CallMeV

I participated in a little Hol veS with Arika Okrent on a radio programme a while back. It was a challenge, and I won with honour.

I think that the people who mock conlangs the most tend to come from monoglot environments, so probably even those people, who seek to study natlangs outside of the one language they know, may baffle and perplex the monoglots.

Those who come from bilingual or polyglot backgrounds (myself included), on the other hand, would probably consider conlangs as just yet more, different languages to add to the lists of those languages they already know.

Mercury has some exhilarating mysteries, and I look forward to seeing the probe unlock them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12904585

"According to Paul Baccas, a senior threat researcher at Sophos, the link featured in an article about US investor Warren Buffet and took users to a fake banking site.

""It went to a third-party site, bankling.com, where users were redirected to a fake anti-virus page given a prompt saying their computer was infected and encouraging them to download a fix," he said.

"In reality, the fix contained malware.

"The exploit only affected users of Internet Explorer, including the most recent versions. Other browsers, including Firefox, were not affected.

"The slip will be embarrassing for the government, especially as Prime Minister David Cameron had helped launch the site and the Number 10 website linked prominently to it."

A small step forward, sure ... but I don't like the direction that step has taken us so far.

HN discussion link:- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387009

And yes, I thoroughly agree with your assertions about Labour, too. Right now, Parliament seems to be at its lowest ebb in terms of talent, honour, honesty or any kind of acumen.

We have not been led by so many, possessing so little clue, for generations.

This scheme feels particularly slipshod in its execution. I'd welcome a £1500 bursary to start up a business - who wouldn't? - but looking at this, I discovered that an entrepreneur looking to set up any business through this site would, in fact, not actually get any sort of money to help them whatsoever.

Here lies the hamartia, the fatal flaw, of this site: it is not what it seems. Your article just confirms all of my fears.

I'm sharing this with some people I know, who have an interest in the scheme. This article will have a marked effect on their decisions. Thanks for bringing it here.

Bingo.

If I had to like or upvote only one thing today, anywhere, I would upvote this. I seriously wish I could upvote it twice.

Thank you for reminding me.

Nobody's "least valuable" unless their entire existence seems to serve to act to the detriment to absolutely everybody around them.

Any lazy journalist can just sit back, crib a whole bunch of feed and stills and press releases floating off he internet and boilerplate it into the column inches without bothering to make even the most cursory check for facts, but there's a word for such slack jawed lacklustre button pushing: churnalism.

People used to complain about news helicopters flying over scenes of disasters such as flooding, saying things like "Why don't they pick up some of the stragglers and ship them to safety?"

The answer is: Because that is not their job.

Reporting on what is going on is. And that means going in there, asking questions, getting the agency to rope in a native speaker to translate where needed, and actually bearing witness to the sort of things that end up on your screen, or in print.

They have to go in there and report, because nobody else is going to - and if nobody else reports, nobody will know how bad things are until that ignorance comes back and bites us.

Journalists - at least the ones truly earning their crust - do what they do because they have a compelling need to show the world what they do not know, and need to know.

They are the ones whose job it is to bear witness.

The BBC is paid for by the British television license payer, not the taxpayer. Otherwise, spot on. Journalists need to eat, too.

Currently I have, and am enjoying, his book The Music of The Primes.

Useful links in these discussions, by the way, including the link in the original post. Thank you.

Considering where I live, my threshold's surprisingly low. If I double it, I'd put aside that surplus for my retirement. It's good to have the ambition of living without ambitions.

How long has it been since the "Amazonian tribe that cannot count" has been refuted? What is the name of this "Amazonian tribe?" How did the anthropologist hear of the existence of this tribe? How did he contact with it? How long did he study with it? How many people did it claim before it was made extinct by logging operations?

So many other questions that I'll bet could not be answered because that damned "Amazonian tribe that can only count in binary" never existed.

This raises the question of what people call "beautiful," "attractive," "ugly" and "unattractive" respectively: purely subjective measures which do not take into account the fact that some of the wealthiest, most successful and smartest people in the world look physically ugly, scrawny, geeky or otherwise "unattractive" by the standards the experimenters seem to have set.

Consider Bill Gates, Gandhi, Einstein, Steve Buscemi, Mick Jagger and Donald Trump. Each a genius in their respective fields, yet hardly the most perfect-looking physical specimens.

Enough evidence exists of the existence of physically unattractive, socially intelligent people with high IQs to provide sufficient data to refute the argument above.

Those conducting the experiment simply appear to have begun with an assumption and then selected only evidence which confirms the assumption, ignoring counterindicative data.

I really would not take the findings of this experiment seriously without some form of verification - for instance, a repetition of the experiment by another team in another part of the US, perhaps repetition of the experiment with other nationalities and so on.

The writers know what they are doing; this parody of mathematics is exactly how real mathematics sounds like to a lay person. This is nonsense, sure: but so is the satirical poetry of Lewis Carroll and the poems of Edward Lear, and the most erudite experts in the English language derive much pleasure from reading such nonsense.

Indeed, the more sophisticated the mind, the greater the need for self-parodies such as this show.

It's a business that demands maximum efficiency. No fat. All lean meat. Physically, as well as metaphorically. A lesson for us all.