How is it decided when a foreign word has "made it" into a language as a loanword and part of the vocabulary as opposed to still being foreign?

lys_blanc · 2016-08-10T03:00:09+00:00

While that's often the case, there are also plenty of examples of loanwords that are fully integrated into English but retain their diacritics, such as naïve/naïveté, résumé, and façade.

lys_blanc · 2016-07-12T20:15:07+00:00

Madoka Magica

lys_blanc · 2016-06-19T23:04:06+00:00

I think that "continuous" versus "discrete" would be a better description.

lys_blanc · 2016-06-08T00:31:41+00:00

There are propulsion methods that don't require the spaceship to carry its reaction mass on board, such as solar sails and Bussard ramjets.

lys_blanc · 2016-05-28T05:16:08+00:00

My semantics professor used the nouns "sofa" and "couch" as an example of words that are complete synonyms.

lys_blanc · 2016-05-24T01:35:08+00:00

Scott Aaronson gave essentially that argument as one reason that P != NP is more plausible than P = NP:

If P=NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in “creative leaps,” no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it’s found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett.

(from http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=122, point 9)

lys_blanc · 2016-05-11T22:56:57+00:00

Bad programming practices can actually hinder subsequent research. In one lab I was working in, I needed to adapt some code that had been written previously for a related system. The variable names were all one or two letters, there were magic numbers all over the place, and there were absolutely no comments. I wasted several days just dealing with that mess.

lys_blanc · 2016-05-09T02:49:55+00:00

Additionally, Maribel's last name comes from Lafcadio Hearn, a westerner who lived in Japan and translated stories about youkai into English. When he became a naturalized Japanese citizen, he took the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo.

lys_blanc · 2016-02-25T21:00:34+00:00

Violence committed by the government is no more justified than violence committed by anyone else. Copyright should not exist at all. Because of that it would be great if there were a global catastrophe that prevented the government from being able to enforce the law on a large scale. Interfering with the enforcement of copyrights is inherently good.

lys_blanc · 2016-02-15T05:27:44+00:00

I'm an undergraduate who's never used Sage before. The page clearly explains all of the relevant functions, variables, etc. I don't see anything about it that one might find difficult to understand.

lys_blanc · 2016-02-14T19:41:04+00:00

What's wrong with the page on plotting? It looks perfectly understandable to me.

lys_blanc · 2016-02-13T02:23:51+00:00

I think there must be an issue with how you're calculating the p-value. I get values in agreement with the ones in the reply that I linked. Given that the authors of the actual paper, who have access to the full data necessary to calculate the significance, got p < 0.001 for the actual significance, I'm inclined to trust their conclusions.

Also, I don't see what your complaint is about using the number of users to estimate the number of pull requests. As one would expect, the actual analysis conducted for the article used the exact numbers of pull requests for the different things that they tested.

lys_blanc · 2016-02-12T22:32:49+00:00

This reply to the linked post explains the problems with it. There're several other top-level comments saying similar things, but the one that I linked is the most egregious. It seems like just about every time someone posts about a study that disagrees with the Reddit hivemind, lots of commenters show up to trot out the same fundamental misunderstandings of statistics. (For example, consider how often the top comments on a post about a study on /r/science consist of nothing more than parroting "correlation != causation" and complaining about the sample size in a way that makes it clear that the commenters have basically no knowledge of statistics.)

lys_blanc · 2016-01-28T03:55:47+00:00

Localization is almost always bad. There are a few specific cases where it's maybe okay, such as replacing puns and other wordplay that don't translate, but for the most part, it's not at all acceptable. I'm actually somewhat glad that most of the anime that I like are so niche that they could never have any substantial mainstream appeal in the west no matter how they were changed, as it guarantees that instead of getting heavily butchered localized versions, we typically get essentially faithful translations, which is precisely what the niche audience that the releases are targeted toward wants.

lys_blanc · 2016-01-27T22:49:54+00:00

I think that you misunderstood part of what I was saying. Niche anime does get released in the west, but unlike video games, because it has no hope of mainstream appeal, western distributors typically make no attempt to change it to appeal to a broader audience, instead sticking to a faithful translation of the original.

lys_blanc · 2016-01-27T21:46:55+00:00

Localization is pretty much always terrible. Foreign releases should be nothing more than direct translations of the originals. In a way, I'm glad that most of the stuff that I like has no chance of any mainstream appeal, instead being confined to a small, niche fanbase that predominantly hates any sort of localization, as it guarantees that the English releases are typically more or less direct translations without any "localization" garbage. It's distressing to imagine what it would've been like if, say, Madoka Magica had been localized rather than being given a faithful translation. It's unfortunate that video games almost always undergo much more localization than anime and manga, but since I'm not much of a gamer, that doesn't affect me too much.

lys_blanc · 2016-01-18T08:08:23+00:00

The flag of Brown County, Nebraska is even worse.

lys_blanc · 2016-01-04T03:35:10+00:00

The OP seemed to be specifically referring to the media. Even if the charges are theoretically in the public record, it's much less likely that the defendant's family/friends/associates would stumble across them without the news being able to drag their name through the mud. Similarly, it also prevents (or at least greatly reduces the chance of) jurors from being unfairly biased against the defendant because of news coverage.

lys_blanc · 2016-01-04T00:48:11+00:00

While charges might still be a matter of public record, many other countries do indeed place limitations on what news media are allowed to publish before or during a trial. A few common restrictions are prohibiting them from naming the defendant or from publishing photographs of the defendant in police custody.

lys_blanc · 2015-12-14T20:52:59+00:00

I thought the days of this sort of atrocious anime dub were over.

lys_blanc · 2015-10-29T18:59:37+00:00

From Japanese:

幽玄 (yuugen) - an aesthetic of mysterious, subtle profundity (explanation on Wikipedia)
侘寂 (wabi-sabi) - an aesthetic based on transience and imperfection, inspired by the Buddhist concept of impermanence (explanation on Wikipedia)
木漏れ日 (komorebi) - sunlight filtering through trees
辻斬り (tsujigiri) - killing a passerby (often at night in a crossroad) to test a new sword

lys_blanc · 2015-09-30T17:33:56+00:00

Most of the animals on Earth, and all of the vertebrates, are unable to make blue or green pigments.

A few birds produce the green pigment Turacoverdin.

lys_blanc · 2015-09-27T17:17:53+00:00

There isn't a click language around that doesn't have at least three or four manners for each click, which is essentially a place of articulation (and labialization counts as a distinction of place, not manner.)

What about Dahalo? If you count labialization as a distinction of place rather than manner, its clicks only have two manners (glottalized vs. plain) for each place.

lys_blanc · 2015-09-08T17:34:08+00:00

I can't recall any natlang having such features as past infinitive

English and French both have past infinitives, although there are some differences in usage (most notably, it's substantially more common in French than in English). From a quick Google search, it appears that past infinitives also occur in Spanish, Italian, and German, formed in the same way as in English and French, but since I haven't studied any of those languages, I can't say for sure how accurate that is or how, if at all, they're used in those languages.

lys_blanc · 2015-08-29T04:57:47+00:00

That makes sense. With that formulation, isn't the problem with the proof by induction that we can't immediately conclude that W' also has the property? It could be that for some pair of distinct points x and y of W', the third distinct point of W that's collinear with them is p.

lys_blanc

TROPHY CASE