gliese1337

Oh my gosh, I hate that "10th dimension" video so freaking much. It has done nothing but spread confusion and false understanding across the internet.

If it were just presented as a fun exploration of what 10 dimensions could be, for fictional purposes, it would be... OKish, I guess. But choosing "10" specifically makes people erroneously think that this is what string theory is about, which is completely wrong.

Additionally, it falls into the trap of assuming that curvature requires a higher dimension to curve in, and that nontrivial connectivity inherently requires such curvature, both of which are false and hard enough to explain to people who have not been explicitly taught wrongly already.

And on top of all of that, it perpetuates the faulty idea that "the" 5th dimension, or "the" 10th dimension are sensible concepts, by presenting its particular choice of dimensions to discuss and its particular choice of ordering of those dimensions as fact.

Correct. Proxy baptisms are never considered to make someone a member of the Church, precisely because it is not possible for the earthly Church to confirm with a dead person that they have given their consent. It is merely considered to make the opportunity for giving consent available to the person in the afterlife.

I know that. I went through it while learning Russian. Nevertheless, the spelling system is close enough that, in my experience, that is in fact the point of view held by the majority of native Russian speakers--if you hear a word and don't know how to spell it, or see a word and don't know how to pronounce it, you need to go back to school. It's not something worth holding national competition about, or an ability worth being proud of, and Russians I have known are consistently baffled by the concept of an English "spelling bee".

Yes. Speakers of Russian, for example, find the concept of a "spelling bee" to be completely nonsensical--if you hear a word and can't spell it, you must just be completely illiterate, and vice-versa.

I have heard this is the case for Spanish as well, but I don't have personal experience in that case.

That is a correct impression. A name, date, and associated place, with all three assumed to uniquely identify an individual in most cases, are required to perform the ordinance. Most typically, that's a birth name and a date and place of birth, date and place of death, or date and place of marriage.

If it turns out that there were two people with the same name born in the same town on the same day... well, the angels will help figure that out later.

Even discounting the procedural difficulties, which would make such a baptism invalid to the church, it doesn't count without knowledge and consent.

If you want to make realistic estimates of the bounds of how well you can do automation tasks without cameras, sure. But not really relevant for figuring out how useful "point a camera at it" can be.

Just think of how much stuff humans use "point eye at" for....

Which it has been known to do....

Important distinction: this is an epistemic "can", not a deontic "can".

In other words, they are saying that it is possible to keep your windows open if you want to and still not let noise in--not that you are permitted to cancel the noise, but must keep your windows open anyway.

I had initially thought this would be something about indoor CO2 buildup or something, but no.

I am not particularly impressed with the prospects for vehicle range extension. All-electric seems like The Way To Go at this point. But improved efficiencies for a home backup generator seem like a potentially really great thing.

The Electric Universe is a much different, much more wide-reaching bit of crackpottery than this.

They absolutely are. My wife is an ICU nurse, former ER nurse, and they've seen way more cases of purposeful suicide attempts and alcohol poisoning in the last few months.

I would think neutron stars accumulating material from a binary companion ought to be reasonably common. Unlike white dwarfs, they won't be able to blow themselves apart in supernovae, so they should just keep accumulating mass until they collapse into very small black holes.

And the state of EMR software pretty much supports the point that it is, indeed, nearly impossible to build new things under those constraints....

Rents, and house prices, are going up where I live, reportedly as a result of all of the people leaving California cities and moving here instead.

Sounds like a use-case for efficient homomorphic encryption.

Note that the price of gold is much higher than the price of helium.

If helium prices rise high enough, then yes, we will extract it from the atmosphere. And scientists will be sad because the they won't be able to afford as much of it anymore.

No, we won't. The whole point of fusion power is that it takes very little fuel to produce a lot of energy. That means very little helium ash produced.

If all of the world's current electric power production were fueled by fusion, the helium produced would be a drop in the bucket compared to the total existing helium market.

They do now. Because yes, they did re-establish the police force later. But step one was completely eliminating the existing force. 100% reset.

It worked for the country of Georgia. They disbanded their entire national police force, and violent crime immediately went down.

Russian also has a single word for the entire lower limb, leg and foot included: "noga". Also a single word for the combined arm and hand: "ruka".

You might like Russian, then.

"It's meant to" and "it does" are different things.

I get the impression that you are not very deeply connected with the general conlanging community. Eurolangs are only a very small part of the vast diversity!

> What if we tried to create, say, a language with a logographic written system that is pure WYSIWYM (as opposed to “what you see is how you pronounce”) and synthetic to boot?

UNLWS.

> Make it use vocal cords differently.

Dritok. Or, if you just mean "differently from Europe", any conlang which makes use of creaky voice.

> Instead of borrowing around, use a random seed in generating a minimum set of unique basic “native” words according to language rules and build on top of that (borrowing for meanings outside of that set).

So freaking common I can't even begin to list a representative set. The whole category of oligosynthetic languages does this (although the initial generation may not be completely random). There are multiple software packages for assisting with the generation of this kind of language.

It appears to me that the main selling point here is automatic parallelization, with futures/promises being abstracted away.

I separate my identity from my job, and my "work product" from my personal projects. If I get paid to make something for somebody else, it belongs to the person or organization who paid for it, and they can do what they want with it--including burning it down and throwing it away. I already have their money; what they do with their property is none of my business. As long as I know that I did a good job on what was asked of me, that's all that matters--I can be satisfied with my work.

Now, if they tried to tell me what to do with my own personal projects, we'd have problems!

True, but the point is not to produce a direct analogy--merely an existence proof.

The existence of quines is a nice proof that biology isn't magic. Consider an alternate history in which computer science develops before organic chemistry. Prior to the development of organic chemistry, some common beliefs about life were, for example, that living matter was fundamentally distinct from nonliving matter, and life could not arise from non-living components; and that obviously no mechanism could contain its own description, so the only way biological reproduction could work is if, say, sperm actually contained miniature complete organisms, which in turn contained even smaller complete organisms, in an infinite regress (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preformationism).

If, however, you can construct a quine, those beliefs are no longer "obvious". If you can write a program that replicates itself, then you can build a machine that replicates itself--and living organisms might well be such machines.

What, just because a feature got cancelled?

Heck, that's every single day at my last job. North of 50% of the code I ever worked on because a C-O insisted it was top priority got thrown in the trash. C-O screwed up, feature won't o to production, hurry up and work on this other thing instead? Oh, I guess it's Tuesday. Paychecks keep coming, I keep workin'....