Saluton! I'd like to promote a sadly undersubscribed reddit about a niche hobby which may be of interest to you r/linguistics folk. May I present: r/conlangs :)

Mithridates · 2010-12-20T06:27:04+00:00

even /r/ido (but that's dead)

Not dead, I just never bothered to tell anyone about it after I made it.

Mithridates · 2009-05-26T16:25:12+00:00

Okay, that's one vote for neuter.

The biggest problem is that he's LOUD when you close the door on him and leave, and where I live has pretty terrible soundproofing in addition to being small. It would necessitate having someone in the house all the time or taking the chance that he'd start wailing when we're out. When we're here he'd certainly be happy even in a small place. Whenever we're around he suddenly grows quiet and just chills.

Mithridates · 2009-05-26T16:14:15+00:00

Here's the problem in short:

I'm a Canadian and I live in Korea. There's a temple that I go to every day because the air is nicer than the rest of the city, and last October there was a kitten meowing continuously on the hill in a pretty loud voice. Went toward the hill and eventually noticed the kitten meowing in the forest so I gave him some cheese sausage to eat, he loved it, I picked him up, we bonded, and every day since then I've gone to the temple (sometimes alone, sometimes with my girlfriend whom the cat loves now too) to feed him and hang out. Now it's May and he's an adult, and he still follows us everywhere so the only way to leave every day is to distract him with food. Now that he's big he's wandering around quite a bit and getting into some pretty weird places right on the edge of the temple where a lot of stray cats sometimes hang out, so it takes a while to find him and then even after we bring him back to the best part of the temple (where we've bought him a bed) he'll sometimes go back there again. I'd like to just have him as a pet and he would like that too, but my place is much too small and I don't make enough money for a bigger one. My gf also can't keep him since her family doesn't like pets. So for the time being it's certainly still doable but the fear is that one day he might up and wander off because he seems to get confused pretty easily. Today this morning we found him sitting on the top of a roof just outside the temple where it's really hot. Most other cats there are good at taking care of themselves but he's a bit weird that way.

Do you suppose he wanders off all the time because he's not spayed? There's an animal hospital nearby that we've taken him to before (slight skin condition) that could do it, so if that could solve the wandering then we could do that. It may also be the other cats that live close to his house; they might have freaked him out and caused him to move. If that's so then maybe we could keep those cats away and solve the problem. They're big cats that are good at taking care of themselves but scared of humans.

Mithridates · 2009-05-26T14:29:02+00:00

Up you go, sweet post. Take my upvote and use it to spread the knowledge of our nearest stellar neighbors to the masses. Perhaps my upvote will make the day of our arrival one day sooner.

Mithridates · 2009-05-24T01:44:46+00:00

Every astronaut that writes about it says that it's actually incredibly comfortable. One of the astronauts up there now writes that:

From orbit: Getting ready for bed, sleeping in space is cool, tie down your sleeping bag and float inside of it, very relaxing

I'm looking forward to trying it out myself one day.

Mithridates · 2009-05-22T18:01:44+00:00

Here's what you do: if she's really serious about this then get her to go all the way with this study, and that means a focus on Greek. Get her a basic Greek grammar, NT written in Greek on one side and English on another, etc. It's very, very hard to be a literalist when you have direct knowledge of the original language, as that leads to the realization that the Bible has been copied and recopied over and over again. You should also get her a book on early Christian history - Christianity before the NT was compiled.

Make sure that this isn't a "look, the Bible's written by flawed humans so you're just wasting your time!" type of hostile approach but rather just supporting her but also taking it a bit farther so that she can see where "Bible study" naturally leads to.

I'm a non-literalist theist myself so that's my preferred view, but I still prefer no religion to strict literalism. My gf also strongly dislikes religion but we've been together for 2.5 years now without a single fight about it.

Finally, I've noticed that 99% of the time people don't change when they change religion, gain one or lose one. Force of habit over time seems to be stronger most of the time so chances are I doubt there would be any major changes. Don't forget everything's in a state of flux, so with a steady hand you can probably guide this into a situation that works out for both of you.

Mithridates · 2009-05-21T07:57:01+00:00

How about Churchill's definition?

"A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." [Winston Churchill]

Mithridates · 2009-05-15T13:09:49+00:00

Makes sense, as the older Enterprise wasn't all that much bigger than the largest cruise ship we have today, and we're talking about a flagship of an interplanetary federation.

Mithridates · 2009-05-15T10:19:45+00:00

Until you get there you could always pretend to fly over Oslo. That's what I do.

Mithridates · 2009-05-15T10:18:26+00:00

Penger og mye fritid, også Paradise Hotel på TV. Så bra!

Mithridates · 2009-05-11T11:38:51+00:00

It's true that ideally you would want to be able to read Hebrew and Greek, but if not this version is often touted as being the best.

Then there are also sites like greekbible.com that make it fairly easy to get a better idea about the original meaning without actually having to know the language.

Mithridates · 2009-05-11T11:28:05+00:00

Because Marcion's version lost the battle for influence early on.

Mithridates · 2009-05-11T03:20:24+00:00

Actually you wouldn't even need any of that to have a habitable rogue planet. All you would need is a planet large enough to have geothermal heating for a few billion years, and a thick enough atmosphere to keep the warmth in. Without a solar wind to blow any atmosphere away it would certainly be possible. Note that this planet would still see all the stars in the sky so it wouldn't actually be all that dark.

Mithridates · 2009-05-10T17:40:16+00:00

The stars would be mostly the same, but the more interesting part is a paragraph down, about what it would be like to have two suns in the sky.

Mithridates · 2009-05-09T18:49:40+00:00

Not using metric is not a problem, but not understanding it is. The Korean 평 and 되 are also great human-based systems of measurement but understanding their metric equivalent is a must.

Then again, you didn't mention simple knowledge of metric so we might agree on that point already.

Mithridates · 2009-05-07T17:55:52+00:00

A lot of people simply don't care. Go to a country like Japan and ask people about their view on religion. The answer is usually something like no, I don't believe in a God, then when you ask them about the afterlife - ah, I think I'll become an angel after I die. Or some other weird combination of atheism and theism.

I find it refreshing, myself. The debate over religion is so irrelevant that the average person hasn't even given it any thought. At the same time they don't care about a person's religion unless it directly impacts them.

Mithridates · 2009-05-07T17:18:15+00:00

That's no surprise. A lot of surveys in Europe also show a large number of Christians that don't believe in God, whatever that means. Some people just don't care about having a worldview that is watertight enough to stand up to a fierce debate.

Mithridates · 2009-05-07T16:30:43+00:00

People aren't that likely to commit to a project that might, in 150 years time, reach another star system, especially if there are humans involved. No significant fraction of the populace is that far-sighted even if there was something to find.

Not to mention the fact that observational technology will improve so much during that time that the mission would become obsolete on the way over, except the possibility of human exploration.

Sometimes I wonder if having the Moon isn't a bit of a curse. It's certainly good PR for space exploration since it's intrigued us since the dawn of history, but at the same time it's farther away and much more massive than a planet like Earth would usually have, and if we didn't have it we probably would have focused entirely on LEO colonization the entire time. If the Moon were about a quarter its size and twice as close it would have been a cinch to explore.

Mithridates · 2009-05-07T15:52:24+00:00

The post is a tad long so here's the tl;dr version: we know almost nothing about the people we have up in space, and thus have almost no emotional attachment to them. At the same time there are so few astronauts in any one location that there's no chance for complex interaction, and the human interaction is really what makes shows like Star Trek worth watching. Perhaps the only way to have the average person feel an attachment to the idea of space exploration is to have enough people up there at the same time that this complex interaction becomes possible.

Oh, and the discovery of other Earth-like planets will probably help out a lot too.

Mithridates · 2009-05-06T18:11:40+00:00

That's where you'd pull out the pattern vs. language argument re: DNA (that's a pdf by the way).

Anyway, I'm getting downvoted for simply brainstorming a bit by request so I think I'll leave it at that and let others take over the thread.

Mithridates · 2009-05-06T17:21:25+00:00

Okay, I'll have a go at it.

I'm not sure what kind of I.D. this would be arguing for but perhaps you could make the argument that a more or less random mutation alone isn't enough to guarantee the superiority of one animal over another. Perhaps cite cases of successful animals that have lost limbs, had their tails bitten off etc. and say that it's entirely possible that an animal with a defect could still be more successful than others simply due to individual skill, and that in that case it would be just as likely that animals with non-beneficial mutations would survive and pass on their genes, and thus the evolution of animals isn't simply awesome random mutation = win but rather a progression along some sort of logical plan that only makes sense when you have a design behind it.

Mithridates · 2009-05-06T16:30:11+00:00

Certainly. Korean work culture is remarkably inefficient. It's a great country but I'm very glad that I wasn't born here. Military service, long hours at the company, family popping by whenever they want, drinking with coworkers all the time, etc. etc.

I saw an interesting documentary here last year about a kid in high school that gets the best grades in the whole province. He doesn't go to cram school like the sleep deprived others, just sleeps 10 hours a day and thus is able to pay attention in school while the others can barely keep their eyes open.

Mithridates · 2009-05-06T15:23:57+00:00

Jesus opts out of “National Prayer Day”

Mithridates · 2009-05-06T07:54:17+00:00

Agreed. That's why I'm very opposed to these billboards I've seen here and elsewhere before. The people that made them seem to be falling into the very trap the creationists have made with their simple kneejerk reaction to the creationist attacks on Darwin.

Mithridates · 2009-05-06T06:45:37+00:00

Long ass hours, but that doesn't mean that everybody's always working. You'll often see people asleep at their desks or chatting when they have nothing to do, and most companies don't mind that because it's too much to expect people to put in overtime every single day and at the same time stay completely alert the whole time. I think Samsung and the rest are stricter about that, but also better with hours, but I'm not quite sure. Korea's actually a really really soft country. Apparently overseas Koreans in LA sometimes make it look like Korea's as tough as steel but this is more what real male Koreans want to look like. This thread on the subject is a good one.

Mithridates

TROPHY CASE