Let's Settle This
neal.fun
neal.fun
This is an amusing question. I was thoroughly confused by what this meant.
In my country, I keep my socks in a completely different room from my shoes. So when I put on clothes, I first have to put on socks, then leave the room, and then put on the shoes. I've observed the same in Germany, France, Austria, Poland, and Spain (off the top of my head).
As a separate issue, the habit of walking in shoes within your house is still utterly baffling to me. I've seen people not walk in shoes even at the office (because it's uncomfortable). Can't imagine the smell of feet after walking in shoes the whole day.
The most pleasant footwear for me is Birkenstock Arizonas with socks, at home or office or when driving or running errands. This is the classic model with two straps over your foot and no back strap. I only switch to shoes when I will be walking some distance.
With the Birkenstocks, most of your foot is ventilated even while standing or sitting, and every time you take a step the bottom of your foot gets some air.
Don't over-tighten the straps. You should be able to slip your feet in and out of them without reaching down. Have at least two pair on hand, so you can easily slip out of one pair and into another.
In the summer I may leave off the socks to stay cooler, so it is especially nice to switch to another pair of sandals to let them dry out. With socks in cool weather, I'm comfortable wearing the same pair all day.
If you get these, be sure to get the "soft footbed" version. They are much more comfortable than the originals. And I like the suede version for the softer straps.
You may look geeky wearing them, but face it, you're already a geek!
I do sock shoe sock shoe because the sequence takes less time overall that way.
Pretty sure it's an American thing to constantly wear shoes, which is weird considering how little walking they appear to do (compared to driving).
Granted, all 3 of those homes were varying levels of filthy to me.
From Latvia here, more or less the same.
Then again, i really like wearing woolen socks everywhere, especially when it's cold outside, so they're on my legs most of the time anyways. Though i do have to change them often, or sometimes just put one pair on a radiator and wear another one, so that once i need to switch the new pair is warm.
It's actually really comfortable.
I think it's mostly climate + walking culture thing. If you live in a muddy/snowy climate and people walk a lot - wearing shoes in your house is simply a no-go. You'd have to clean up constantly.
Only "old man" ones. I want cool looking slippers that don't make me look like I belong in a retirement home.
Online, 'cool' slippers are all of a very low quality, and mostly only available in kids sizes.
There are slippers for walking around in the house if you want them (and every family has "guest slippers" for when somebody comes to visit). Not taking off your shoes when you come to someone is very rude.
You put the dirt inside your sock instead though.
You could put one sock on, then go to the other room and put a shoe on, return to the first room for the other sock, and then go back and put the second shoe on.
It'd be like applying a bubble sort to getting dressed.
(I still put the socks first, but alternating isn't completely unreasonable.)
I've always pronounced it like "hazel", but many of my colleagues rhyme it with "dazzle".
The Bazel website even has an FAQ entry about it, but they managed to completely confuse the issue:
> How do you pronounce “Bazel”?
> The same way as “basil” (the herb) in US English: “BAY-zel”. It rhymes with “hazel”. IPA: /ˈbeɪzˌəl/
Little problem here... Basil, the herb, can be pronounced either like hazel or like dazzle. Or even rhymed with hassle!
So naturally I opened a PR attempting to clarify this. It led to an interesting discussion, and in the end I wrote a bad poem acknowledging both pronunciations:
Don’t even get me started on the fourteen incorrect ways to say Omicron…
So do you pronounce the "Aah" like the "o" in "otter", or like the "a" in "apple"?
Isn't it fun trying to describe pronunciation with contrived spelling? :-)
I've noticed consistently that more British people are familiar with IPA, even passingly or badly, than Americans. I've never quite known why -- unless you do a language degree here you're never taught it formally, but it's usually in the dictionaries (e.g. the Oxford English dictionary) by every word, often with multiple forms for different geographic regions. I've never actually seen a real physical en-us dictionary -- does Marriam Webster (sic) do the same?
Amusingly, I don't ever remember a proper IPA pronuncation table in almost anything I used to learn English.
> does Marriam Webster (sic) do the same?
Looks like it [0]
[0] https://shop.merriam-webster.com/collections/dictionaries/pr...
I think I've ipa'd this right: http://ipa-reader.xyz/?text=%2F%C3%A6%CA%92%C9%9C%C9%9Cr%2F
(It sounds correct anyway)
Aah-zhur to the west, uh-Zhur to the east.
(Honest question, I'm confused myself. An authoritative source would be awesome.)
But then it wouldn't be an anagram for "Blaze" any more. (That's Google's internal build system that Bazel is derived from.)
A petty or paltry poet; a writer of poor or trashy verse; a rimester.
[0] Oxford English Dictionary, 1989. No link; it's a handy 20 volume set.
You may have been making a veiled reference to the fact that the Swiss pronounce it three different ways themselves, but just in case you weren't:
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowTopic-g188049-i752-k284241...
>The locals say without any doubt "Basel" with a long "a". So do the germans.
>So, in american it is something like "Baahsel"
>Some english folks pronounce it "Baahl", so do the french, who write it "Bâle".
>In italian, by the way, it is "Basilea".
I always find “long ‘a’” very unclear. Is it long like “ate” or long like “art”?
Even though I say BAY-zuhl, my inner mind reads Bazelisk as BAZZ-uh-lisk. No doubt because I knew the reference to Roko's Basilisk, which I'd always pronounced BASS-ihl-isk. Again in my inner mind, because I don't think I've ever heard that word pronounced either.
So I might say "We run BAY-zuhl using BAZZ-uh-lisk." And my mind doesn't put a red flag on the inconsistency, it seems perfectly natural.
Just like I eat sea bass and listen to bass guitar!
This is indefensible.
A Star Wars fan will tell you there are, at most, four good Star Wars movies. A Star Trek fan will tell you there are 6-7 good Star Trek movies, depending on whether you count Galaxy Quest. This might leave us with some room for debate about whether the cultural impact of Star Wars episodes 4 and 5 outweigh Star Trek's larger amount of quality material.
Except that Star Trek is a TV show.
For the movie franchise to not even be the better movie franchise is just... there's... it's not even a question.
Despite the better and more coherent world of star trek, the original show is preachy. Its too preachy. Almost every episode was to be an allegory to a real world issue at that time and its slow, and awkward. Die hards appreciate it more so for the “bold exploration” than what actually happened!
Later on the themes began self referencing and evolving into their own lore, while largely retaining a self-contained episodic format.
The movie are just fan service or the dream conflict.
But remember the human in the audience. They dont want to be preached to, they dont want the origin story of a particular character to be anything more than scifi, instead of the plot piece for now contrived bigotry.
Star Wars provides this desired entertainment. A heros tale, over and over again. The classic formula for the acceptance of the masses. Star Wars is not a satisfactory chronicle when completed, but the world building in all of its other shows and actual tv series is more engaging.
The original lore in star wars is fantasy and audiences want that.
The original lore in star trek is allegories to a real world social issue, and audiences dont always want that.
Trek has its moments, but it's just more boring. A lot of talky talky and slow and/or repetitive sequences. Even if it's more intellectually interesting as a whole, story-wise.
Even Star Wars was kind of slow by modern standards but the audiovisual design was just monumental.
• Gritty vs clean
• Thieves and scoundrels vs naval officers
• Genuine clothing vs color coded uniforms
• Misfits save the world from pervasive evil vs bold leaders discovering some weird new thing
• Magic vs Science
• Jumping into a gun turret and swinging it around at your enemy vs “Mr. Worf, target their ships!”
• Swordfights and maulings vs redshirts getting blown up.
I think each of them has its own milieu that it speaks to more, but the internet is for sure gonna pick Star Wars over Star Trek if they just are asked “X or Y?”. Star Wars still has a cool factor while Star Trek still has a dorky factor.
And a lot of that factor comes back to the fact that Trek is better known as syndicated TV. The constraint is that the episodes may be shown in random order, and so every episode or every two episodes, the state of the crew and the ships needs to be returned back to the baseline. The dorkiness comes in part from that aspect where the system gets returned back to where it was.
That's not all of it because Deadliest Catch also has the same aspect where every Deadliest Catch episode is basically the same thing, hah. Firefly kind of can be viewed as the attempt to take Star Wars’ grittiness and somehow make it syndicatable, “we finish the job and you see us a month later seeking out the next job.”
I'm a diehard fan of BOTH Star Wars and Star Trek. And I can say Star Trek has better influence, especially to the fandom who understand accurately what its messages are.
Last I checked, there were several feature films with the title of Star Trek. Do I live in a fantasy world where this isn't true for you?
Maybe I think the best sci-fi series is one with only two movies and no notable TV presence, but they're two outstanding movies. I don't think there's anything wrong with an opinion like that.
Star Trek 2 and 4 are really good though. Especially the whales in 4.
Even if both of them started in almost the same period, it seems to be that Star Trek was more active (in the sense of promoting it) early (11 movies launched before 2010, only 2 launched after) so it probably has a fan base older.
Also somehow Star Wars seems more modern, in the sense that watching Star Wars seems more 2020 than watching Star Trek even if both of them launches movies (2 Star Trek and 3 Star Wars) in the last 10 years or so (2010-2020).
I know a lot of young people who saw Star Wars, but not many that watched Star Trek.
I am not saying Star Trek is better, but I am saying that maybe a lot of the fan base is not active or does not care enough to vote or contribute to this debate :)
Also even if I am a big fan of Star Trek I also really enjoy Star Wars. Both of them brings me different things like for example: Star Trek is exploring more what humans can become while Star Wars explores more the effects of human flaws on politics, culture and societies.
I think both of them explore current events or are influenced by current geo-political events or cultural shifts.
I also think that Star Trek should try to be back to its visionary origin and not try to compete with Star Wars on apocalyptical events.
A category in which it loses handily to Babylon 5, the best sci-fi show, nay, the best show in general, ever to have been made.
Star Wars is pop culture, knights-in-space, high-octane, good vs evil. Of course it wins a popularity contest. To be clear: I'm not dissing Star Wars. It was just made to appeal to the masses and sell action figurines. It targets broader audiences. Star Trek has always been niche.
The only situation I’ll put socks on is when I’m going outside in closed shoes, and in that case I’ll bring a pair of socks to the front door because why bother removing the sandal, putting on the sock, putting the sandal back on, walking to the front door, removing the sandal, putting on the shoe? Instead I’ll usually go “foot at a time” so remove sandal, put on sock, put on shoe, repeat for next foot.
I'd be surprised if my process is common though.
Is a slipper a shoe?
This one does actually have a definitive answer!
Evolutionary, there has to be an ancestor to the chicken that is not a chicken itself. It doesn't even matter where exactly you draw the line - it just has to exist.
At some point in time, a genetic mutation occurred during fertilization, resulting in the very first chicken ever. Which of course started out as an egg.
So there you have it - the very first chicken of all time started as an egg, laid by an animal that was not a chicken.
Thus the egg came first.
In that case you need to start to argue about what makes an egg an egg, as the fertilization happens while the rest of the egg is forming(or so I just read). So depending on your egg definition, there might be a brief period where there is a chicken which will become an egg and then becomes a chicken again.
While the question seems to strongly imply that "chicken" is meant to refer to the hatched animal (which is also the most commonly accepted interpretation) - it does not spell that out. Thus it's not perfectly clear which interpretations may be used.
Now, if we do allow alternate interpretations of the premise, then the egg still came first. Because dinosaurs laid eggs - and that was a long time before the first chicken ovum ever got fertilized.
But if we disallow alternate interpretations and clarify that within the context of this question "chicken" has to refer to the hatched animal - then your answer is simply no longer valid.
Well, let's ignore all that. Let's define our premise such, that: A) fertilized ovums ARE chickens B) fertilized ovums are NOT eggs and answer the question based on those assumptions.
The first problem with your argument is, that it's impossible to find a logical, internally consistent definition of "chicken", that does INCLUDE the fertilized ovum, while at the same time EXCLUDING the egg. There's no way, the ovum is a chicken - stops being a chicken while an egg - and becomes a chicken again. Every definition that does include the fertilized ovum will also include the egg. So, based on our assumptions A) and B), we can deduce: C) eggs ARE chickens
But if eggs are chickens, then the question "the egg OR the chicken" no longer makes any sense - and no correct answer can exist. Therefore, your provided answer cannot possibly be correct either.
Thus, within this set of assumptions A) and B) - the question becomes meaningless, and can't be answered either way.
P.S.: you are aware, that the "ovum" is more commonly called "egg cell"? ;)
No it didn't.
It started out as a fertilized egg cell, or ovum, but that is different from an "egg," which is the vessel containing the zygote. See [1]
This egg vessel -- yolk, albumen and shell -- was created entirely by the mother (i.e. unlike the fertilized ovum, it is not a result of fertilization by two parents, and contains no mutations which could make it a new species).
So a chicken was once in an egg. The question is whether this egg, created entirely by the non-chicken mother, counts as a "chicken egg" or not.
If the egg IS a chicken, then the question "the chicken OR the egg" does not make much sense, does it? You can't chose "the egg" for an answer as that still would be the chicken (just inside a shell).
Given that the question is ancient, as well as the fact that the question has been used to further philosophical debate about first cause, infinite regression and cause & effect, it seems pretty unlikely that - within the context of the question - "chicken" is meant to refer to the entire animal species including the ovum.
It seems way more likely to me, that "chicken" is originally meant to refer to the adult animal, as in:
ovum -> egg -> chick -> chicken
Thus the argument that the chicken came first, because of the ovum (also known as "egg cell") - does not just misinterpret the premise that the question is built on - it kinda breaks the question, because basically it turns it into "What came first? The chicken or the chicken?"
Of course the evolutionary answer does defy the purpose of the question as well - finding an answer was never the purpose - but at least it sticks with the meanings of "chicken egg" and "adult chicken", that are kinda implied in the question.
The question treats the egg as NOT being a chicken. And thus by extension the ovum should not be treated as a chicken as well. It's of the species chicken of course - but it's not an adult chicken - which is the meaning of "chicken" used in the question.
The "egg" per Wikipedia, is the vessel that contains the developing chick. In that regard, it's analogous to the uterus.
Indeed, assuming we take "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" to mean "...or the chicken egg" (otherwise it's just a silly question, as dinosaurs had eggs), then we can make the analogy to "which came first, the human or the human uterus?"
That should clearly be trivial to answer: the first organism that we could call a "human" must have started developing before her uterus did. So the human came before the human uterus.
I'm saying that this is equivalent for a chicken egg. Since the "egg" is created 100% by the mother, albumen, yolk, shell and all, I'm saying it "belongs" to the mother, in the same way that a uterus belongs to a mammal mother. It's all her own cells.
Therefore, the first "chicken egg" had to be the one laid by the first chicken. So it comes after the chicken.
Edit: I think a lot of people thought I was serious. Just joking around.
We never discus image formats tho. I’ll have to ask them about GIF next time.
Don't get me started on Stuyvesant! ;-)
/s in case it's not obvious
You wouldn't think "the breathing apparatus of a fish" before "the unit of measure"? When was the last time you saw something measured in gills?
ghoti
so "ghoti" can be pronounced the same as "fish"
When I was young I never understood the French idea of 'the death of the author'. I found the idea of ignoring the author's intentions in writing a novel, and of ignoring their clarifications regarding the novel, quite absurd. In time, I have found myself more on the side of this idea.
An author can create something, but this does not give them dictates over how it is interpreted by the rest of us. Creation need not imply authority over understanding, nor later insights inspired from a work.
I'm not sure the pronunciation of an acronym for an image format quite fits into the concept of literary criticism, but I can't say that I'll ever be too bothered that the original author has had the misfortune of pronouncing their own format incorrectly.
[1]: https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-...
Imagine if someone said “well actually the inventor of the paper clip pronounces it with a soft ‘c’ so it sounds like ‘paper slip’”
This seems so clearly absurd that I don’t even really know how to argue against it.
The problem is people aren't going to look up the "correct" pronunciation. They're just going to say it how ever it seems like it would be said by reading it in their native language. Once enough people do it it's too late to fix.
An interesting related thing is how people pronounce initials. For example NOP ("No" "Awp" or "Nawp" or "Nope" I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots".
In my domain, graphics, there's GLSL which some people say "Glisle" and "WGSL" which some call "Wigsle". But why not "Glasle" or "Glashal" and "Wagsle"/"Washal". Why did they choose "i". "a" makes more sense given that the letters stand for and if you're going to abandon what the letters stand for, still, why "i" and not some other vowel?
This has an explanation! If a short vowel is inserted as a transition between two consonants, there is a strong tendency for the inserted sound to be a more ‘neutral’ vowel, such as the schwa /ə/. But in many English dialects, there has been a merger [0] between the schwa /ə/ and the short ‘i’ sound /ɪ/ — the two sounds are no longer distinguishable by native speakers of those dialects. Thus, what might be pronounced as [ɹəts] sounds very much like ‘ritz’, and ‘GLSL’ becomes [ɡləzl̩], sounding like ‘Glisle’.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...
I don't say this out of disrespect; language is a sort of chaotic dynamic group-level system, and what happens initially is only one small input.
Is this true? Basically a lot of people in europe will jump to soft g. Will latin america pronounce "gi" as the aspirated H?. Don't know anything about the countries in africa, I hear nigeria is pretty big and there's a lot of tech coming out of there. India (big elephant, pun intended) I suppose is hard g, but what about china -- I have no clue? Japan (120M, almost half the population of US, mind you) is exclusively soft g -- likely because hard g collides with the name of a prefecture (province). Korea I think is hard g (50 m, almost all very tech-savvy). Indonesia?
OK, I'm pronouncing GIF as 'throatwobbler mangrove', then.
Here's a wonderful video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmqy-Sp0txY
Graphics Interchange Format
Try to say Graphics with a soft G.
That's not exactly difficult to do, though it would be spelled "draphics".
It's difficult to see what this is supposed to be relevant to; acronyms are never given pronunciations taken from their hidden constituent words. Try to say "stimulated" with a /z/ (as in "LASER").
Yup, and there are plenty of others too:
SCUBA - U as in uh-nderwater
SIM / VIN - I as in I-dentification
YOLO - second O as in wuh-nce
CAPTCHA - first A as in aw-tomated
AWOL - soft a-bsent
ICE - ih-mmigration and Customs Enforcement
NATO - soft A-tlantic
OCONUS - ow-tside
OSHA - ah-ccupational
SCOTUS / POTUS - uh-f
AIDS - a-cquired
It's really a long list if you look. I vote for GIF with a J sound.
Here's a soft G word making a hard G acronym, and a hard G word making a soft G acronyn:
GAD - Generalized Anxiety Disorder
GEMA - Gas and Electric Markets Authority
PAL - Phase Alternating Line
PAWS - Phased Array Warning System
SWF - ShockWave Flash
But we can all have preferences, and in some small way be part of the process of pushing English in one direction or another. So here's my pitch for the hard g:
Ambiguous letters are very annoying. I'm teaching my kids to read and it's very frustrating. C is sometimes like sometimes like k (except when k is followed by n) and sometimes like s (except when s is followed by h), unless c is followed by h in which case...you get the idea. We have more sounds than letters, so some ambiguity is required by a sort of pigeonhole principle. It's weird, then, that we have multiple letters for the same sound. A misuse of resources.
But at least C the rules are relatively clean. G is the worst of them, because you really can't tell. Gimble but giant, etc.
So we ought to try to minimize the degree to which this happens because it makes English more approachable for everyone. If you coin a word starting with a "k" sound, start it with a k. And if you want something to start with "j" use a j. (If you want a hard g, you have to use a g, so that's settled already). Then, on the margins, English is slightly more consistent.
With words where there's no consensus, you probably can't change the spelling (and with gif you surely can't) but the same logic applies: pick in the direction of less ambiguity. Since we already have a "j" sound, we should, where possible, make "g" hard.
So say gif with a hard g for humanity.
A whole 51% the internet currently appears to agree. Phew.
> If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken
Species are assumed to produce eggs of the same species. Like many convenient turns of phrase, this isn't strictly true. What the egg contains (unless the egg casing is a relevant attribute) is how it is characterized.
A mutation exists in the developing embryo, so a non-chicken had a chicken-containing egg. This is a chicken egg, which necessarily came first. Looking at any given xenopregnancy (a hybrid Liger, or panda fetus in a cat, et al). The carrying species does not make the result of that species. eg If there was a non-chicken species (say, a turkey) which produced eggs that were genetically and practically identical to chicken-containing eggs, they would be called chicken eggs.
Viewed this way, what actually caused chickens to happen was the migration, not the genetics. It was the part where the two red junglefowl groups came out of genetic contact and started to diverge. On the assumption that these red junglefowl were adults (which is obvious if it was a migration, but merely likely if it was forced by humans), this means that a population of non-chickens was divided into two subpopulations, one of which was chickens, one of which wasn't.
So even agreeing that we should categorize the egg by the creature it produced immediately after hatching, you still get by this argument that a nonchicken egg hatched into a nonchicken which by circumstance became a chicken... Chickens came first, and then their chicken eggs.
Which egg?
Obviously "the egg that the chicken hatched from" came first, no one's debating that. But that's all you've said.
If the question is "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg", then it depends on whether the chicken egg is one that houses the chicken, or the one that is laid by a chicken.
Would you really argue that those eggs hatching into mules are not mule eggs?
I could see an argument that those eggs, coming out of canaries, could count as canary eggs, but not in a way that stops them from being mule eggs. "mule eggs" definitely needs to include the eggs that hatch into mules.
You could still debate if a non-chicken egg with chicken DNA is a chicken egg. Its shell and yolk, all contents, were produced by a non-chicken - imagine the eggshell was blue, not white, and the final allele change to become “chicken” switched the “egg color laid once grown” to white.
If all this eggs contents were produced by a genetically non-chicken - the egg is blue - is it really a “chicken egg”?
Imagine you took a chicken egg, and modified the DNA so that an elephant would hatch. Is this a “chicken egg (with elephant DNA)” or an “elephant egg (with shell, white, and yolk produced by a chicken)”?
Viewed your way, a chicken actually gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a chicken who gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a chicken that was finally the mother of an unbroken line of hens that survives to this day, some of whom had nonchicken fathers.
The problem is that the variation of the breeding population is much larger than the distance from the originals to the final result.
Those mutations happen at/inside the egg. At some point… little by little, two animals have an offspring that isn’t exactly like them.
The chicken egg came before the chicken that laid it. Some other animal laid it. And likewise the egg existed before the chicken inside it developed.
In no scenario that I can steelman does the chicken ever come first.
Another way to put it is that a chicken was once an egg, so even if "the chicken came first," that chicken was once an egg.
A chicken was once a fertilized egg cell, but an "egg" is the vessel that contains the zygote [1], and was created entirely by the mother (i.e. it is not a result of fertilization). So a chicken was once in an egg.
Consider the context before trying to correct people. You’re just being pedantic for no reason.
Many people in this thread are using the word "egg" in the same way as a female mammal releases an "egg" in estrus, i.e. the cell which will become an organism once fertilized. Hence the discussion elsewhere of how the mutation has already happened in this cell.
For instance, besides this thread, another person said "resulting in the very first chicken ever. Which of course started out as an egg.
I'm saying that a bird "egg", from the Wikipedia link, is not the gamete cell but rather simply the container, created by the mother.
So statements such as "[the chicken] started out as an egg" or "a chicken was once an egg" (your statement) are simply incorrect, just as saying "a human baby was once a uterus" is wrong.
It's not pedantic "for no reason" (at least any more than the rest of this by-definition pedantic discussion is).
And that's the best I can do. But it's silly, because that interpretation of the question has an extremely obvious answer, which implies that this is _not_ the intended meaning of the question -- if the structure of the question contains the required answer, then you wouldn't bother asking that question at all.
So we're right back at of course the bloody egg came first.
Anyone else want to take a shot?
To expand to dinosaurs, chickens, and Bronteroc's.
Assuming there's just chickens, and we're talking just about chicken eggs, then the chicken came first. Chickens need a mother to hatch the egg, to create the egg in it's womb, etc. An egg cannot exist without a mother to birth it.
I'm assuming that evolution would happen slowly over time, the creature that ended up becoming the chicken would have had to already been laying eggs. The egg laying feature would need to already be present for it to be our modern day preciously defined chicken.
The egg had to have come first
I don't think the question is about a fantasy world that only has chickens, and the chickens came from ????.
Just treat it as "chicken" vs. "chicken egg".
- GIF /dʒɪf/: Graphics Interchange Format
- gif /ɡɪf/: short looping silent video
Uh, literally anyone who works with graphics?
I get that people want to be lazy but pronouncing acronyms/contractions has always been fraught with disagreement. Same goes for things like SQL (which somehow gets pronounced as "sequel") while people leave PDF alone.
Sounds like you meant it was originally "Structured English QUEry Language"?
Not the most inspiring way to form an acronym.
The fact that GIF videos are considered an image is really just a quirk of evolution of the image format to support videos and browsers supporting these videos in an <img> tag (and nowhere else).
Illegal.
Pineapple with cashews & onions on a pizza is da bomb
I went to that restuarant a few days later and it was horrible food, but similar to the other cuisine experiences possible in that town, region.
So, now I understand. Maybe their pineapple on pizza experience has been bad because of the way it was prepared.
So many people come up with so many fake rules for why it should have a hard G, but there are only two real rules for names, and, yes, GIF is a name (of a format). 1) If the named thing can't speak for itself, the people who named it dictate how the name is pronounced. 2) If it can speak for itself, it dictates. Nobody who isn't the named thing or its namer(s) gets to say how its name is pronounced regardless of what they think of the spelling.
That's obvious anyway; gift is one word (well, also give) swamped in a sea of other gi- words.
And gift is a very strange one. What is it, a loan from Norse? You'd think, if it were a native word, that it would have turned into something more like "yift", the way we see in e.g. day, I, or yard.
[1] This one's not Norse.
Consider the changes of people's names as they migrated around the world. In NZ, we pronounce Craig as "Crayg", in the US they pronounce it "Creg", which I struggle to make sense of, but that doesn't make it wrong. There are better examples than Craig but that was the first one that came to mind.
I agree with everything you said except that bit, it’s megawrong
I feel like it doesn't make sense, because then Greg should be spelled Graig, but that's the whole point, language evolves in an inconsistent way, and the only defining point of correct pronunciation is really "how do the majority of people say it", and that is often only a regional thing too.
Either way, the assertion that because something is a name it cannot evolve in pronunciation is easily disproved.
...you are aware that "gibbon" isn't pronounced with /dʒ/?
Are you from Wales?
Language is constantly evolving.
I assume they just don’t notice the difference, like with marry/merry/Mary.
Wikipedia agrees that this is common: "In North America it is often pronounced with a short vowel sound /krɛɡ/, as in "egg"" [1]
Not the same thing at all. This is more like someone following different pronunciation rules insisting that your name as spelled is pronounce "Kee-lay"; and if you actually want "Kaa-il", you should spell it K-A-I-L instead. It kind of makes sense that way too, as long as the rules are somewhat consistent in their version.
If the creator wanted to name it after Jif, the extension and name should have both been JIF. Putting in a G instead of a J is begging to create confusion about the pronunciation.
Both patterns exist in the language.
These are both words pronounced really differently, though. Give is a hard 'g' short 'i', jive is a 'j' and a long 'i'.
I'd like to add 'Gaol' or 'Jail'? Debra vs Zebra (These are pronounced differently in the US).
Yes that is my point.
You're implying that there should be a logical correspondence between how English words sound and how they're spelled. I'm not convinced that is true.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gist%2Cjist&ye... makes me wonder just what happened around 1840. I suspect https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_the_Little_Frenchman_Wear... (uses jist regularly as a misspelling of just) may have something to do with it.
(what letters are used to describe how the word "gif" should not be pronounced?)
You could pretty easily update the sign to say "it's pronounced gif, not ghif".
Doesn't matter what it was, "G"if is what it is. Who knows what it will be.
This gives us an easy solution to make everyone happy though! We gust have to change "graphics" to be pronounced as "jraphics"
Whether to prescribe language or not is somewhat arbitrary at times and is determined culturally, so I don't think the argument above can be resolved.
There seem to be plenty of people who will argue to conserve grammar/spelling/semantics etc. I can't say their work is unfruitful, yet it does seem to be the case that language follows the habits of the majority.
There is more than one canonical way to pronounce things, even names. For example, what's the correct way to pronounce Arkansas?
The real issue here is people trying to assert there is only one correct way to pronounce it.
No it’s not, plenty of people are very much of aware of the intended pronunciation and still choose to pronounce it another way.
Plus, pronunciations change. I assume you don’t go around demanding people pronounce knife ‘kunifuh,’ right?
Knife used to be pronounced k'nife. This slowly faded over time and is now completely eliminated.
By analog, jif being the original pronunciation is not important because the majority of people have decided to go with a hard G.
In other words, the "correct" spelling or pronunciation of words is democratic.
How about girl as jirl?
Giraffe as jiraffe?
Frankly, I reserve my right to not care and have fun with language -- instead of being a curmudgeon (there's no point except to feel better about oneself).
> Giraffe as jiraffe? ??
"Spoken with the confidence of a man who's been spelling 'giraffe' as 'diraffe' for the last 20 years."
You do you, but Graphics having a hard G doesn't force GIF to any more than the Amplification in LASER forces the pronunciation of its A, or Stimulated its S, or Emission its E. Or do you and your friends also say "lasseer" instead of "layzur"? This is an arbitrary choice you've made in one case but not the other.
The K in knight appears to have turned up in the American pronunciation of "schedule".
A chicken egg is not synonymous with an egg cell, or ovum. The fertilized ovum of course belongs to the creature it will grow into -- it is the creature it will grow into -- and so certainly the chicken ovum came before -- or at the same time as -- the chicken. But when we say "egg" we are referring to the vessel with a shell that houses the fertilized ovum until it hatches. [1]
This vessel is made of of various proteins and nutrients, produced by the mother that laid the egg, and a calcium carbonate shell, also made entirely by the mother. This egg, created entirely by the mother and not by the union of an ovum and sperm cell and any mutations that happened then, belongs entirely to the mother.
If Proto-chicken mother has laid clutch after clutch of eggs, all those are proto-chicken eggs. When one of those clutches happens to have a mutant that we arbitrarily declare is a "chicken," the egg itself has not changed in any way, only the DNA of the organism housed in the egg.
So, on thinking about it, I want to go back and change my answer.
Subjectively, I feel that the soft-G is milquetoast mild to the degree that it's unpleasant to say or hear. Insipid like a cold bland porridge. Hard-G has all the zest, all the pizazz!
Though it does seem to be an American thing - we pronounce the H in pretty much all words too, whereas Americans tend to make a lot of "H" sounds silent.
And a peanut butter in the US. So what?
> Saying "Gif" as "jif" seems very redundant - why even have different letters?
English is...rather unconcerned with having an absence of duplication of sounds between letters (“c” and “x” are pretty much completely redundant with other letters, and there are plenty of overlaps on the other letters in represented sounds.)
To the extent this is true, it's only in a sense where consensus is much more than mere majority preference and it's absence, and thus the absence of a single correct pronunciation, is also possible and, in fact, common; for GIF, there is an absence of consensus on pronunciation, and thus a diversity of pronunciations with shifting popularity. Your preference may be the eventual consensus, but English can maintain words with multiple pronunciations with shifting popularity over a very long term without settling to general consensus, so maybe not.
People can call it whichever they want. If you say gif or jif and someone else corrects you then they're just being dumb. Clearly they understood what you meant and until consensus is almost unanimous (around 90-99%) both pronunciations are fine. I also don't think the creator's pronunciation matters. If they originally said it should be pronounced jife but people were between jif and gif then saying either jif and gif would make sense in conversation but jife wouldn't.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
Oh? Why do you say that? I mean, I doubt knowing what the creator said has that big of an impact but maybe I'm wrong on that.
> I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
Show me a poll that doesn't tell you the answer in the options. When one of the answers is "gif", and it wins as the pronunciation for "gif", that's a useless result.
Are you gonna argue that there exists a significant number of people that would pronounce it jif with no prompting? That's quite a stretch
When you say 'no prompting', you mean just finding it in text with no context? Hell if I know whether people blindly guess it's like "give" or "gin" but neither one seems super obvious over the other unless you treat it like it's derived from the word "gift".
If you say it in front of someone and they possibly correct you, I don't know why the techy version would differ from the average person version.
I personally don't know anyone who'd pronounce it with a j sound and I severely doubt anyone in my country would default to a j sound, but I'm open to that being cultural. I just think the fact that hard G wins by such a landslide is pretty good evidence that defaulting to a j sound is incredibly rare
A 20/80 split in a poll in a world in which lots of people are correcting others towards a hard G indicates that there's plenty of people choosing to pronounce it like "gin" or "gist" or "gelatin" or "genius" or "generous" or "genetic" or "giant" or "gymnast" or "ginger" or ...
Because, even if this were a valid (random sample of the target population) survey, 1 in 5 is a lot, especially given the fact that the distribution of pronunciation is not homogeneous geographically or by other divides that define distinct subgroups of language use.
> I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
I think the existence of ongoing debate among speakers of the language as to the correct pronunciation is strong evidence that there is no consensus.
Would it also "make sense" to pronounce jpeg "jay-feg"? Or "nasa" "neh-sa"? Or "laser" "lah-ssur"?
If you watch Back to the Future (which came out in 1985), Dr Brown pronounces gigawatts as jigawatts, and now the common pronunciation has a hard G. It has the same initial gi-, so I guess sometime in the 1990's the trend was to prefer hard G over soft G in technical words which start with gi-.
The original pronunciation is with a hard g, though there was a brief period after the US National Bureau of Standards claimed otherwise where some people in America thought otherwise. At least according to [0].
[0] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-prefix-giga-originally-pronoun...
Roughly every 10th person pronouncing it with a soft G doesn't sound like an "anomaly" of a single movie to me (as claimed in the quora post), more like a less common variant.
>It's not a well-researched documentary.
Of course, it's not. But it gives us audio evidence that some people in the 1980's pronounced it with a soft G (or thought it's pronounced with a soft G because they wouldn't usually use -- and hear -- the word IRL, just like with GIF's)
Generally - no, but there was a superb execution by one place in Vancouver whereby they used partially dehydrated pineapples. That was really good, because you got the pineapple taste but without any of that pesky sogginess.
That's the place - https://www.stevestonpizza.com/menu
The rest of the menu is equally wonderful, absolutely fantastic flavour combinations, really well executed. The place was started 10-15 years ago (?) by a former chef of one of 5 star hotels in the city. It has always been a bit quirky, first with the foie gras pizza and then with the $800 caviar and truffle one, but their main menu was super solid. I am no longer in Vancouver, but I'd order from them again in a heartbeat.
So objectively it is black and blue. Of course, our eyes tricking us about color is hardly anything new... (brown is just orange with context!)
Gist of it is this: The dress is under a harsh sodium lamp, If you spent your formative years around those (a night owl in the years when lots of sodium lights were present), you would pick up the subtle cues in the photo that would tell you that the dress is black and blue. Those with less fun histories lack the ability to pick those cues out, and misidentify as white and gold (me included).
- accessibility[0]
- customization - not everyone wants the same tab-width
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_t...
tabs don't work for customization
code // comment
code code // comment
There are just as many arguments pro tabs as there are con tabs
Many could be solved with smart tools. Have your editor reformat the text to your preference. Have it put it back to the project's preference when you check it in.
Tabs are not suited to aligning code, but ideal for indentation.
function(arg1, arg2, arg3,
arg4, arg5, arg6) {
code
}
I think you might be misunderstanding the alignment comment. The idea is that the lines starting with "function" and "arg4" have the same number of tabs, and then the "arg4" line has nine spaces after the tabs.
(For a better readability and ease of edition, I however prefer to actually indent arguments (each on it's line) rather than the suggested alignment, as I show in the second function)
class Something {
>const obj = {
>>somePropName: 1,
>>xyz_________: 2,
>};
>function foo(arg1, arg2, arg3,
>_____________arg4, arg5, arg6) {
>>code
>}
>
>function bar(
>>arg1,
>>arg2,
>>arg3,
>) {
>>code
>}
}Fortunately all the projects I work on do the proper thing and use spaces ;)
React (FB) says they use spaces: https://github.com/airbnb/javascript#whitespace (react links to the airbnb style guide)
Google: is usually spaces, https://google.github.io/styleguide/jsguide.html#formatting-...
Apple: https://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#whitespace, https://webkit.org/code-style-guidelines/#indentation-4-spac..., Swift (load xcode, see it inserts spaces in default code projects and with reformatting in xcode, ...)
Mozilla: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/code-quality/coding-..., rustfmt defaults to spaces: https://rust-lang.github.io/rustfmt/?version=v1.4.38&search=...
Python: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces
PS: I know some projects use tabs (go, linux) for example. I don't work on those :P
Of all the ways you could object, I feel like listing makefiles and python might make the least sense. Makefiles require tabs and python has zero problems using tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. In fact, python will make it harder to accidentally indent a line wrong than almost any other language.
I'd just say people are more likely to screw up, or something like that.
> PS: I know some projects use tabs (go, linux) for example. I don't work on those :P
Linux requires 8 space indentations so it's the worst of all worlds.
As long as you never use tabs after other characters, things will work well enough.
Use tabs for logical indentation and spaces for line wrapping indentation! (/s)
Sure, fine. I kind of like 3, to be honest. But have you had to deal with 8? My code's already inside a function inside a class. I don't want super wide columns, and I don't want >30 spaces of indentation when I go only two layers deep inside that function.
Further back much of my code was inside a function inside a class inside a namespace...
And code formatters are not usually very good at letting you edit in a different form from the canonical repo format.
Using summer time means you get the light in the evenings. Things like doing sports activities that need daylight after work become possible about a month earlier than without time, and you gain another month at the end. Long evenings are glorious for all sorts of activities. The alternative puts the light in the early morning when people sleep.
In winter, winter time here means it's at least a bit twilighty during the morning commute; without it it would still be pitch dark, and it would still get dark before the end of the work day.
(I'm in the Netherlands, which is actually already on a bit too summer timey timezone compared to its location).
Yes, some people can change their schedule instead. Most people are tied to fixed times of work, their kids' school etc.
Can't say I've ever wanted to stop daylight savings. Never-ending afternoon evenings every day in summer, delightful!
But also in the Netherlands, there are many people who want to abolish it.
In my view, they're only thinking of the weekends when the switch is made. At that time, it doesn't seem to make a huge difference, and the switch is annoying, it takes some days to get into the new rhythm.
But ask them, at the start of summer you have X hours of sunlight -- what times during the day would you like them to fall? And the same question for the darkest months of winter. I wouldn't be surprised if it needed a switch of two whole timezones to make both answers true.
Where you are, yes.
In the US, there's a lot of the country spending a lot of months of standard time with sunsets between 5pm and 6:30pm, where the shift would do the most good.
It's a solution to a human problem, not a technical one.
That's OK. There's a refreshing freedom in being the only sane person around. And the edge brownies are shunned by the herd so there's plenty for us.
That's why I started having vivid conversations with myself.
Is your answer the same if the question is about a person instead of straw?
Both possible answers are technically correct, because "hole" has at least two relevant definitions: (1) a hollow space inside something, (2) an aperture connecting two spaces. A straw has one #1 type hole, and two #2 type holes.
#2 is probably more practically correct, because most of the time when one wants to talk about a straw's holes, it will be the apertures that one wants to talk about not the hollow interior.
I mean, 'politely' see them off please.
We have to assume there is a line between "creature that is almost exactly like a chicken" and "a chicken."
A proto-chicken laid an egg. That egg after fertilization contained a mutation that pushed the proto-chicken INTO chicken territory.
Thus, the (chicken) egg came first because a chicken cannot exist without mutating as a part of reproduction.
In fact, I posit that evolution isn't really incompatible with christianity.
The exception is for an absurdist literal interpretation of a single simile translated multiple times, from a non-original copy of the bible of which the original was written down from oral tradition several hundred years after the stories first originated.
Christians still enjoy their pork though. And shellfish. Strange how nobody seems to cherry-pick that passage anymore... almost like it is more about anti-intellectualism than it is about following a code of ethics.
Further, I think that the second-best argument is that the first chicken was the first animal to be called "chicken" by someone. In that case, that first chicken came from an egg, which was laid by something which was never called a chicken, hence not a chicken. The egg still came first.
Writing this now, it occurs that perhaps almost any satisfying definition of chicken implies that the egg came first. If you can define what a chicken is and you assume that chickens have not always existed, then it follows that there must have been a first chicken. If you assume that the first chicken hatched from an egg (if not, your definition of chicken is quite broad!), and that at the time it hatched, it was a chicken, then the egg came first. As above, there are reasonable ways for a non-chicken to lay an egg which hatches a chicken.
I don't see any good ways around "egg came first" other than a definition of chicken that allows a non-chicken to become a chicken after it hatches. You could argue that the first chicken became one the first time someone called it that. Okay, but that seems pretty slippery, because if, today, a chicken is born in the woods and no human is aware of it, it's actually not a chicken, merely a bird that might one day become a chicken.
A food can be classified by which faces of a cube the outer layer of carbs populate. In the case of a hot dog, it is a taco, since the bottom and two sides are the carb structure.
A slice of any of them is a toast.
No inconsistency there.
Though I prefer "pizza" to "toast".
In the context hotdogs appear, it is around other bread meat combinations:
hotdog hamburger sandwich
these are distinct things, and to some they are assumeable identities where one can expect criticism for any choice, despite their overlapping feature sets
as such, hotdog is not a sandwich
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sandwich
1a: two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between
1b: one slice of bread covered with food
By the anti-sandwich lobby's logic, if you were to build a ham and cheese sandwich using one piece of bread and then folded it in the middle to make it look and function like a "traditional" double breaded sandwich, it would somehow magically no longer qualify as a sandwich -- and that's just plain absurd.
(Yes I think a tortilla is a valid bread for this.)
> By the anti-sandwich lobby's logic, if you were to build a ham and cheese sandwich using one piece of bread and then folded it in the middle to make it look and function like a "traditional" double breaded sandwich, it would somehow magically no longer qualify as a sandwich -- and that's just plain absurd.
I don't think it requires magic to say that a sub sandwich is not a true sandwich.
Also those people wouldn't say you had a sandwich to start with. It's reasonable to say that open-faced sandwiches aren't true sandwiches, and I think people would agree that the folded version is either equally or more sandwichy than an open-face.
The question is where the exact threshold lies. Are both sandwiches? Just the folded one? Neither?
Don't get too hung up on the dictionary definition you quoted. Dictionaries are over-inclusive and include very casual language. Spiders are not actually bugs, even though people sometimes use the word that way and you can find it in a dictionary.
It requires the most absurd magic to say that a sub is not a sandwich. It's literally everything that you call a sandwich without any differences whatsoever. It's only nicknamed a "sub" because the shape of the bread resembles a submarine. That's it. Your completely arbitrary limitation of a sandwich being two square-shaped pieces of bread simply doesn't reflect reality.
> Dictionaries are over-inclusive and include very casual language.
The irony is rich, given that you're trying to redefine words to have completely different meanings than the original.
First: When I said the dictionary was over-inclusive, I was implying that your 1b might be wrong. The definition that includes "open faced sandwiches". It's not clear whether those should count. Yes, even though "sandwich" is in the name. Like how a veggie hamburger isn't actually a hamburger. They are an alternate version of a sandwich, on par with a pizza.
Second: I wasn't clear about subs. I thought context would help, but I guess not enough. So, trying again. If you take a loaf and cut it in two, and put stuff in between, everyone will agree that's a sandwich. It's not about the kind of bread or anything. Where some people disagree is when you don't cut the loaf all the way, when you no longer have "pieces of bread" at all.
> The irony is rich
But do you disagree with what I said there about bugs?
Also you didn't answer about tacos. That's not a gotcha, I want to understand how you draw the line and how you interpret the dictionary definition. I don't want to put words in your mouth or guess, and it looks really stupid whenever I make a choose-your-own-adventure argument.
Hot dogs are tacos, not sandwiches, per the cube rule. [0]
Arguing the boundaries of arbitrary semantic categories with no significance isn't something “logic or reason” plays a whole lot of role in in any case [0]; what is on display is a whole lot of emotional attachment backed with a abusive language, not “logic and reason”.
[0] Which is, of course, what the site is satirizing.
All of the cube rule starch configurations can be distinguished independently of orientation.
"You forgot about:
- static v/s dynamic typing
- compiled v/s interpreted
- functional v/s imperative
- VM v/s non-VM languages
- SPA v/s non-SPA web apps
- "native" v/s cross-platform mobile apps "
Now I am doubly disappointed :)
This problem has its own website and wikipedia entry :)
http://toiletpaperorientation.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_roll_holder#Orientation
* The Internet thinks Star Wars is better.
* How close the voting is for pineapple on pizza
* Sock shoe sock shoe is even a possible answer.
* I’ve now been introduced to the question, “Does a straw have one hole or two?” This will haunt me until I die.
OP and whoever made this: Joking aside, this was a really cute link. It really helped my mood today.
This very much depends on the sandwich. Cheese? Diagonally. Peanut Butter and Jelly? Horizontally (or really what I would think of as vertically, since bread usually has more symmetry left right than top bottom). A pointy PB&J is just wrong.
I'm from Finland. I mostly eat rye bread sandwiches.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ruispala+puikula&t=fpas&iax=images... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=puikula&t=fpas&iar=images&iax=imag...
45% voted yes (of 14,463 votes so far).
Whether we're living in a computer simulation is an absolutely fascinating subject to think about, and I do not dismiss the idea, but do a significant number of people really believe it?
I humbly suggest the reason the universe we live in does not use Real numbers is because you couldn't simulate that with a Turing machine.
Again.
We've been trying to roll out a patch to address that along with several other, related issues (you can probably guess which ones those are), but we don't have an ETA yet; you wouldn't believe how long it takes for this thing's unit tests to complete.
When people are living their daily lives and interacting, but in the backs of their minds they have a loose grip on reality, to me it's a new low in spiritual degradation. Not only is reality meaningless, as a classical nihilist might affirm. Whether it has meaning or not is irrelevant because reality isn't real.
Aside from the philosophical argument, I think computer science has a good line of argument against simulation theory. Unless the metaverse transcends logic/computation itself, then computer science actually has a lot to say about the topic. Even universe size computers can't bend some rules.
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39697206-ed-mastery
Seriously?
Then I realized this was targeted at a general audience...
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