/Left/Progressives. All I could conjecture was that is was a combination of their culture writing, and left-over reputation from an earlier era before I was old enough to read it, which it was gliding on. It's articles about economics, and social and foreign policy were fairly consistently disturbing and decidedly right-wing.
Mostly right on, but the rich are largely Democrat voters and Democrat policies highly favor them...
If only that were a fact, rather than that staple of the right, a lie made up on the spot. In fact the available evidence shows that not is the truly rich heavily Republican, that they even more heavily favor Republican economic and policy prescriptions than party ID would indicate.
Sullivan (a Brit) self-identifies as a conservative, which he translates into Democrat in the US.
Wasn't always so. Sullivan used to self-identify as a Republican. Self-identifying as a Democrat today, when that party is moderate Conservative, while the Republicans have abandoned Conservatism for a race to the fringes of radical right-wing wing-nuttery is absolutely what any honest thinking Conservative would do.
It is significant, I think, that the last public turn that honest thinking Conservative William F. Buckley took before his death was to reflect with satisfaction on his role in running the radical right-wing wing-nuttery of the John Birch Society out of Republican politics. He lived to see the reincarnations of the John Birch Society take over the Republican Party in the early 1960s.
Needless to say, the implicit rebuke went unnoticed on the right.
You must live in a location without wind. A solar panel must be mounted such that it will not blow away in a 100 year wind (if you want it to survive with high probability over the 30 year panel life). This requires a very robust motorized mounting in most places. A very significant expense.
Slashdot Mirror
Icelandic is a North Germanic language. English is a West Germanic language (whose root is confusingingly called "North Sea Germanic")) with significant influence from Old Norman and a lot of minor influences). Both of their main roots, however, are Proto-Germanic.
I think it's pretty obvious that the French aren't re-coining the imported technical terms based on roots in a manner that just happens to sound essentially identical to the English. They're just simply taking the English terms and making minor spelling adjustments.
....
Although English is a Germanic language something like 3/4 of its vocabulary is Romance in origin, either borrowed from French or coined from Latin (in the case of many modern scientific terms).
The word "telephone" was coined in French, and English borrowed it. You are painting with far too broad a brush.
...
Keep in mind that English accents in actual Britain are already more diverse then several language groups. In fact one of them has been promoted a language. When my grandmother grew up in Arbroath in the 20s and 30s everyone in the County spoke English with a pronounced Scots accent. Now they speak the Scots language.
"Already"? Methinks you are reversing the history of English in Britain.
The diversity of dialects in Britain are of ancient origin. 1200 years ago, when they were still speaking Old English (a different language from Modern English for certain) there were major regional variations - particularly between southern England and the north (Northumbria and lowland Scotland).
When Old English evolved into Middle English, a new language, the Middle English spoken in the north was quite different from that spoken in the south, and as Modern English developed was well on its way to splitting off into a separate language. The Act of Union with England in 1707 put a stop to that, and from that time on (actually the process started earlier, aided by the printing press) the divergence between Scots English, and the English of southern England became steadily less divergent.
You are observing ancient linguistic divisions that are in the process of vanishing, not new divisions that are emerging.
If the Scots dialect has replaced Standard English (as it is known) in Arbroath in recent years it is the conscious revival of a dying dialect, not the development of "new language".
Also about the claim that dialects (not accents) in England are more diverse that several language groups... well, [citation needed].
Canopus belongs to the Carina constellation, notorious for two things
I do not think that means what you think it means.
Dictionary.com:
Definition 2: publicly or generally known, as for a particular trait
I think it does mean what the summary writer thought it meant. (I know correct summaries are a surprise here.)
I submit that Triangulum, the triangle, does indeed look exactly like a triangle. So that makes at least two. The image of Orion, the hunter, is also very easy to visualize.
I do not know what you are talking about regarding the "name change" of the constellation Scorpius, it has been called that for all of the modern era. Are you confusing it with the astrological sign Scorpio?
I found it odd that the writer asserted that the only thing she missed from the Northern sky was the Big Dipper. She is also missing one of the most spectacular sights in the sky, M31 (the Andromeda galaxy), and also M33 (the Triangulum galaxy) - not as spectacular, but still the third largest galaxy in the Local Group to which we belong.
Which is: there are no good technical histories of computer science.
Read TFA - he spends the majority of the article explaining in detail why Knuth is right - that there are indeed no good technical histories of computer science, and little prospect of any.
Where Haigh takes issue with Knuth is in arguing that the histories of computers and software, which are not technical histories, are nonetheless valuable in their own right, and thus Knuth's dismay at their publication is misplaced. But he otherwise agrees with Knuth has to say.
This item is simply hyping a press release from a rare metals sales firm. There is nothing to see here folks, move along.
I see a lot of "fool and his money" posts and it's nonsense or pseudoscience. And I see a lot of posts on "Fusion being 20, 30, or even 40 years away" from posters when stories on hot fusion are posted here.
So given the lack of progress in hot fusion after billions have been spent and decades wasted,...
Thermonuclear fusion has made progress - the evidence so far is that the tokamak system can be scaled up to commercial plant size. It is the only fusion technology to currently be in the running to do this. So there is progress. Unfortunately even if current plans pan out as expected it will be the most expensive energy in the world, exceeding the cost of every means of energy production currently in use (and some of them will be getting still cheaper in the mean time).
if a low cost fusion alternative can be found then it should be researched. After all what do you have to lose?
...
But given that the payoff for a relatively minor amount of funding is so massive, harsh criticism for research into the phenomenon is counterproductive. It should in fact be encouraged by anyone who considers themselves a person who supports clean energy.
Nothing wrong with investing effort in long-shot ideas, and questionable 'anomalies'. That definitely should go on. But there is a huge difference between legitimate scientific research, which requires well designed experiments with high quality controls, openness, peer review, providing the means to reproduce results, etc. and these claimed "trade secret" scams that share none of the traits of legitimate research, but are trolling for 'investors'.
Not all people working in this field are evident scamsters. There scores of researchers working in this area for decades - with no convincing results to show for it. The fact that there seems to be a mutual exclusion between well designed experiments and positive results suggest that this is a social phenomenon of marginal researchers finding something to do, not a scientific one.
Final point: we are still just looking for convincing evidence that some low energy reaction phenomenon actually exists. There is no reason to suppose that even if it does, we are looking at a promising new source of energy. That is a pitch line for someone selling snake oil.
... I'm hard pressed to believe that there is an advantage for colorblindness that would have been selected for in the earliest mammals.
There didn't have to be an advantage for partial colorblindness (they were never totally colorblind), there just doesn't have to be any penalty for the trait to be lost. Same with the inability of some mammals to synthesize vitamin C, no particular advantage to losing it, but with a vitamin C rich diet there was no penalty either and so it could get lost over time. Color vision only works in bright light. Mammals spent a lot of their early evolutionary history as nocturnal creatures, and so could lose this trait without penalty. In fact it appears there were multiple function S cone loss events in the mammalian line, not just one (genomics gives us powerful insights into this today). The article does point out though that "the fact that these gene mutations have spread throughout the populations allows the possibility that the loss of S cones may in some way enhance visual fitness". It is entirely possible that processing of images in dim light could be better optimized through evolution with the loss of the unneeded bright-light color vision baggage.
Go to a modern well funded post office some time. They're incredibly efficient.
huh?
perhaps you live on a different world as I, but "efficient" businesses do not lose 1.9B USD every three months.
unfortunately, history has shown for at least 2500 hundred years that government bureaucracies always devolve into political quagmires, where empire building and ass-kissing trump sound business practices.
If you had actually bothered to read the article you linked to, you would have noticed that Congress is preventing them from taking cost savings measures the USPS wishes to implement. Congress controls the prices they can charge. Congress mandates six day deliveries. Congress prevents them instituting their own health insurance plan (which an organization the size of the USPS can easily do). Congress mandates pre-paying health and pension benefits many decades into the future (the only case of this occurring in the U.S. government, and also all but unknown in the private sector).
And then there all the Constitutionally-derived mandates for keeping unprofitable rural branch offices open, and delivering mail to every household everywhere, every mail-day. Things no private business will do.
When Congress's package of restrictions and controls essentially requires an organization to run a deficit, efficiency alone cannot turn the situation around.
Let's look at an "evil government" index to determine the "evilness" of Cuba among authoritarian regimes. A good one is the Democracy Index put out by the Conservative economics journal "The Economist".
Cuba ranks at 124, which puts it in the top 20% of authoritarian regimes, so 80% of them are "more evil". We certainly don't do any business with those 80% do we? Near the bottom of that list is our old friend Saudi Arabia, a regime we absolutely should not support right? Others in the "evil 80%" are Nigeria, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Tunisia, China, Qatar, Oman, Vietnam, and the UAE. No way we do we have diplomatic relations, do any business, or offer any support to any of those guys!
Of course six of these Evil Nations have oil, which makes everything good, correct? Well, it turns out that Cuba has useful offshore oil as well, so geology automatically promotes them to Tolerable Oil Nation, even if their much higher democracy ranking does not.
Especially if "Do Not Track" is set to on - why don't they limit the data to send back?
You have misunderstood what "Do Not Track" means.
No, I don't think he did. He was suggesting that browsers truly act on that option selection in a useful way. You misunderstood his post.
Rather that being a display of "good intentions" the message appears to me to be just an ad for Greenpeace. It is one thing to promote a message, and then take credit/blame for it - this just looks like advertising pure and simple.
Even to many who generally support the same causes as Greenpeace, they are often full of self-importance and recklessness. A very flawed messenger.
Eastasia, not Eurasia.
The "online harassment" probably only exists in her head. The guy is a Nobel, that alone guarantees him enough tail for a lifetime.
If he believes that it does then that would be ready explanation for harassment.
Because Earth has very unusual moon. Some good models exist to explain how it came it existence, and how the present system evolved, and can explain the isotope and elemental composition data we have for the Moon, and explain all currently discernible features of the system rather well. But they start with a massive planetoid collision on the early Earth that lofted enough material (combined from Earth and the impactor) to create that little twin planet of the Earth called Moon. Available evidence favors this model much more strongly than any contenders, and this collision event would have driven off the volatiles. It is a very difficult conclusion to escape from, and requires later acquisition of material.
Seems far-fetched? "Fetch distance" is not generally a useful tool to judge a theories plausibiity.
Some on with mod points please mod Calvar up. He has it exactly correct.
You are probably right about the confirmation bias. But one should be able to make that argument without hounding someone out of a profession. That is more-or-less what happened here.
No, it isn't. Watson proved himself incapable, after a good 39 years as Chancellor of the Cold Harbor Laboratory, a publicly funded scientific research institution, to continue to successfully function in that position. Like it or not, carrying out such a prominent, highly-paid job puts demands on a person to act and speak responsibly, with the object of maintaining the image of the institution who trusts him to represent it.
A programmer who can no longer the job he is paid to perform gets fired.
A scientist who can no longer the job he is paid to perform gets fired.
A Chancellor who who can no longer the job he is paid to perform, well, he becomes Chancellor Emeritus with a $375,000 salary.
NB: The claim that it is up to everyone else to debunk Watson is incorrect. As a man of science he had the responsibility of being able to support his assertion.
Sorry, affirmative action for influential wealthy white men does not wash. Nothing unfair here.
And in the words of the article he "draws a $375,000 base salary as chancellor emeritus" which according to this calculator puts him in the top 2% of Americans. This is assuming that he had no other academic income which we do not know to be the case. Heck, The Double Helix is available right now in five different formats, and so must being in some income.
Efforts to pain Watson as beleaguered and impoverished are bizarre to say the least.
And let's not forget the downfall of the Roman empire included the introduction of homosexuality.
Odd. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire seems to correlate far more closely in time with the adoption of a homophobic religion.
You don't have to go back in history at all. Consider present day Saudi Arabia. Its society is quite alien to the experience of modern Americans, and the status of women right now is as bad, or worse, than any historical examples given here, and quasi-slavery (various forms of trafficking and forced servitude) are still practiced.
1990s of course.
Here, here!
For nearly 40 years I have read TNR off and on, trying to divine why it was regarded as a thought leader among Liberal/Left/Progressives. All I could conjecture was that is was a combination of their culture writing, and left-over reputation from an earlier era before I was old enough to read it, which it was gliding on. It's articles about economics, and social and foreign policy were fairly consistently disturbing and decidedly right-wing.
Mostly right on, but the rich are largely Democrat voters and Democrat policies highly favor them...
If only that were a fact, rather than that staple of the right, a lie made up on the spot. In fact the available evidence shows that not is the truly rich heavily Republican, that they even more heavily favor Republican economic and policy prescriptions than party ID would indicate.
Sullivan (a Brit) self-identifies as a conservative, which he translates into Democrat in the US.
Wasn't always so. Sullivan used to self-identify as a Republican. Self-identifying as a Democrat today, when that party is moderate Conservative, while the Republicans have abandoned Conservatism for a race to the fringes of radical right-wing wing-nuttery is absolutely what any honest thinking Conservative would do.
It is significant, I think, that the last public turn that honest thinking Conservative William F. Buckley took before his death was to reflect with satisfaction on his role in running the radical right-wing wing-nuttery of the John Birch Society out of Republican politics. He lived to see the reincarnations of the John Birch Society take over the Republican Party in the early 1960s.
Needless to say, the implicit rebuke went unnoticed on the right.
You must live in a location without wind. A solar panel must be mounted such that it will not blow away in a 100 year wind (if you want it to survive with high probability over the 30 year panel life). This requires a very robust motorized mounting in most places. A very significant expense.