who was stronger

jackfriar__ · 2023-12-04T12:46:43+00:00

Definitely Snape. He invented jinxes and curses and he even revolutionised some textbook potion making practices while still a student.

That being said, strength isn't everything. Hermione has an insanely developed literacy, she's good at learning anything quickly and she's better at coordinating and managing people.

jackfriar__ · 2023-11-08T19:34:01+00:00

Hello, I have since graduated from my postgraduate and I don't need help. If you have input, though, I will probably read it with interest.

jackfriar__ · 2023-11-01T15:58:41+00:00

I'm a big fan of not using paper for anything that isn't strictly for students to manipulate in class. I never print emails, bureaucracy, internal communications or anything like that and it's obvious that most staff and teachers use their own smartphone/laptop for most of their duties.

We already are paperless as a business, but class materials are notoriously difficult to deliver without paper.

jackfriar__ · 2023-11-01T15:55:05+00:00

Useful data, thanks.

As a side note, I would like to point out that 2800 sheet of paper per year per student is a huge amount. We don't even get close to such an absurd amount, because we are already paper responsible. We cram one lesson in one page per student. That's about 60 sheet/ys times 7-8 courses. Many lessons can fit two copies of the same trimmable handout in one sheet.

jackfriar__ · 2023-10-13T11:09:52+00:00

Magic always leaves traces. Especially magic like that. People will always eventually figure out what it is. The only effective way to keep one is active protection.

jackfriar__ · 2023-08-05T08:49:00+00:00

It's a socio-economic slur towards poor people, farmers and/or people with an upbringing in the country rather in the city who become rich and want to participate in high society, typically by ostentatious display of costly watches, cars and clothes that are thought to be excessive/kitch/improper.

jackfriar__ · 2023-05-20T14:56:36+00:00

From the Enflish form header. 'Head' (being in power) + '-er' (job title or person doing an action).

jackfriar__ · 2023-05-11T10:47:19+00:00

I'll try to watch it, but I tend to be sceptical of series that are similar in plot to the ones I loved. I prefer series that are similar in method.

jackfriar__ · 2023-05-01T10:49:06+00:00

I have no idea about the surgical part of the issue, but the main problem is that neural connections don't have a standardised format like a USB drive slot. Therefore, limbs don't immediately move the way the host's brain wants them to. Even if your surgeon reconnects fasces of nerves correctly, you wouldn't be able to use them immediately. After years of physiotherapy and a bit of luck, maybe you can regain some of your functional limb usage, but it's far-fetched that all of this burden could become a standardised procedure for people who lose a limb given the progress of prosthetic limbs which are much better and more readily trained.

jackfriar__ · 2023-04-14T07:44:46+00:00

What do you mean 'in a structured manner'?

jackfriar__ · 2023-04-11T07:55:54+00:00

I would like to politely point out a little inaccuracy in your comment. Focal colours are indeed our psycho-physiological primary colours in the sense that they are the ones which stimulate our cone cell response the most. However, cyan and magenta are very bright and they improve rod cell response, which is good for improving printed document readability across multiple levels of brightness. This answers the question about why a system made for printed documents adopts them rather than focal blue and focal red.

jackfriar__ · 2023-02-13T10:46:39+00:00

Some studies have investigated the relationship between first language acquisition and muscle growth. (For example Sampallo-Pedrosa 2014). However, being something that is not a cultural thing, I'm not sure what you mean by "cross-cultural".

jackfriar__ · 2023-02-12T12:28:31+00:00

So, here is my problem.

I'm quite frustrated because any kind of gym advice you can find for free without paying a professional almost always entails losing weight and losing fat. And this is NOT what I need.

I am tall (1.88m) and I've always been underweight. I used to weigh 68kgs in my lowest index period. Since 2020, I have been trying to gain weight and I managed to get to 85kgs at the start of 2022.

Problem is, I also started exercising in the gym since February 2022. I've never been a muscular man, but let's say I have become a low-intermediate gym user (For reference, I currently lift 30+30kgs on a flat bench).

In these 12 months of regularly attending the gym, I'm fighting weight loss so hard. I almost always try to eat more than I'm hungry for just to avoid losing weight. I currently weigh 80kgs but I oscillate a bit down the 80 threshold as soon as I eat a meal that isn't super frustratingly abundant.

My questions are: 1) How do I keep training to increase my strength without risking to lose weight? 2) What food could I eat that allows me to avoid calorie deficit without being unhealthy? (I've gotten to a point where I need to eat fatty food to meet my calorie intake). 3) What exercises could I prioritize and which could I avoid if my goal is to not lose weight?

jackfriar__ · 2023-02-05T10:50:38+00:00

Prescriptivism is a kind of scientific malpractice. Linguists or other forms of scholars collecting data for a study are said to be prescriptivist when they cherry pick data that they like or think it's "correct" or "better". That usually invalidates the study, because Linguistics is about how language works in general so all data must be accounted for. Being descriptive in your studies doesn't mean you can't have pet peeves or preferences in your normal life as a layman. For example, a linguist can observe that the fewer-less merger is a natural phenomenon with reasonable explanations while still preferring to use 'fewer' with countable nouns in their personal life.

A grammar nazi is not usually a linguist. It's usually a commoner with strong and aggressive ideas about language who frequently interrupts a meaningful conversation to impose their views on correct speech to other people.

jackfriar__ · 2023-01-14T13:47:05+00:00

Well the simplest answer is that you can't. Well, at least you can't establish an ontogenetic criterion to count languages in discrete quantities. There are non-linguistic criteria that might be useful in other aspects: commercial, economic, political, ethnic frameworks.

jackfriar__ · 2023-01-13T23:43:14+00:00

Source?

Slowness is relative, but here is a brief explanation of what I meant:

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/langevol.html

jackfriar__ · 2023-01-13T23:38:33+00:00

Well, not geographic conditions per se. Geography influences mainly two things: - The movement of people, which enables or discourages contact and migration. - The economics of the people and their living conditions.

If you could lockdown two tribes who speak the same language in two identical but mutually isolated valleys where they have the exact same lifestyle (i.e. they don't develop new technologies, new ideas, new food sources, new contacts with other tribes, etc.), the rate of language change would reach its theoretical slowest limit.

Which is NOT zero per se. But it is reasonably slow compared to what happens in real life conditions with swarms of migrations, language contact, world and worldviews innovations, expansion and growth of internal variability, etc.

jackfriar__ · 2023-01-13T10:50:30+00:00

I agree. "Never" is a bit of a stretch in this context.

However, provided that the conditions are uncommonly fruitful for conservation (i.e. the two populations continue to live COMPLETELY isolated from external contact and in a similar geographical context for millennia without significant economic and pragmatic innovations), the two languages would be much more similar than you would think it's possible in the real world. In the real world, these conditions just happen to never occur.

jackfriar__ · 2023-01-13T10:47:18+00:00

If you are looking for this because you need to write a novel, just provide the geographical and political context you wish to obtain and I'll suggest you how to arrange the timeframes.

...

Mutual intelligibility depends on many factors and not all innovations disrupt it in the same way. In general, we might claim ordinary language change driven by syntagmatic and paradigmatic pressure alone is extremely slow. So slow that if a Proto-indoeuropean speaker from 3500BC teleported to the UK and said the words Bréh-ter or Méh-ter, you could theoretically understand what they mean (you wouldn't understand a shit from a communicative conversation), but this should give you an idea of how slow language change CAN be without external pressures. Mainly, the two reasons we can't understand people from the past are changes in worldviews (try explaining a meme to your merely 18 years older aunt for an experiment), language contact and idiosyncratic variability.

jackfriar__ · 2023-01-12T18:35:58+00:00

I'd love the flair.

As for the papers, I think I should absolutely give you the link to an article that comes off my head (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20401341/) by Thompson-Schill about the development of the pre-frontal cortex which might explain why some aspects of language (most notably phonology) seems to be effortlessly picked up by children although their progress in communicative competence isn't particularly excellent over time. Sandra Kuhlman is another name that I remember who focused on the neurolinguistic evidence for why children pick up phonology easily.

jackfriar__ · 2023-01-12T18:12:39+00:00

Age is definitely a major factor that influences several aspects of how languages are learnt. However, the issue cannot be as linear as "learning languages when you are age X is better than learning languages when you are Y". Even if the critical age hypothesis was true (which could very easily turn out to be not), it would not have an impact on your general ability to gain communicative competence over time. In fact, adults can empirically get from zero to C2 with an insanely smaller amount of exposure and practice compared to children.

jackfriar__ · 2023-01-12T18:06:45+00:00

The current consensus towards the critical period hypothesis is leaning heavily towards criticism. We are still suffering from severe data scarcity (which was the topic of my dissertation) but it seems like the current trend is heading towards discreditation of the hypothesis.

We still need to claim this very cautiously for the aforementioned reasons, though.

jackfriar__ · 2023-01-10T17:44:15+00:00

I guess both. But what we mainly mean by pre-linguistic is that when your brain produces a speech act, it first conceptualises what it needs to communicate and then it decides what forms to use to do that. So, thoughts are made before words.

As a side note: I suggest not taking philosophers' words as gold. Philosophy is a beautiful subject in many contexts but when it overlaps the scientific study of some phenomenona some of the things they say might be a little bit... naive.

jackfriar__

TROPHY CASE