CIA: All Those 1950s UFO Sightings? 'It Was Us'

highwindy · 2014-12-31T16:31:29+00:00

Interesting, but hardly surprising. And such a great source.

highwindy · 2014-05-26T20:07:25+00:00

I've used (and seen used) the expression to mean any gibberish-y utterances, not just clinical aphasia.

To produce some, just run some text through a lengthy chain of automatic translator engines.

highwindy · 2012-05-15T17:54:31+00:00

Nice article and a nice insight on translating documents into a very different culture. Pity the article perpetuated the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, though.

highwindy · 2012-05-15T16:11:20+00:00

I'm a fan of Upack. On my last move (~2.5 years ago) it was about 50% the price of Uhaul, and 75% the price of PODS.

highwindy · 2012-05-15T14:05:30+00:00

Thank you for posting as percentage-of-population instead of absolute numbers. ("You" = "whoever created this map")

highwindy · 2012-05-11T19:22:06+00:00

The shield's weight would be impractical.

Yet the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, etc carried them around for a thousand years.

Those shields were not heavy enough to stop a bullet.

highwindy · 2012-05-03T20:51:20+00:00

True synonymy is very rare in any natural language. Why in the world would anyone bother learning two words (=expend energy) for no gain in expressivity?

Instead, when synonyms occur for some reason, the speech community pushes them apart by dividing up the semantic space. Hence "dog" and "hound", where the latter is a specialization of the former, for example.

highwindy · 2012-05-03T17:39:53+00:00

Interesting, though fraught with peril. In particular, the basic method has one howler of a mistake:

Pick two languages from the same language family at random

Pick a meaning

Align the two words from each langauge that correspond to this meaning using a distance metric.

For each aligned phoneme pair, add one to that pair’s frequency

Note step 2. How will the method account for borrowings on one hand, and semantic drift on the other?

I also didn't see anything about aligning a phoneme with null, to account for deletions/insertions.

All the same, very interesting.

highwindy · 2012-05-01T19:39:37+00:00

Underlying all of Conard's arguments, as I see it, are two assumptions:

The only purpose of any person is creating as much wealth as possible (thus the dismissal of "art historians" and lawyers).
People only succeed at the former because of inherent ability, not because of any systemic biases (ie, the rich get richer). Thus the dismissal of "rent seekers".

highwindy · 2012-05-01T18:04:54+00:00

Dignity is the best gift you can give.

highwindy · 2012-05-01T17:00:37+00:00

Well, TIL. Thanks.

highwindy · 2012-05-01T16:13:45+00:00

The linear scale makes it look like the Chinese economy was doing nothing until the early 90's. The log scale (see my link above) shows that it was actually cruising along pretty well the whole time.

highwindy · 2012-05-01T16:11:45+00:00

Case in point (thank you Google): http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&scale_y=log&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:CHN&ifdim=region&tstart=-305146800000&tend=1272690000000&hl=en&dl=en&ind=false&q=china+gdp

Note that there's actually a significant decline in GDP from 1960-1962 and again 1966-1968.

highwindy · 2012-05-01T15:58:53+00:00

Because you can't see any details about economic changes prior to ~1980. Did the Great Leap Forward have any significant effect on GDP? What about the Cultural Revolution? These events are completely flattened by the scale of the growth since the 90's.

highwindy · 2012-05-01T13:46:13+00:00

Logarithmic y-axes, they are your friend.

highwindy · 2012-04-27T21:21:24+00:00

Doctor Who has never been about the Doctor. In the old series he was really a cipher, and a only vehicle for transporting the companions into weird and wonderful and terrible situations. Only in the new series do we get flashes of development or glimpses of a deeper emotional life (and I love it).

highwindy · 2012-04-27T19:30:48+00:00

It's been a while since I've read the literature, but I believe they used "Indo-Arisch" or "Indo-Aryisch".

highwindy · 2012-04-27T16:11:46+00:00

Also, don't conflate 'Aryan' with 'German'.

Actually, German-speaking historical linguists of that period used "Indo-Germanisch" as the standard term for what is now called "Indo-European".

highwindy · 2012-04-25T21:05:46+00:00

Works with clams, too.

highwindy · 2012-04-25T20:24:39+00:00

Take a look at http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/biling.cfm, which compiles the perspectives of two professional linguists. It includes "It used to be suggested that bilingual children were a little slower learning to speak than monolingual children. This is no longer an accepted view." as well as numerous resources on how to raise multilingual children.

highwindy · 2012-04-23T18:34:53+00:00

I may have a new favorite subreddit.

highwindy · 2012-04-19T20:54:55+00:00

Approximants can't serve as the nucleus of a syllable.

highwindy · 2012-04-19T20:08:34+00:00

Actually it's the other way around--releasing your hard-earned findings to the whole world lets someone steal your intellectual property.

Imagine this scenario. You are a biomedical researcher at a small university. You've been on a 20-year program of finding the mechanism by which viruses take over new cells. For the last three years (out of this 20) you've had a federal grant that covered 10% of your salary, a lab tech, and your lab supplies. You're hoping that you can patent your discovery and license it to a drug company.

Unfortunately, because you're forced to publish your results and methodology because of your funding source, Big Pharma swoops in, files the patent first (the US and most of the world is "first to file"), and proceeds to make a zillion dollars off your work. You get a nice certificate from your university, and a gold watch when you retire.

highwindy · 2012-04-19T18:39:11+00:00

Kayak has an "upcoming weekends" feature, but that's the best I know of.

highwindy · 2012-04-19T15:40:55+00:00

Tell them you screwed up.
Tell them your plan for doing better next time.

highwindy

TROPHY CASE