Although there’s no recent history of terrorism in the British Antarctic Territory, attacks can’t be ruled out.
I’ve been enjoying this song lately. I get the impression this was a fairly well-known group back in the early 2000s, but that’s just slightly too early for me to have been paying any attention to pop music, so it seems they passed me by, and I only heard about them for the first time like a week ago.
TIL about the existence of people who modify their car exhausts to make their cars louder. I wondered why anybody would do such a thing, and found this article via a Google search, which seems to be saying that they do it just because… they want it to be louder? What? This behaviour is unfathomable to me.
How is this a TIL thing? I’ve been suffering these a*******s driving around being anti-social c***s filling the neighbourhood with noise pollution for years.
I think I’ve heard them before, I just assumed it was due to particular types of cars having a technological requirement for the extra noise or something like that, rather than it being something that was done just for kicks.
TIL about the existence of people who modify their car exhausts to make their cars louder. I wondered why anybody would do such a thing, and found this article via a Google search, which seems to be saying that they do it just because... they want it to be louder? What? This behaviour is unfathomable to me.
(After a list of built or restored temples:) I have done good for god and man, for the dead and the living. (So) why are illness, grief, demise and loss entangled with me? Discord in the country and strife in the family do not depart from my side. Disorder and evil matters constantly beset me. Unhappiness and bad health have bent my body. I finish my days in woe and alas. I am troubled (even) on the day of the city god, the festival day. Death holds and constricts me. Day and night, I moan. I am exhausted, my god, give (these things) to the irreverent, and let me see your light! For how long, O god, will you treat me this way? I have been treated like someone who does not revere gods or goddesses!
From an inscription of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria 669--631 BC (as translated in Mario Liverani, Assyria: The Imperial Mission, p. 23).
More information on the inscription at http://akkpm.org/P237924.html.
A random note about axiomatic set theory
According to Wikipedia:
In 1968, Azriel Lévy proved that von Neumann's axiom implies the axiom of union. First, he proved without using the axiom of union that every set of ordinals has an upper bound. Then he used a function that maps Ord onto V to prove that if A is a set, then ∪ A is a set.[8]
I think there is a simpler way to prove this, although it requires the axiom of foundation. Suppose A is a set. By the axiom of limitation of size (“von Neumann’s axiom” in the quotation above), ∪A being a proper class means there is a surjection f : ∪A → V, where V is the class of all sets. So every set belongs to f*(B) = {f(x) : x ∈ B} for some B ∈ A. Now, by the axiom of replacement (which is an easy consequence of the axiom of limitation of size), since A is a set, so is C = {f*(B) : B ∈ A}. Hence C belongs to f*(B) for some B ∈ A. But f*(B) belongs to C, so this contradicts the axiom of foundation.
Writing in Markdown is annoying because I can never remember which way round the link syntax is---URL before text, or text before URL?
Pokemon Reborn is officially completed. It is in my opinion the best Pokemon game ever.
It’s beautiful, fun, challenging, well-paced, innovative, expansive, clever, poignant, well-produced, funny, and the product of 10 years of work, with so much to show for it. I recommend it to anyone willing to potentially spend a lot of time on a Pokemon game.
Check out this wallpaper!
I started playing this game based on the above recommendation and it is indeed pretty awesome! I haven’t been this fully engrossed in a video game for a long time.
Questions I’ve asked Google via the Firefox searchbar since 2016
Specifically via the Firefox searchbar; I just found out that any text you enter there is recorded in an sqlite database in your Firefox profile in a file called formhistory.sqlite, so I thought it would be mildly interesting to make a list of all the search queries I’ve made that I explicitly phrased as questions.
2019-present (current laptop)
"what happened to derovolk" but seriously, are jackdaws crows can you have multiple bank accounts can you pay into two isas at once can you temporarily pause a vm so it doesn't lock up the host did an american president ever visit the soviet union did lord liverpool have anything to do with liverpool did we really need a third orangutan species does python autoseed does the countdown assistant cheat how did reagan destroy the soviet union how do i know if my host can support a vm how do you reconstruct a song from the chords how long should you keep a database connection open how much does a twitch sub cost how much ram do i have how to add more ram how to charge philips shaver how to do a sit up how to do a squat how to electrocute yourself at home how to play territorial.io how to remove earwax how to ssh into a headless virtualbox vm how to take screenshot from phone how to use bleach for toilet how to wash headphones how to wear earbuds philips series 7000 how to charge philips series 7000 how to clean philips series 7000 remove stuck haird python when do objects get deleted sshould i disable vertical sync was iceland an american protectorate was india under the east india company part of britain what are the modern mosasaurs what if the queen dies before the jubilee what is a vtuber what is my steam account name what the fuck is corecursion what to do if you stab yourself in the eye what's going on in libya what's the point of paypal when can i use arial when is eurovision on where are america's nuclear weapons located why are electric shavers so bad why are my texts green why deprecate xmp why do you need a login to download from steam workshop why does armchair historian talk weird why does the english translation of the internationale suck so much why does virtualbox suck so much why elasmosaurus neck why is british gas website so slow why isn't let syntactic sugar hindley-milner why perl zero truthy why tail call optimization why use a virtual machine for devellopment will saif gaddafi win the election in libya
2016-2019 (old laptop)
are uniform spaces any use breath of the wild what's good against electricity does every multivariate polynomial have a root does instagram work on desktop does northern ireland have a government yet does the master sword break forth why two stacks how expensive are comparison instructions how long can a whale stay underwater how many history graduates in uk how much arithmetic for godel's incompleteness how to answer recruiters at work how to apply for a phd how to buy a house how to compress my pictures how to compress pdfs how to convert int to float how to find a house to rent how to make a tumblr theme how to rent a house how to save pictures from snapchat how to solve a cubic how to start a django project how to upload snapchat memories to computer how to use texlive instead of mixtex is a switch statement more efficient than a function pointer table is catnip edible is every subgroup an image is it easy to get a job at tesco is it faster to load signed or unsigned is python compiled is scorbunny going to be fire fighting is uninstalling the battery driver safe python how to make a package should you shut down your computer every day what is a mechanical keyboard what is a star refinement what is causation what is the third pokemon in let's go eevee what is the use of a nop instruction what sets the zero flag what will ed sheeran's next album be called when are monics injective where are snapchat memories stored where is horse meat eaten where is snorlax who proved the fundamental theorem of algebra why are uniformities not popular why do worms have segments why does overleaf require a constant connection to the server why formulas as types and not formulas as values why is fairy good against dragon why is ice good against ground why is isomorphism interesting why is snapchat's user interface so bad why is the tv license not a tax why is type theory intuitionistic why k for a field
The people within Koyan, Kazakhstan have been affected by the radiation and have suffered from radiation caused illnesses just as other surrounding areas have. However, unlike other communities, the citizens of Koyan have formed an identity around this fact.[14] The people consider themselves to be a new breed of human, a step-up evolution. As they understand it, they are mutants who have grown and adapted to the radiation present in their home.[14] In their eyes, the air and food are poisonous, and the people consume this and yet live. Thus, they must be adapting to the radiation and that is why people only get a 'little sick'. They even have begun to believe that they are so used to radiation that their bodies require it.[14] This belief has stemmed from the fact that the majority of individuals that moved away from the city died within two years. As such, to those left behind, it seems that the lack of radiation killed them. This has further cemented their belief that they are 'radioactive mutants'.[14]
The locals also believe that their status is backed by science.[14] The basis of this was a training exercise performed by the Comprehensive Test-Ban-Treaty Organization (CTBTO).[14] The exercise was based around a hypothetical nuclear explosion, so they came in wearing full protective gear. The citizens of Koyan witnessed this but were not informed of the 'exercise' status nor the reason for the outsiders' presence. As such the citizens perceived strangers having to wear protective gear to enter the area around their community while they, the residents, had no need.[14] This further cemented their belief that they must be radioactive mutants as other people seemed to need protection to exist within their home.
Apparently this is the Usenet thread where the “you decide to solve your problem with a regular expression, now you have two problems” thing comes from. Reading it was a somewhat amusing experience.
Dualities between depth-first search and breadth-first search
Dualities between depth-first search and breadth-first search
Something which I think is fairly well-known among programmers (I first learned it from reading Higher Order Perl) is that depth-first search and breadth-first search can be implemented in such a way that they differ only in their choice of data structure—depth-first search uses a stack (where you add to and remove from the same end), breadth-first search uses a queue (where you add to one end…
There’s a StackOverflow question asking “why is ‘0′ false in Perl”. The answers explain that in Perl, there isn’t really supposed to be a distinction between numbers and strings—you just have a single class of scalar values, which are treated as numbers or strings depending on the context. So ‘0′ is basically the same thing as 0, it’s just treated as a number in some contexts and a string in others. Hence, since 0 is false, so is ‘0′.
Unfortunately, it seems this only goes so far. Today I found out that while ‘0′ is false, any other string representation of 0, such as ‘0.0′ or ‘00′, is true. So the Perl literals ‘0.0′ and ‘00′ are true, but the Perl literals 0.0 and 00 are false, which means the “scalar value” abstraction breaks down as soon as you try to test whether a scalar value with the semantics of a potentially non-integer number is zero or not, which is hardly an obscure edge case.
As far as I can see you could make the “scalar value” abstraction work better by just making any string representation of 0 false rather than ‘0′, but it seems Perl’s designers got confused and made the wrong choice. Which would be a good reason to suspect that the whole type-ambiguous “scalar value” thing might be misguided in the first place.
Pretty sure there’s at least one standard function which makes use of the fact that you can have truthy string representations of 0. It sometimes wants to return the number 0, but that’s a successful result that it doesn’t want you thinking is unsuccessful. (Maybe it returns false or undef on a failure?) So it returns the string “0 but true”, and when you use that as a number it becomes 0.
Yeah, I know DBI returns ‘0e0′ when call its method to execute a query and the query affects 0 rows, so that you can distinguish it from undef which it returns on error, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar idiom was used elsewhere. The reason it does this is so that you can write something like $dbh->do($statement) or die ($errorstr). I suppose it makes sense if you’re going all-in on the Perl way of thinking.
This week seems to be tackle-messy-Perl-issues week at work. Yesterday I thought I had found a bug due to the differing truth values of string representations of zero (though eventually it turned out to be a red herring). Today I ended up having to write the equivalent of this absurd line of code:
$x = 0 if $x == 0;
This was in order to make $x equal-as-a-string to ‘0′ if it was equal-as-a-number to ‘0′, since I was passing it into a template which needed to check if it was zero to change the text it was displaying, and the template language (Template Toolkit) was only capable of checking equality-as-a-string. You could argue that the template language is at fault here really for not being expressive enough for Perl’s needs.
Another one which comes up not too uncommonly at work, and which I dealt with another instance of today, is where somebody writes a hash like
key1 => something, key2 => something_else,
and “something” is a function that returns nothing, which is interpreted as the empty list in list context (and anything in a hash is in list context, because hashes are really just lists), which causes the value associated with ‘key1′ to actually be ‘key2′.
There’s a StackOverflow question asking “why is ‘0′ false in Perl”. The answers explain that in Perl, there isn’t really supposed to be a distinction between numbers and strings---you just have a single class of scalar values, which are treated as numbers or strings depending on the context. So ‘0′ is basically the same thing as 0, it’s just treated as a number in some contexts and a string in others. Hence, since 0 is false, so is ‘0′.
Unfortunately, it seems this only goes so far. Today I found out that while ‘0′ is false, any other string representation of 0, such as ‘0.0′ or ‘00′, is true. So the Perl literals ‘0.0′ and ‘00′ are true, but the Perl literals 0.0 and 00 are false, which means the “scalar value” abstraction breaks down as soon as you try to test whether a scalar value with the semantics of a potentially non-integer number is zero or not, which is hardly an obscure edge case.
As far as I can see you could make the “scalar value” abstraction work better by just making any string representation of 0 false rather than ‘0′, but it seems Perl’s designers got confused and made the wrong choice. Which would be a good reason to suspect that the whole type-ambiguous “scalar value” thing might be misguided in the first place.
The Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (OED-substitute-sort of for the Welsh language) is a pretty cool resource, but I keep discovering horrible new things about its website.
Initially I noticed that the website almost totally failed to load in Firefox (my usual browser). This is what it looks like:
That wasn’t too big of a deal, just meant I had to open up Chrome.
Then I noticed that I was unable to copy any text from within the entries and paste it elsewhere, which is something it’d be quite convenient to be able to do since the entries are written in Welsh, with no English translation available (as far as I can see. You can translate the general UI of the site but not the entries themselves). So I’d like to be able to use Google Translate, but the only way I can do that is by painstakingly retyping any text I want to translate. And yes, I would like to learn Welsh and reading GPC entries is a good opportunity for practice, but still. Sometimes I just want it to be less work, y’know? I do feel like this might all be part of a cunning plot to force anybody interested in Celtic philology to learn Welsh...
What I noticed just today was that, although entries sometimes contain links to other entries, you can’t open these links in a new tab or window. After all they don’t actually go anywhere, it’s all a single-page app so they probably just trigger JavaScript actions. If you want to open the linked entry while keeping a view of the original entry, your only option is to open a new tab, type the GPC URL there, and search for the linked entry. Which isn’t that much trouble, but it is a bit of an annoyance.
(I was also going to complain about the lack of a “Back” button that would work when following these inter-entry links, but then I realized there is one... I mean, it’s not the browser’s “Back” button, which is bad, and it’s right in the middle of the top menubar, which is the last place you’d expect a “Back” button to be, and rather easy to miss among the other identically-styled menu items, so that’s also pretty bad. Another problem for me was that in the Welsh UI, which, by the way, you get back every time you load the URL into a new tab [since it doesn’t seem to store a cookie for your language preference or anything], the button is naturally titled not “Back” but “Yn ôl”, but maybe I ought to have that basic bit of vocabulary by now.)
Welsh stress is weird* and kind of fascinating. I’m listening to this phrase and getting a sort of Yanny-Laurel effect; depending on what I anticipate, I can hear it as either Tywýsog Cýmru or Tywysóg Cymrú.
* Well, I don’t know how cross-linguistically weird it is, but I haven’t heard of a language having a stress system like this before.
Introductions to Welsh will generally tell you that Welsh generally has stress on the penultimate syllable, except for a small minority of words which have stress on the final syllable. However, it turns out things are a bit more complicated than this, and it looks like it’s something of a murky aspect of Welsh phonology, without any single clear account in the literature. Generally it’s acknowledged that with these words that are “stressed on the penultimate syllable”, there is actually also a stress in some sense in the final syllable---some of the acoustic correlates of stress (as found in other languages) occur on the penultimate syllable, while others occur on the final syllable.
In particular, it’s often remarked on that the highest pitch is generally to be found on the final syllable, rather than the penultimate syllable. So one way of looking at it might be that Welsh has a pitch accent in one place (the final syllable), and a stress accent in another place (the penultimate syllable), which is pretty interesting. Hannahs (2013: 42--43) seems to be satisfied with this account.
The interesting part then to me is what characterises the stress on the penultimate syllable. I guess is part of the general question of how to characterise “stress accent”, which is also a bit of a tricky one. Welsh would seem to be an important language to study in this respect since its stress accent is totally divorced from its pitch accent.
The most detailed account of the phonetics of Welsh stress I could find is in Ball & Williams (2001: 165--185). They list four acoustic phenomena that can be involved in stress:
- higher pitch
- greater vowel quantity
- greater loudness
- more peripheral (less centralized) realisation of the vowel
Besides (1), they observe that (2) and (4) don’t seem to apply very well to the Welsh stressed penults. Welsh has phonemic vowel length, and long vowels only occur in stressed penults and monosyllables; however, short vowels also occur in stressed penults, and when they did some measurements, they found that short vowels were consistently longer in unstressed final syllables than in stressed penults, and in fact there was no difference between the length of short vowels in stressed penults and the length of short vowels in unstressed syllables from before the penult.
As for (4), they observe that in Welsh, the schwa is perfectly well capable of appearing in stressed penults (as in the words Tywysog and Cymru). In fact it’s pretty common in that position. It does have a restriction on its occurrence, but the restriction is that it can’t occur in non-final syllables. In this respect it seems like (4) might be like (1) in that it’s actually a feature of the final syllable in Welsh. There are also apparently some Welsh dialects which have schwa in stressed penults corresponding to unreduced vowels in other dialects (suggesting that reduction to schwa can still productively occur with the present-day stress system of the language) and that these “stressed” schwas can even be elided completely in fast speech!
So that leaves (3), but they don’t seem to actually talk about this at all, unless I missed something.
Instead they talk about two other things which might be involved in the perception of the stressed penult:
1. Rhythm---basically the idea that there tends to be a regular interval between stressed vowels, so the stressed vowels could be identified by the fact that they occur at these regular intervals. Some measurements are done to back this up, which find a negative correlation between the mean syllable duration within a foot and the number of syllables within the foot. The correlation is pretty weak though, so this doesn’t seem (to me) like a very strong explanation.
2. Consonant quantity. It turns out that in Welsh, though there are no phonemic geminates, consonants do tend to be geminated after stressed vowels. This is actually quite a well-known feature of the Welsh English accent, which I guess has filtered through from Welsh. Ball & Williams don’t really talk about this very much; they seem to favour the rhythm account. I guess one problem might be that there might be limits on which consonants get geminated. Hannahs (2013: 21) talks about this allophonic gemination a bit, but she doesn’t at any point say that it can happen to any consonant---she says that there is “widespread agreement” that it happens with voiceless stops and that it “may also” happen with /m/, /ŋ/, /s/ and /ɬ/. On the other hand, Awbery (2009: 368) says generically that “following a stressed short vowel, a single consonant is slightly lengthened”. Listening to other recordings on Forvo by the speaker linked above, it seems clear that she, at least, is geminating other consonants such as /n/ (https://forvo.com/word/manon/#cy), /ð/ (https://forvo.com/word/addysg/), and even /d/ after /n/ (https://forvo.com/word/blinder/#cy---by the way this /d/ is also fully devoiced! for this speaker the contrast between the stops seems to be purely one of aspiration)
If gemination only occurs after short vowels, that’s not a problem, since a long vowel indicates the presence of stress by itself. It seems plausible to me that the main indicator of penult stress in Welsh is actually syllable duration, with the syllable-final consonant being lengthened when the vowel in the syllable is phonemically short.
References
Awbery, Gwenllian (2009). Welsh. In: Ball, Martin J. & Müller, Nicole (eds.), The Celtic Languages (2nd edition), pp. 359--426.
Ball, Martin J. & Williams, Briony (2001). Welsh Phonetics. The Edwin Mellen Press.
Hannahs, S. J. (2013). The Phonology of Welsh. Oxford University Press.
Anonymous asked:
Please. Please can you tell me what a baeddel is and why people (terfs?) used it in a derogatory manner on this website for a hot minute but now no one ever uses it at all
you asked for it, fucker
[2k words; philology and drama]