mablap

Oh friend, I am not American but we share similar childhood memories. I have traveled much in America and McDonald's/IHOPs/Denny's were a staple breakfast!

When I was in Japan, I would often eat breakfast in a hurry by getting some groceries from 7-11. Such a breafast would usually consist of a smal pack of fried rice, with a pastry or two, and some juice or milk, for about 500Y if I remember correctly. Everything tasted good, but I cannot say it was "healthier" than what I'd have in America. But again, that was a 7-11 5 minute breakfast...

Gah.... instead of shaking my head in disbelief/disagreement/disappointment/stupefaction once again, I will simply wish you the best of luck in your endeavours and bail out from this impass.

    I think you can’t accept that there are many concepts that
    can’t be expressed in any language other than English.

I cannot accept such an absurdity, because it is false. I am also a scientist trained in theoretical physics and I have received my education in French, a colleague had his in Portuguese, another in Mandarin, yet another in French/Arabic and our professors and PIs had theirs in German, English, French, Spanish and Romanian (that I know of, could be more).

You are right that at conferences people speak English, and we speak English in group meetings for the simple reason that it's the common denominator. There is no other reason. We have scientific discussions in French and English, some have them in German or Arabic, it doesn't matter because they're all equally capable of describing scientific thought.

I think the point you're trying to make is that the scientific vocabulary in some languages, in some scientific fields, sometimes doesn't keep up with that of English. This I would concede to you. But usually, just like English does, the other languages simply borrow the new words (or craft the usually obvious equivalents using greek/latin or whatever). This has nothing to do with a language's inherent capacity of describing concepts, as you maintain. This argument is a much weaker form than that which you propose.

I am upset in the intellectual sense, not the physical.

There is no discussion to be had. You are wrong. If you cannot accept the basic fact that any concept can be translated into any language (efficiency notwithstanding) then fine, just don't pretend you want to engage in "civilised discussion".

Confrontation is not a personal attack. The arguments you gave (and still support) are evidence of someone who is either trolling or has not seen the world. Honest question: do you speak/read multiple languages?

You're right of course, and this is precisely why preserving languages is important. They are loaded with knowledge, and passing around this knowledge is time consuming, hard, or sometimes unfeasible if not enough speakers still live :)

I have read what you wrote - that is what upset me. You come up with ridiculous, blatantly false, unfounded claims and don't back them up. I understand it might be annoying to be called out like this, but letting this ignorance pass without calling it out is akin to agreeing with it. I still think you're wrong. But I'm not on a witch hunt, if this is what concerns you.

This was also my first reaction. The PGP part might have been audited... but what about the rest of the code? I highly doubt Electron is bullet proof.

    You can't write a modern scientific paper in classical
    Greek or Latin

You're comparing modern day English with languages that have died more than 1500 years ago. Your arguments are incoherent and suggest a serious lack of judgment.

What you're saying makes absolutely no sense. Do you even speak another language than English? Millions of people each year have their graduate education on languages other than English and are doing fine. They do learn English for broad communication, but what you're implying is that they couldn't even think in their own language since it's inadequate.

I'm sorry to say but you're full of it if you believe what you wrote. It's an absurdity only someone who has never travelled or been exposed to the world could say.

Just because it takes more time does not mean the process is fundamentally different.

    most higher level scientific concepts can’t be expressed
    in any language other than English. Out of the total
    number of human concepts that have ever been communicated,
    the majority are only available to English speakers.

Please provide examples to support your baseless claim.

Again, the article has a specific definition of what it means to speak "one language" - it means to renounce all knowledge trapped inside the dead language, cultural and all. Therefore yes, if you both only spoke English (in the absolute case at issue) you woudn't have different cultures, by definition.

Language and culture are not linearly independent.

The process you describe is effectively translation. This works with natural languages as well.

    For one thing, all computers can run any PL with little effort.

A counter example to this is that any children can be taught any language. The fact that an adult can't learn new languages as easily speaks more to the architecture of the computer (brain) than to its capacity to run various languages.

Noted. However I think the tone I used is different than what is given as an example. I was really asking the question, since depending on the answer, our disagreement would be on a different level.

Have you read the article? The condition has to be stronger than simply not teaching it to your children. You have to absolutely and completely remove the worldview, cultural heritage, geographic knowledge etc that comes with it.

Thus to get my (and the article's) point, you need not just stop teaching it to children, you have to completely erase the underlying knowledge the language holds and start over in a new language. This is the point: you lose much more than what appears on first glance.

And concerning programming languages, I don't see how picking up brainfuck for example is easy, but someone still put the effort into creating it. Imagine a universe in which you'd have to solve every single programming problem in C. You could dream up all sorts of programming language concepts, but you could never use any other language than C. I bet you'd find that a bit boring and tedious...

Make no mistake, I'm not advocating for languages to keep their purity. I think it's a good thing they mix and borrow concepts and words. But I do find the idea of having one world language an utter absurdity.

Well there you have it. The vocabulary teens use varies from city to city. The vocabularies of (France) French and Canadian French are different to an extent, as are those of (England) English and American English. It seems to me completely obvious that "one language to rule them all" is an absurd idea bound to fail. It will morph and splinter by itself.

Erm, Tillich could have chosen a better example: in French you also have isolement and solitude.

Are you willing to stop speaking, reading, thinking, writing in English and use Mandarin?

And what about the fact that some concepts and words are enunciated more succintly or clearly in different languages?

I mean, you have the perfect example in front of you: why are there so many programming languages? Could it be that some language constructs are more difficult in one language vs the other? Why invent new programming languages when you've got C?

I have always lived surrounded by animals, mostly cats, dogs, hamsters, rabbits etc. People who haven't usually completely underestimate the level of communication and emotional bonding that can happen between two species.

Looks good!

Can I buy the software and run it locally? I'm extremely interested for a client, but there is no way they will surrender ownership of their content to a third party - and I sadly won't suggest they do.

I assume they could pay 150-300 bucks for a single-site license and something like 5-6 pages. Their website is very small. Honestly, cook up a license with per n-page fees and I'm sure you'll sell a bunch.

The miners have the authority. Nothing forces them to accept a transaction.

Users don't have to worry. Here the miners are akin to the banks. They process payments and thus they get to decide if the money is spent or not. For the end user, there is no difference. The fork only happens if over 51% of miners update.

Except that the Ethereum Foundation and developers have just issued a patched client that does just that: miners can now choose to prevent the thief from spending his/her coins. So in this sense it's really not so different.

In that regard, they're not at all different from the regular banking system.

edit: The Ethereum Foundation and devs have issued a new client that enables a soft fork, effectively freezing the DAO. The only difference with the traditional banking system here is that the decision to fork is upon the miners, and not a single entity (central bank). The spirit is the same.

It is quite useful in the following sense: correctly predicting a war at the moment is not really possible. So I agree with you here.

What is certain is that the (nationalistic) political class will use this situation to its advantage. Viewed through historical lenses, this is not exactly good news. But that does not lead de facto to war.

Both!

I think the population has a right to vote. I just don't think most people are fit to vote on every particular issue. It's en emotional vote and it could have swung one way or the other. Interesting times!

Yes, to an extent. 52-48 is quite too close to mean anything other than "the Leave vote won". A lot of voters could have changed their minds either way had the vote been a week ago, tomorrow morning, or in a month.

What do you mean? I am not predicting a war, but pointing out its possibility is inherently volatile.

The problem here is that most talking heads are demagogues piggybacking on popular sentiment and ignorance, unfortunately.

The British people didn't say "fuck you", they said "we don't really know what we want". I mean, 52-48 is not insignificant, but it's also not a "clear, strong message" for leaving - it's a message from a divided nation who is quite literally not sure what it wants. Just sit in a restaurant tonight and look around - whatever your opinion, half of the customers agree with you.

The issues at hand are very complex and quite simply too much so for most voters to even get an idea of what's at stake. As with any such referendum, the overwhelming majority of the votes are cast emotionally. You cannot get such a massive amount of people to think through the implications rationally - they go with their gut.

So again, the message here is "we have no idea what we really want", not "fuck you".