frodetb

You're right, that line from Shakespeare is even quoted in the paper. From the list of sayings they had collected from various languages, Greek seems like the most popular comparison, followed by Chinese. But since there's a Greek saying that uses Chinese in its comparison, it is Chinese that ends up at the end of the graph.

Edit: I went back to check and that is not right. Chinese wins out by a lot. I simply misremembered.

This paper reads like a long-form-shitpost of the highest quality. Both made me laugh and taught me something interesting. Of course, which language another uses to explain that something sounds like gibberish does not tell you anything about which is harder. And, judging by their flimsy yet insistent and very eloquent justification of their methodology, the authors were well aware of that.

It is very cool to see Chinese coming out on top. As for the Norwegian that they left blank, I'll be happy to add that we use Greek to express that something is unintelligible:

    Det er helt Gresk for meg.

Years ago, I was talking to a friend about IASIP, South Park, and Arrested Development, and why they had held up so well. I argued that it partly had to do with the fact that the characters were already so extreme, they were resistant to Flanderization.

I'm making no judgement call here, with respect to the "cardinal sins". I'm only highlighting that we've worried about committing them since forever, unlike what the author is suggesting.

> > We humans are, deep down, lazy and gluttonous creatures. If left to our own devices, we will do nothing but eat Pringles and watch Netflix. The only way we can escape our indolent nature is to exert our higher faculties over our base instincts.

> First, humans are not “naturally” lazy, because humans are not “naturally” anything. ... We’re different today not because our genes changed, but because our culture changed.

But those faults are in fact undeniably persistent to us as a species. It is not without reason that many of our religions, since antiquity, have framed this issue, man's struggle against his impulses, against his baser self, as the struggle against evil.

If you're of the opinion that religion is bad for the same reasons that those motivational coaches are bad, then I think you still have to admit that this fight against our selves is far from novel.

That is a great example. I've been bounced between different sides in that exact field myself, on various topics.

Everyone has an opinion about food too, I find. Diets and science and morals and ethics. So, when I meet someone who has their feet firmly on either side of some issue, and are more knowledgable than me about their viewpoint, I can usually get a good talk out of it. Since I know a little bit, I can ask good questions as if from the other camp, and we can challenge eachother's statements. In the end I might yield the debate to make peace and show that I'm not really in opposition, though I may secretly still remain unpersuaded. But I'm sure to have had my internal debate enriched with food for thought! And it might even have turned into an enjoyable and memorable social encounter.

Why this pressure to make me necessarily reject or accept an idea? Seems like a false dichotomy. Instead, why can't I be aware of all sorts of ideas, have them bouncing around my head, loosely held, and believe more or less in them, even opposing ones, as I learn more?

I'm never really sure about anything, really, so there's a constant internal debate going on over various topics. While that's not necessarily good for making quick decisions, I do appreciate the mental flexibility that my uncertainty ends up giving me. Weird, controversial, silly, or obvious ideas can be useful also in order to connect with other viewpoints, practicing empathy in a way.

One should always strive to consider side effects as far as possible, but there are obviously limitations. The number of effects to consider increases exponentially with the order of thinking. Weighing them against each other becomes harder as well, as the scope increases and effects may no longer be tightly tied within the same domain. Probabilities necessarily become part of the equation, and they only become fuzzier the higher the level. A sufficiently high order of thinking becomes essentially to predict butterfly effects.

Not that this makes the task impossible, within some scope. Games like Chess have a similar kind of chaotic unpredictability, yet people get really good at thinking many moves ahead and ignoring dead-end paths. Higher order is better, as far as you can be confident. But the real world is huge, and full of unknowns, so higher order conclusions will be as highly up for debate.

The other day, while collecting my childhood belongings from my mother's house, I found my old peg-solitaire set. The following week I was totally obsessed with it, playing it all the time, sharing it with all my friends, and I ended up discovering some really nifty facts about it.

I quickly found that as starting positions go, only certain specific choices for the first open hole would make the game winnable (in the sense that you remove all except one peg). For others there would always be at least two pegs left. I also found that the final relative configuration was to a large degree decided (modulo some relative shift) by your choice of initial configuration.

After gaining intuition I decided to apply some rigor, so I went about things mathematically and found an invariant! That is, I found a way to compute, from any board state, a number between 0 and 15, which would be the same after any legal move. This meant that there were (at least) 16 groups of board states that were inaccessible from each other by legal moves. And of these 16 groups, only 9 were congruent with a board state containing just one peg. In particular, the octagon board (the one I had as a kid, apparently referred to as the French variant) with the center peg missing in the starting position is not solvable!

Once I felt that I was done with investigating the puzzle for myself, I started searching around online and found that my results were (unsurprisingly) far from novel, and were in fact only scratching the surface of what brighter mathematicians had found over the years. But that only made me more happy with my findings, because it confirmed to me that I was right and also that other people were interested in this thing.

I've thought about writing an interactive article presenting the findings I made and intuitions I used. Perhaps I'll post it on here once I'm done with it.

According to the input hypothesis of language acquisition, the ability to speak is a function of how much we've already heard/read/taken in, and understood. If you're someone who enjoys reading, and you find that parsing weird syntax comes easy to you, then you're all set for learning a language with something like the refold method[1]. You just gotta put in the possibly staggering amount of hours that it takes.

[1] https://www.refold.la

I'm not sure what the version was, and it was probably an earlier version if there are multiple. This was around 2-3 years ago.

I was not able to use this thing comfortably. I think my handwriting style might not be optimal for it, as too small details and tight loops seemed to disappear on me. My handwriting is pretty small to begin with, and only gets tinier with subscripts and tiny details in mathematical writing.

There was also a slight input delay that I found annoying. I love writing on paper, and so if the experience is significantly inferior I won't be sold. I totally disagree with the author's claim that this thing provides a superior writing experience, unless they've improved on their designs and it now actually does feel like paper.

I would instead highly recommend a much cheaper, though dumber, yet far superior LCD-slate (like one of these: https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-howshow-lcd-writing-t...). The writing is instant, and even the tightest loops and smallest details will show up as if on paper (though green-on-black). When I was in university, I would use this for sketches in discussions, rough calculations and drafts, and saved a ton of paper that I would otherwise just have thrown away.

The fact that it wouldn't let me save stuff or share my drawings didn't bother me at all. Worst case scenario, I'd just take a picture of it.

The title of the comic also kind of encourages it.

I did close mine completely, early this January, and have since only occasionally been affected when encountering businesses like the ones you describe. However, I view those occasions as a chance to push back against that bad trend, reminding them that there are people willing to give them money that they simply won't reach. While the push is small and they probably have already accounted for this loss in their strategies, I think it is better than nothing.

I've tried watching dubbed+subbed shows, with both set to my target language, and the two rarely ever match for any given line of dialogue. Netflix has thankfully expanded their language capabilities recently to make it easier to watch shows in an arbitrary language (used to have to change the entire interface into the target language), but I wish there were a CC option for all choices of audio.

I play a lot of NES tetris, so this actually threw my instincts for a loop. What I think is most satisfying is when I pull off a "tetris", i.e. get 4 lines at a time with a long-bar. This implementation seems greedier, as it seems to want to give you the pieces necessary to complete any line at all.

I worked around it until I got a well on the right hand side, at which point all I got was long-bars. This is the cleanest path I could find to an infinite run of tetrises: ذටරऍƐඥժݹߝɿඍݷ౫ටฅڝ௨పໃܡ௨ඖІݮ௨ഗƊݹɷඝܘܢ௨پܘݓ௨ಮІܦ௨ชІݶΗʈາђடටවݹदඦܘݣ௨ಬໃƎௐڌໃݷಒටԠђௐڊಸݹࠂƣຜࡁரڀฮࡁਓȺಥɜਆ

I think this is very interesting. As systems of distributed governance and smart contracts mature and emerge, I wonder if this sort of thing will be a step on the way for the old world to keep up.

>Features:

> - It's Tetris.

Not sure what I was expecting.

Well, humans are more likely to be interested in bad news. As a survival strategy, that happens to be a good place to direct ones attention. Unfortunately for The News, our attention and so their source of income is getting harder and harder to come by. Given all that, and coupled with how entirely central and all-consuming Covid-19 has become as a topic the past year-and-a-half, these results shouldn't be all that shocking. I wonder how it might compare to any of the upcoming catastrophic or disruptive phenomenons of the 2020s.

Love the idea! Though I would have used the singular imperative more, so e.g.

  salūtat (he/she/it salutes) -> salūtā (salute!)  
  sedēs (you sit) -> sedē (sit!)  
  tacēte (be quiet, y'all!) -> tacē (be quiet!)

and maybe the subjunctive for "us"-suggestions, so

  ambulāmus (we walk) -> ambulēmus (let's walk)

I have been studying Latin by my self for the past couple of years, and would recommend anyone looking at this to instead consider learning Latin by the Dowling Method. It is simpler and much more straightforward than any course. It essentially boils down to memorizing all of Latin's regular grammatical forms, and then reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata with those tables fresh in mind.

It may seem old-fashioned, but I think this is the best strategy for learning such a highly inflected and essentially dead language, especially if you only have experience with mostly analytical languages to begin with. Much of what makes this work is the work of genius that is LLPSI, but I have come to see the value of this strategy for language learning in general. If you are as convinced of the input-hypothesis as me, then you might agree that this is the quickest way to get reading independently in Latin, which is where most learning will take place.

The only objection I have with Dowling's method, is that you should start reading LLPSI immediately, rereading chapters over and over while you are memorizing the tables. Only pace yourself, and don't rush on to chapters covering grammar that you haven't started memorizing yet. If you get bored with old chapters, pick up the companion books, like Fabellae Latinae, for more reading materials.

I wrote my masters on using simulated annealing to solve a particular optimisation problem. In a sense, the Gibbs sampler lies at its core, and I really have to agree with you in what you say. At the time I did not have time to think too deeply or too much about it, but I have since really been increasingly awestruck with it, with thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in general, and analogies that can be drawn to all kinds of disciplines.

Since your screen is most likely flat, you'd have to hold the camera directed straight at it and at a bit of a distance in order for their face not to get distorted by perspective. Even a slight angle would make it appear to the algorithm that they have too big of a forehead/chin, or an asymmetric face (otherwise known as a 5/10).

I've done the same thing, and started out with an extremely dumb feature phone. Maps and IM were the biggest losses, and meant I needed to plan activities to a much larger degree before going out.

I'd have details settled with friends before leaving my connection to the group chat. I'd plan out my route in google maps and try to memorize where destinations were and how to get to them.

Of these two, only the lack of maps is a real step back. I've come to appreciate the need for clear planning that comes out of not having my group chats with me constantly.

The feature phone was doomed from the start, since it only had a 2G connection which is going away. But then that phone broke after a rainstorm, and I got a Nokia 2720 Flip running KaiOS. It has 4G, can work as a wifi hotspot, and has a version of Google Maps that is surprisingly not-terrible. With that, I lost my only real pain points. AND I have a cool retro looking satisfyingly flippy flip-phone.

I highly reccommend it to anyone who wants to listen.

Remarkable video. For the longest time I couldn't decide whether he was serious or not. An hour of talking about hand shapes seems like a long-form shitpost, especially since Lindybeige has a very sarcastic air about him. But I did wind up being fascinated withing just a few minutes.

Curious. I've noticed a number of people using Gödel's incompleteness theorem as a ridiculously stretched metaphor for some idea they're trying to get across. At this point it's gotten utterly cringey to me. It reeks of someone who only recently heard about it, got a conceptual understanding for what it's about, and now want to show off and force the comparison in the first conversation they have. Seems like a more obscure version of the meme that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle has become.

This one is the most egregious case I've seen though. It seems like it would be a waste of time to read, so I closed out fairly quickly. Have I misjudged the article?

Thanks! I've been listening to gamelan music for the past couple of hours now, and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. From my limited exposure, I get the impression that the music leans on repetition of sound patterns to give the listener something to hold onto musically, creating more of an atmosphere of sound than a melody you might hum along to. Is that fair to say? Perhaps I just need more exposure before things "click".

I might compare this non-harmonic genre with the artist Sevish, whose work I've enjoyed a great deal. He too tries to step out of the realm of 12-tone equal temperament. Some of his work is quite reminiscent in structure to this gamelan music (e.g. Desert Island Rain). However, he also manages to build melodies and something you could probably call chord progressions (though I wouldn't know), in a new and very foreign musical world (his entire album Harmony Hacker is amazing). Besides the music being amazing, getting used to this new landscape is enjoyable in and of itself.

My point about the drums, though, was more aimed at what scales, chord progressions and melodies might be developed by a species who had as harmonic basis the drum's spectrum of resonant frequencies. We, by comparison, have the integer multiple of some base frequency, the canonical "harmonic sequence", whereas for them it would be quite different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membr...

A drum is a good example, though we don't often think of it as a melodic instrument. The resonant modes of a drum don't look anything like someting as nice as those of strings, with their integer multiple frequencies. Makes you wonder, what music might have been like if our ear was more "drum-based" than "string-based" (however that might work).

Quite a bold title. My understanding (while limited) is that the human ear senses sound by means of tiny hairs in the inner ear that vibrate in resonance with incoming sound waves. I've always believed that the reason certain intervals are more harmonious to us than others was because there would be some overlap in hairs that resonated for the different harmonious pitches. The same way guitar strings will resonate with other strings that are tuned an octave, or perfect fifth, or fourth higher, these ear-hairs ought to behave by the same physical laws and principles.

As such, I'm a bit skeptical of the method and conclusion of this research. It seems like physics to me, not psychology. Ability to reproduce pitches and intervals does not strike me as entirely related to what they were trying to find out.

How about instead playing different soundbites, of consonant and dissonant pitches, and asking for their opinion in some way? Maybe even allowing the participant to find a relationship by some sliding instrument themself? That would seem more aimed at studying the Tsimané's ability at "perceiving octaves."

Maybe my interpretation of the header and conclusion is wrong. Perhaps the idea is that _some training_ is needed in order to perceive octaves, the same way _some training_ is needed in order to learn how to walk. That I might be able to wrap my head around.

> Plainly put, poor countries are poor because those that have power make choices that create poverty.

Simple enough, almost sounds tautological. If truly all the causes listed in the beginning of the article don't amount to an explanation, then there's little left to point at than the governing powers.

I'd like some more proof before I'm convinced that inclusivity in government is _the_ smoking gun, but I don't think it is controversial to say "democracy good."