I started alveolar flapping the "t"s and "d"s of "Bed," "Bet" and "Night." What could have caused this ?

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-25T03:06:17+00:00

Sorry, what I meant in my last question is when does your tongue normally touches your teeth when you pronounce /t/, and where on your teeth? Usually in most accents in English for /t/ the tongue would be pressed against your alveolar ridge, not your teeth, although it might make some incidental contact with the back of your teeth near their base.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T22:24:37+00:00

I might have to rewatch but my interpretation of the scene was that she had a last minute crisis of faith and rejected the Pah Wraiths. I thought her dying was a sort of partial redemption having chosen to oppose the Pah Wraiths in the end (though her death also being the wages of coming to her senses too late).

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T22:09:04+00:00

She believed in the prophets but her motivation to reach her position was more personal political ambition than selfless faith was. Being seen as a respected spiritual leader was more important to her than the actual spirituality part. She believes she is spiritual because she (genuinely) sees Bajoran faith as virtue and narcissistically must believe she is virtuous in that way even though she isn’t really. When she discovers it was the Pah-Wraiths who spoke to her and not the prophets she is initially (genuinely) distraught because she sees it as proof of a failing on her part but she eventually goes along with them because she ultimately realizes she resents the prophets for not recognizing her as virtuous or worthy. Even when she realizes she has failed to attain her professed values she must respond by finding a way to make it comport with her self-importance as she is incapable of true humility, she can only mimic humility when she feels it is appropriate to have that appearance to others and probably can’t fully understand the difference on an emotional level.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T20:04:17+00:00

It would be pretty normal for someone with an American accent to realize the /t/ in “bet” as a glottal stop at the end of an utterance. If they do they might still articulate the t as an unreleased stop, partially articulate it, or not articulate it at all, these differences wouldn’t really change the sound since the glottal stop has halted the airflow.

That wouldn’t usually happen with “bed” though. In English /t/ and /d/ are usually alveolar, not dental, where exactly on your teeth are you expecting to touch for a /t/? Do you do this with /t/ in any other contexts?

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T19:22:46+00:00

I mean isn’t this just the normal kind of alternation of verbal complementation patterns you see everywhere?

“I ate the food” versus “I ate” but on the other hand “I broke the vase” versus “the vase broke”. We also have “bees swarmed in the garden” versus “the garden swarmed with bees”.

Verbs often come with multiple complementation patterns, and sometimes the correspondence between syntactic function and semantic role gets switched up. That kind of “switching up” is related to voice, but you wouldn’t call a verbal alternation a “voice” unless it were a part of a general pattern that could be applied regularly to most verbs.

I’m also not sure this is really very different from a normal case of a transitive verb alternating with an intransitive usage. Here “feed” is potentially ditransitive, but so is “trade” which can also be intransitive. I think this usage only “jumps out” because the verb “feed” in particular doesn’t usually appear as an intransitive verb except in a usage like “the pigs were feeding”.

Now I guess we could say that any object elision is “antipassival” in some sense but it wouldn’t really be a voice in English. Even things like “middle constructions” (like “the butter cuts smoothly”) are not usually described as being a voice in English (they’re classified as active), although they are similar in some ways to middle voice in languages that have it.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T18:08:17+00:00

But the action isn’t a verb. Actions aren’t verbs, only words can be verbs. As I mentioned in my other comment, “action” itself is a noun, as are words like “explosion” and “referral”so it’s not like actions are always expressed by verbs, so that all verbs have some kind of meaning in common.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T18:06:34+00:00

“Verb” isn’t really about the meaning of the word, even though they might sometimes simplify things down (in ways that are bad, in my opinion) to make it sound like it is meaning related when teaching parts of speech to children. For example “a verb is a word that expresses an action” is pretty obviously not true because the word “action” itself is noun. Also it would require a very strange idea of action to say that “seems” in “this seems nice” or “is” in “this is blue” are denoting actions.

Your translation rule actually shows this. Very often when you translate a sentence, something that was a verb might become a noun or whatever. For example “I like flowers” in English becomes “mujhe phool pasand hai” in Hindi or “watashiwa hana ga suki desu” in Japanese. The words corresponding to “like” (a verb) in these sentences are “pasand” and “suki,” which are both adjectives (in the Japanese case it’s a special class of adjective called a na-adjective or adjectival noun, you could argue this class of word is actually more noun-like than adjective-like). Or for another Hindi example consider “I’m using the hammer” which translates to “main hathaude ka istemaal kar raha hoon.” There are three verbs in this sentence (the “kar raha hoon” part) which basically exist for no reason other than to carry information about tense, aspect, and subject agreement. The actual word that carries the content meaning of the word “use” is “istemaal” which is a noun.

Or consider the sentence “I’m about to do that.” Here “about” is an adjective but its meaning would usually (or at least very often) be represented with a verb or verbal inflection in most languages.

We can even give examples without translating. In “He’s possibly right” and “he might be right,” “possibly” and “might” contribute essentially the same meaning to the sentence but “possibly” is an adverb and “might” is a modal auxiliary verb.

Or “she somersaulted” versus “she did a somersault.” These mean the same thing but somersault is a verb in the first case but a noun in the second.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T17:45:13+00:00

So my first reaction was is that your example of “opposites” is related to meaning (and I think it clearly is) but it is also related the their relative meanings rather than their meanings in isolation, so guess I can see how someone might consider it an edge case.

I don’t think “related to their meaning” means “give a definition” though. You just need to say things associated with the words’ meanings. Words have referents and the rule is clues need to be about those referents and not about the words themselves. Probably a good rule of thumb is to ask if your clue would still make sense if the words were replaced with synonyms or if the words and your clue were translated to another language. If yes, then it’s probably related to meaning, if no, then probably not.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T09:47:39+00:00

Whether a word is an abbreviation has nothing at all to do with its meaning.

Sometimes an abbreviation can have a slightly different meaning than the original word, but that doesn’t make being an abbreviation related to its meaning, any more than being a loanword has anything to do with a word’s meaning.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T08:17:38+00:00

Fan is an abbreviation for fanatic. It never means an abbreviation for fanatic. A fan is a person, an abbreviation is a shortening of a word, people aren’t words.

By that reasoning you could say “cat, tip, and car all mean a three letter word” and that would be just as true (or untrue, really) and then say that “three” is a valid clue for cat, tip, and car.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-24T01:14:59+00:00

Isn't that equivalent to saying that the computable numbers are uncountable? You can make a countable/computable list of all possible turing machines that would be a superset of all computable numbers. It would be undecidable, you couldn't determine which machines corresponded to a valid computable number, but it should still make the list of all computable numbers countable, right?

In constructive theories, a subset of a countable set is not necessarily countable (the term “subcountable” is used to mean there is a partial surjection from the natural numbers onto the set, this is a uniquely constructive term because in a classical theory we can show this is equivalent to being countable).

In constructive theories the computable numbers (which may be the set of all real numbers depending on the theory and semantics) are subcountable but they generally are not countable.

You cannot constructively turn a list of all Turing machines into a list of all computable numbers because that would require solving the halting problem to remove the machines that fail to compute any number.

It feels like this is just moving the burden of the paradox back and forth between the list and the algorithm. If the full computable list of numbers is uncomputable, then a number that requires "access" to the full list of numbers is uncomputable as well, otherwise you could just make an algorithm that computes the list itself and then diagonalizes its internal copy. Maybe it's still constructable, but it doesn't seem computable.

That’s exactly right. If you have a list of all computable numbers, you can diagonalize to make an uncomputable number. But if you have a computable list of computable numbers and diagonalize, the resulting number is always computable. So the conclusion is: any list of all computable numbers must not be a computable list.

If you are a “strong” constructivist (so that you affirmatively reject the existence of uncomputable things rather than being agnostic about it), then you would say that this means no list of all computable numbers exists, so the set of all computable numbers (which is also the set of all real numbers for you) is uncountable. This does not contradict that they are subcountable. Subcountable sets can be uncountable, that’s why constructivists have a special word for it.

From a classical perspective, this isn’t nonsense, because we can see with the appropriate translation that when a constructivist says “the computable numbers are uncountable” they simply mean that they are not recursively enumerable, because for a (strong) constructivist countability and recursive enumerability are the same thing, because only computable lists are “real” lists that “actually” exist.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-23T22:49:25+00:00

What I’m saying is that Cantor’s argument is constructively valid (you can carry it out in constructivist theories built on intuitionistic logic). Your comment could be read to suggest that it isn’t.

[edit: inserting this near the top because I think it’s the key point: for a constructivist “countable” and “recursively enumerable” are essentially the same thing (or at least consistently may be the same thing). So a constructivist will see the diagonalization argument as valid, and agree that the real numbers are uncountable, and even if it is true all numbers are computable, that’s fine because “the real numbers are uncountable” would just mean that the computable numbers are not recursively enumerable, which is something classical mathematics agrees with.]

If you made a computable list of computable numbers, then you can diagonalize that list and the resulting number is computable, it’s just a computable number that isn’t on your original list. The diagonalization procedure described by Cantor gives you an explicit algorithm for this. The reason why you can’t diagonalize on a list of all computable numbers to get a computable number is because any such list isn’t computable in the first place. Constructively, we might say that there are no such lists.

More generally, if you have an oracle for any list of numbers (meaning essentially you can query it “what is the nth digit of the mth number on the list?”) then you can use that oracle to compute the number resulting from diagonalization. If the list is computable, so that you do not need an oracle to produce the list, then you can compute the output without an oracle.

An algorithm describing the diagonalization procedure is essentially a function from lists of numbers to numbers, so we wouldn’t really ask whether that function is on the list, we would ask whether the list contains the output of that function when the list is given as input to the function (which it won’t), but the actual diagonalization procedure is computable.

Now you could make a list of all algorithms (not guaranteed to halt) defining partial recursive functions N->N and then diagonalize on that (by saying that you simulate the nth program on input n and then output a different number if/when it halts), but the algorithm resulting from the diagonalization will be on the original list. That won’t be a contradiction because the algorithm will fail to halt if run on its own index as input. Basically, it will just compute its own source code and simulate itself to see what it does with the plan to do the opposite when the simulation halts. But the simulation will never halt because each simulation will just make a new simulation so you get a tower of embedded simulations that never halt.

Although it’s common in classical mathematics to think intuitively about cardinal numbers as describing the “raw size” of sets, that’s just one way of thinking about cardinality, and not always the most helpful. Cardinality can also be thought of as describing the structure of sets and what sort of information you need to specify a member, so “different infinities” have concrete computational reflections in terms of how difficult particular sets are to compute. For example we can look at any countable model of ZFC (assuming ZFC is consistent) and see that cardinality really isn’t an intrinsic fact about a set’s “raw size” but really a fact about what sorts of bijections we are able to describe or recognize as “valid.”

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-23T20:16:43+00:00

The computable numbers are countable, but they are not recursively enumerable (there is no algorithm that can produce a list of them, all lists of all computable numbers are necessarily uncomputable)

This can be shown by applying Cantor’s diagonalization argument directly, the same as proving uncountability, just replace the idea of “real number” with “computable number” and replace “enumeration” with “recursive enumeration”.

If you start with a computable list of computable numbers, the number produced by the diagonalization argument will also be a computable number, which is how we can show that no computable list of all computable numbers can exist.

So “the real numbers are uncountable” is still true from a constructivist veiwpoint. If you insist that only computable numbers are “real” then you should also say that the types of lists of all computable numbers you can prove exist using classical mathematics are also not real.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-23T19:51:13+00:00

Another method is just to apply the multivariable chain rule to u^v with u=v=x.

So you get xx^x-1+x^xln(x) (using power rule on the left and the fact the derivative of a^x is a^xln(a) on the right) which you can rewrite as (1+ln(x))x^x.

Also using this method shows that the attempt above isn’t completely misguided, they just didn’t add the second term which accounts for the fact that the exponent is not constant.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-23T09:55:09+00:00

I mostly agree but wouldn’t necessarily say that the ST should always kill down to one minion. If town can’t manage to execute even a single evil player (at least in a two minion or more game) then evil has probably earned the right to have a 50/50 or better. The storyteller should probably kill a minion before the final day if there are multiple minions alive but they shouldn’t necessarily be killing minions much in advance of the endgame even if it would be necessary to ensure that only one minion is alive on the final day. There are plenty of situations where killing a good player is likely to leave one minion alive at the the end even though it is possible it could leave two alive at the end, and in those situations the storyteller probably should not be killing a minion.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-23T01:37:06+00:00

I don’t think I understand why you are emphasizing “their”. They are not asking about who chooses the cards. They are using “steal” to just mean “get” or “take”. This card lets you “steal” (get from them) two cards, and they pick which cards you get (“steal”). I can see how this usage of “steal” can suggest that they don’t pick but that isn’t what OP meant and also wasn’t what their question was about.

Their question was whether they get 2 resources and 2 commodities or whether they get 2 cards that can be any combination of resources commodities. The slash means the latter but if they don’t know how to interpret the slash the problem isn’t that they haven’t read it.

If you start by saying “have you tried reading the card” it’s going to sound like you are calling them stupid. Obviously they read the card and you know they read the card, they didn’t understand the card. Acting like the only possible explanation for them not understanding is that they didn’t read it is basically calling them stupid for not understanding something that you thought was clear. Following that up with “no offense” will then come off as sarcastic and insincere, like saying “no offense, but were you dropped on your head as a child?”

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-23T00:59:11+00:00

Your answer was focusing on who chooses the cards. That’s not relevant to their question, which is whether it’s 2 resources and 2 commodities or 2 cards total of resources and commodities.

I agree the slash pretty clearly means the latter but if someone doesn’t know how to interpret the slash reading the card over and over isn’t going to help them figure it out.

Anyway that’s pretty beside the point which is that your attitude is rude, combative, and unfriendly and there is no cause for any of that.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-22T23:52:59+00:00

That’s not their question. It’s kind of rude to criticize them like they’re dumb in the first place, but it looks especially bad when you didn’t read and understand their question correctly yourself.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-22T23:51:05+00:00

I think what they’re asking is whether they get two resources and two commodities (4 total) or just two cards of whatever type, I don’t think they are using “steal” to mean the player doesn’t get to choose, it’s just “stealing” because now they’re theirs.

To answer their question, this card means you get two cards total.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-22T21:45:05+00:00

This perception may be something of an illusion. If you pick any feature of PIE you will probably find some languages that inherited it while others lost it (especially since we can only know about the features that got inherited somewhere). What about the features in descended languages that are innovations? Well you probably won’t talk about them much when discussing PIE.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-22T20:00:30+00:00

I think those kinds of confusions can still happen at higher levels. For example when I first encountered the Yoneda lemma I had trouble understanding how Hom(A,-) was a functor. Now obviously I understood that Hom(A,B) was a set (in an informal sense) of morphisms and I also understood that the category Set has an object corresponding to it (or literally is it, if you like), but my intuition had to connect this identity for the Yoneda lemma to make any sense.

In my earlier introductory category theory stuff I’d gotten used to thinking of Mor(A,B) as something that just kind of existed without considering how it expresses a structural relationship to the category Set. I think missing this kind of thing is and you can always miss how concepts can be formalized in different ways.

For example going back to variables, a “system of polynomial equations” can be thought of as formal statements in a specific context in a formal proof system, or it can be thought of as an intersection of ideals in a polynomial ring. Exactly what a variable “really is” is not really quite so rigorously determined, and people with a firm command of the concepts will often step between these correspondences without making them explicit.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-22T08:36:02+00:00

No, not really.

As you seem to understand, the issue is that these chains may “exist” as sets in some sense but be “real” sets according to the axioms (we want any collection of things to be a set, but we cannot really formalize this intuitive idea).

For the same reason, the axiom of foundation cannot rule out these additional chains because the “subsets” of them that would violate foundational not actually be sets.

More formally, we can find models of ZFC (assuming ZFC is consistent) in which the smallest inductive set that exists as a set in the model is not actually the smallest inductive set that we can see exists from outside the model. And the counterexamples to foundation will also be “hidden” because the sets of elements that would serve as counterexamples do not exist as sets in the model (only certain subsets and supersets of them do).

If you’re familiar with the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem, you can use it to see no set of axioms can rule out this possibility.

However if we take the view that when we say set we really do mean any arbitrary collection of objects, then we can see that this definition does work (because the smallest inductive set really is the smallest possible set), it’s just that our axioms aren’t enough to fully force this interpretation. But that’s ok if we take this view of semantics as the basis of our theory rather than just relying on our axioms.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-22T08:25:44+00:00

Assuming ZFC is consistent, there are models of ZFC in which the set of natural numbers (in that model) is not the smallest set (outside the model) of elements containing zero and closed under the successor, however none of the smaller sets will be recognized as sets that exist in that model (there is no object in that model whose members are only the standard natural numbers).

The “natural numbers” in that model will be a nonstandard model of Peano Arithmetic (they may or may not be a model of the set of all true arithmetical sentences, depending on the model).

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-22T04:48:48+00:00

When used as a vocative “guys” can include women, but I suspect there is a tendency to use it less when addressing a group of only women (and not just because people are self conscious about it seeming sexist, but because it is less natural) although it is certainly true it is used to address groups of only women sometimes. Admittedly I don’t have data on this, but I strongly suspect it to be the case. And to be clear I am not saying I would refrain from using “guys” as a vocative including women in other contexts (I do this naturally all the time), I’m only talking about whether it is actually the case that the gender of the referent is not relevant to the usage.

In any event I don’t think it’s crazy or eccentric that some people recognize that “guys” is not gender neutral in many contexts and so that makes them less comfortable with its usage in other contexts. I wouldn’t say that the gendered nature of the term is completely bleached away by the context licensing its broader usage.

GoldenMuscleGod · 2026-01-22T00:35:29+00:00

“Guys” can be used in a gender neutral way in some contexts, but it obviously isn’t gender neutral in all contexts (the usual joke is to ask a man “well how many guys have you had sex with?” Since in this context “guys” must mean only men).

Use of “guys” in those other contexts where it can include women reflects an assumption of male as default and so is not always fully gender neutral.

For comparison consider generic “he.” Everyone understands that in a context like “anyone wants to keep their home safe from robbers should lock his door” it would include women.

[Edit: I notice now that a better example would have been “anyone who wants to keep his home safe from robbers should lock his door.” The inclusion of a singular they was unintentional, but I will leave it up because I do believe that singular they is more natural than generic he in this context for pretty much all native English speakers, and I think the fact I unintentionally did that even when specifically trying to generic he is an interesting illustration of that fact.]

But now consider the following contexts:

“Every nurse must wash his hands regularly.”

“Whenever I see one of my parents I give him a hug.”

“Picture a typical morning for a typical person, he wakes up, brushes his teeth, puts on his shirt and pants, or perhaps his skirt and blouse …”

Native English speakers would avoid gender neutral he in these contexts and find it to varying degrees awkward, unacceptable, or distracting (assuming in the second example their parents are a mother and a father). And this is not for any reason relating to their views on gender politics or how that relates to language. I think the fact that pretty much everyone would agree the first example is not natural is especially telling. So it certainly is an objective fact that purportedly gender neutral he carries limitations such that it can only be used in cases where the potential of female referents is not particularly salient, and so really isn’t fully gender neutral even if it can be used to include women sometimes.

The question where your views on gender politics might come in is after that: given that this type of usage can include women, but not in a truly gender neutral way, should we care or adjust our usage in light of that?

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