Andrew Dalke's Comments
@Jolly. A reason for 48 frames per second is because its twice the current 24 frames per second. Note though that most projectors show the same image twice or three times because, as you say, 24fps is less than 30fps so would be noticeable. While upping the frame rate to 30fps might be a technical solution, it's easier to double the frame rate. This makes it easy to still play films made for 24fps, and hand-drawn cartoons which have only 12 or 6 unique frames per second.
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@Gustav V: Thanks for the elaboration! In my English dialect I still say 'sir' and 'ma'am', even to teenagers. The last has gotten me into trouble in California when a woman didn't think she was old enough to be called 'ma'am.' I don't think the association with the English word 'hen' is all that big given the Swedish words 'slut' and 'fart'. ;)
Personally I love that Swedish, like English, does not have feminine and masculine forms, other than archaic remnants like "den gode mannen." Research like that at http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf has convinced me that there are "effects of grammatical gender on people's descriptions of objects, their assessments of similarity between pictures of objects, and their ability to remember proper names for objects." "The arbitrary designation of a noun as masculine or feminine ... can have an effect on how people think about things in the world."
Or http://www.frontiersin.org/cultural_psychology/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00244/abstract : Jakobson (1959) reports: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists: he did not realize that ‘sin’ is feminine in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (rpex).” Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist’s native language indeed predict the gender of personifications in art? In this paper we analyzed works in the ARTstor database (a digital art library containing over a million images) to measure this correspondence. This analysis provides a measure of artists’ real-world behavior. Our results show a clear correspondence between grammatical gender in language and personified gender in art. Grammatical gender predicted personified gender in 78% of the cases, significantly more often than if the two factors were independent.
That's why I don't like that Swedish words like "vetenskapsman" ('knowledge-man' = 'scientist') or "ombudsman" have "man" so tied to the name. Interestingly, some people in English will write 'ombudsman' as 'ombud.'
Anyway, there's a more complete discussion of the 'hen' topic at Language Log at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3898 .
Personally I love that Swedish, like English, does not have feminine and masculine forms, other than archaic remnants like "den gode mannen." Research like that at http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf has convinced me that there are "effects of grammatical gender on people's descriptions of objects, their assessments of similarity between pictures of objects, and their ability to remember proper names for objects." "The arbitrary designation of a noun as masculine or feminine ... can have an effect on how people think about things in the world."
Or http://www.frontiersin.org/cultural_psychology/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00244/abstract : Jakobson (1959) reports: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists: he did not realize that ‘sin’ is feminine in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (rpex).” Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist’s native language indeed predict the gender of personifications in art? In this paper we analyzed works in the ARTstor database (a digital art library containing over a million images) to measure this correspondence. This analysis provides a measure of artists’ real-world behavior. Our results show a clear correspondence between grammatical gender in language and personified gender in art. Grammatical gender predicted personified gender in 78% of the cases, significantly more often than if the two factors were independent.
That's why I don't like that Swedish words like "vetenskapsman" ('knowledge-man' = 'scientist') or "ombudsman" have "man" so tied to the name. Interestingly, some people in English will write 'ombudsman' as 'ombud.'
Anyway, there's a more complete discussion of the 'hen' topic at Language Log at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3898 .
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Ummm, inflation? Looking around now I came across 'In the late 1970s, I went to one prom. I bought an "expensive" dress for the time, $125. (my girlfriends spent under $100);'
According to one inflation calculator, "What cost $250 in 1978 would cost $826.10 in 2010." $100 then is $330 now.
This 'unimaginable' $500 prom dress is well within that range.
Assuming the mother got married 20 years ago, that $800 wedding dress would now cost $1230. I found "In 2012, the average cost of a wedding dress is between $900-$1,280."
The relative costs of prom dresses and wedding dresses hasn't appreciably change over the last few decades, only the price tag.
According to one inflation calculator, "What cost $250 in 1978 would cost $826.10 in 2010." $100 then is $330 now.
This 'unimaginable' $500 prom dress is well within that range.
Assuming the mother got married 20 years ago, that $800 wedding dress would now cost $1230. I found "In 2012, the average cost of a wedding dress is between $900-$1,280."
The relative costs of prom dresses and wedding dresses hasn't appreciably change over the last few decades, only the price tag.
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Abdul: this is proposed change to general use, not a legal change. There is no talk of fines for not using the proposed alternatives.
The best context to see this is to compare it to Sweden's "You reform" in the 1960s. Sweden has singular 'you' ("du") and a plural 'you' ("Ni"), rather like 'you' vs. 'you all' in the US South dialect. (Yes, "Ni" was capitalized.)
However, unlike in Southern English, "Ni" was often used to refer to a single person, and "du" was reserved for close family and for children. This somewhat like in Spanish, where "usted" is the plural form of 'you' but it's also used in singular form for formal cases.
Sweden before the 1960s was more formal. People would be referred to by their job title, like "Engineer Svensson" or "Bus Driver Hurtig" and even listed in the phone book by job title, not name. "Ni" was part of that formality, but it also had a tinge of classism. In one story around the time, a woman dropped her scarf. A man picked it up and said "'Ni' have dropped this." The woman replied coldly "I am not 'Ni' to you", meaning I think that "I am not your servant so don't use 'Ni' to refer to me."
In the 1960s, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the head of the National Board of Health and Welfare, and others started pushing for a language reform. They decided unilaterally to use 'du' instead of 'ni', in the interests of increased social democracy and equality. This reform was successful, and now 'Ni' is only rarely used for the singular second person.
You could still use it if you wanted to, but people would look at you funny, like if you wore a Norfolk suit around town now.
This proposal for the gender neutral 'hen' is in the same vein. It's a push for more equality in the language by removing cases where you must otherwise artificially insert gender into the conversation.
Personally, I want a gender-neutral term. At the very least I wouldn't have to say "What a beautiful baby! How old is .. he? she?" The many proposed terms in English don't feel like a good fit to the language, but the proposed one for Swedish sounds reasonable to my foreign ears.
The best context to see this is to compare it to Sweden's "You reform" in the 1960s. Sweden has singular 'you' ("du") and a plural 'you' ("Ni"), rather like 'you' vs. 'you all' in the US South dialect. (Yes, "Ni" was capitalized.)
However, unlike in Southern English, "Ni" was often used to refer to a single person, and "du" was reserved for close family and for children. This somewhat like in Spanish, where "usted" is the plural form of 'you' but it's also used in singular form for formal cases.
Sweden before the 1960s was more formal. People would be referred to by their job title, like "Engineer Svensson" or "Bus Driver Hurtig" and even listed in the phone book by job title, not name. "Ni" was part of that formality, but it also had a tinge of classism. In one story around the time, a woman dropped her scarf. A man picked it up and said "'Ni' have dropped this." The woman replied coldly "I am not 'Ni' to you", meaning I think that "I am not your servant so don't use 'Ni' to refer to me."
In the 1960s, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the head of the National Board of Health and Welfare, and others started pushing for a language reform. They decided unilaterally to use 'du' instead of 'ni', in the interests of increased social democracy and equality. This reform was successful, and now 'Ni' is only rarely used for the singular second person.
You could still use it if you wanted to, but people would look at you funny, like if you wore a Norfolk suit around town now.
This proposal for the gender neutral 'hen' is in the same vein. It's a push for more equality in the language by removing cases where you must otherwise artificially insert gender into the conversation.
Personally, I want a gender-neutral term. At the very least I wouldn't have to say "What a beautiful baby! How old is .. he? she?" The many proposed terms in English don't feel like a good fit to the language, but the proposed one for Swedish sounds reasonable to my foreign ears.
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I wouldn't shelter on Alcatraz Island. It has no water of its own.
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*sigh* You do not understand what I am saying. We are not in agreement and are saying opposite things. You wrote: "this kind of touching is not defined in physical world. where matter is concerned, as you said there is no touching at all, what we call matter is mostly empty space"
I say there is touching in both cases. Not only that, but this view of matter being "mostly empty space" is outdated by about 50 years; your so-called 'empty space' is full of virtual particles, which are the carriers of force between particles.
You also wrote: "i said 'two objects are touching if the contact area between them is > 0.' " . I wrote that this is mathematically incorrect, and gave 5 quotes references which disagreed with you. Not only that, but the the general population also disagrees with you, in that most people say that Utah and New Mexico "touch", even though they don't share a border.
"The answer does not have real scientific value." The things is, it does have value. Thought-experiements like this help identify and resolve ambiguous definitions. The underlying resolution to this sort of problem was figured out in the 1800s when limit theory was used to put a sound underpinning to calculus.
I say there is touching in both cases. Not only that, but this view of matter being "mostly empty space" is outdated by about 50 years; your so-called 'empty space' is full of virtual particles, which are the carriers of force between particles.
You also wrote: "i said 'two objects are touching if the contact area between them is > 0.' " . I wrote that this is mathematically incorrect, and gave 5 quotes references which disagreed with you. Not only that, but the the general population also disagrees with you, in that most people say that Utah and New Mexico "touch", even though they don't share a border.
"The answer does not have real scientific value." The things is, it does have value. Thought-experiements like this help identify and resolve ambiguous definitions. The underlying resolution to this sort of problem was figured out in the 1800s when limit theory was used to put a sound underpinning to calculus.
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Lycantrophe: the problem is that you haven't defined what "touch" means. In physics, "touch" means the electron surfaces of two atoms/molecules is close enough that the repulsion forces dominate. (There's of course the question of when two neutrons "touch." I'm not going there.)
In geometry, "touch" means that there's an intersection. In this case, the plane touches the sphere at a point. For examples:
1) "Take a sphere and place it on a plane. Let's call the exact point where the sphere touches the plane the south pole. The plane is tangent to this point." http://www.learner.org/courses/mathilluminated/units/8/textbook/05.php
2) ".. and considers the point F at which the sphere touches the plane" (Encyclopédia of mathematics, By James Stuart Tanton; in Google Books)
3) "Let O (fig 146) be the center of a sphere; C the point in which the sphere touches the plane of projection ..." ( A treatise on crystallography By William Hallowes Miller; also at Google Books.)
4) "The point at which the sphere touches the plane is a focus of the conic section", http://www.chemistrydaily.com/chemistry/Dandelin's_theorem
5) (From 1840!) "... the line drawn from the centre to the point where the sphere touches the plane will be the shortest line which can be drawn from the centre of the sphere to the plane." (A treatise on geometry and its application in the arts By Dionysius Lardner; Google Books)
Quite obviously a number of people with math training disagree with your statement that "A perfect sphere and a perfect plane can never touch each other."
If you want to be more mathematical, and move from the ancient Greeks to the 1800s, the definition of "touch" corresponds to the idea of a limit. It's adversarial in nature. You pick a finite distance 'd'. Two objects touch if there are parts of the objects which are closer together than 'd', I just have to find examples. You are free to specify any finite value of 'd' you want, all I have to do is beat it. This definition neatly avoids the complex issues of infinities that you're having troubles with.
With that definition it's trivial to see that a sphere and a plane touch. If you pick "12 inches" then I just need to show a place where the sphere is within 12 inches of the plane. If you choose 5Å then I just need to show a place which is smaller than that. It should be obvious that no matter what finite size you pick, I can find a point on the sphere and a point on the plane which is closer. (After all, the distance between them is 0.) Hence, the sphere touches the plane.
But moreover, the generally accepting meaning of "touch" says that New Mexico "touches" Utah, even though the borders meet at a perfect geometrical point. This agrees with the limit-based mathematical definition, but by the definition you want to use, you say that those two states don't touch.
The issue here is you're trying to apply loose principles which work on a human scale to something beyond your everyday experiences. You need to define your terms in a way that's applicable to what you're trying to analyze.
In geometry, "touch" means that there's an intersection. In this case, the plane touches the sphere at a point. For examples:
1) "Take a sphere and place it on a plane. Let's call the exact point where the sphere touches the plane the south pole. The plane is tangent to this point." http://www.learner.org/courses/mathilluminated/units/8/textbook/05.php
2) ".. and considers the point F at which the sphere touches the plane" (Encyclopédia of mathematics, By James Stuart Tanton; in Google Books)
3) "Let O (fig 146) be the center of a sphere; C the point in which the sphere touches the plane of projection ..." ( A treatise on crystallography By William Hallowes Miller; also at Google Books.)
4) "The point at which the sphere touches the plane is a focus of the conic section", http://www.chemistrydaily.com/chemistry/Dandelin's_theorem
5) (From 1840!) "... the line drawn from the centre to the point where the sphere touches the plane will be the shortest line which can be drawn from the centre of the sphere to the plane." (A treatise on geometry and its application in the arts By Dionysius Lardner; Google Books)
Quite obviously a number of people with math training disagree with your statement that "A perfect sphere and a perfect plane can never touch each other."
If you want to be more mathematical, and move from the ancient Greeks to the 1800s, the definition of "touch" corresponds to the idea of a limit. It's adversarial in nature. You pick a finite distance 'd'. Two objects touch if there are parts of the objects which are closer together than 'd', I just have to find examples. You are free to specify any finite value of 'd' you want, all I have to do is beat it. This definition neatly avoids the complex issues of infinities that you're having troubles with.
With that definition it's trivial to see that a sphere and a plane touch. If you pick "12 inches" then I just need to show a place where the sphere is within 12 inches of the plane. If you choose 5Å then I just need to show a place which is smaller than that. It should be obvious that no matter what finite size you pick, I can find a point on the sphere and a point on the plane which is closer. (After all, the distance between them is 0.) Hence, the sphere touches the plane.
But moreover, the generally accepting meaning of "touch" says that New Mexico "touches" Utah, even though the borders meet at a perfect geometrical point. This agrees with the limit-based mathematical definition, but by the definition you want to use, you say that those two states don't touch.
The issue here is you're trying to apply loose principles which work on a human scale to something beyond your everyday experiences. You need to define your terms in a way that's applicable to what you're trying to analyze.
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Lycantrophe is absolutely correct. You can't talk about a perfect sphere or a perfectly flat plan which are composed of atoms/molecules. Zoom in close enough and you'll see that the surfaces are bumpy. This isn't just theoretical - we have images from x-ray, scanning tunneling microscopes, and other sources which show just how bumpy it is.
So you either have to talk about abstract math, or you have to talk about the real world. If you talk about abstract math, then the contact area is 0. If you talk about the real world - where your intuition comes from - then things deforms and you have a non-zero contact area.
Deformation doesn't even require atoms. The same thing would occur (as Philip Howie pointed out) in anything which is not perfectly stiff. "Stiffness", after all, being defined as "resistance to deformation."
This is not a perplexing question.
There's no reason to even make the statement: 'if we cannot calculate the value of pi to an absolute, then can we even create an accurate formula for a “perfectly spherical ball”?' -- a "perfectly spherical ball" is defined as the volume at or within distance 'radius' from a point. Pi isn't even involved in that statement. In any case, nothing in the math requires knowing an exact value of pi; we know the value exists, so we're free to use the symbol ? instead.
Alan Fray commented "in reality there is no contact point as the molecules do not actually touch." This is a somewhat useless comment. I think it's meant to point out that "touch" is not a well-defined topic. Molecules don't have a real surface, so don't "touch" in the common sense. Instead, there are the electrons around a molecule, and these electrons interact with other molecules. At a far distance there's the electrostatic force, when a charged ballon causes long hair to rise up, we don't say that those are touching.
When two molecules get closer, there's an attractive force. Geckos use this to cling to walls. But even closer there's a repulsive force when the electrons are so close that they are trying to occupy the same volume at the same time. The Pauli exclusion principle describes this effect. The effect is that the two molecules start to repel each other.
This repulsion is very much like a hard wall (see the Lennard-Jones potential for a picture). And this repulsive force is what we generally talk about when we say that two things are touching.
Using that understanding, two things touch when their electron shells are close enough that their repulsive terms are a significant component of their force interactions.
So you either have to talk about abstract math, or you have to talk about the real world. If you talk about abstract math, then the contact area is 0. If you talk about the real world - where your intuition comes from - then things deforms and you have a non-zero contact area.
Deformation doesn't even require atoms. The same thing would occur (as Philip Howie pointed out) in anything which is not perfectly stiff. "Stiffness", after all, being defined as "resistance to deformation."
This is not a perplexing question.
There's no reason to even make the statement: 'if we cannot calculate the value of pi to an absolute, then can we even create an accurate formula for a “perfectly spherical ball”?' -- a "perfectly spherical ball" is defined as the volume at or within distance 'radius' from a point. Pi isn't even involved in that statement. In any case, nothing in the math requires knowing an exact value of pi; we know the value exists, so we're free to use the symbol ? instead.
Alan Fray commented "in reality there is no contact point as the molecules do not actually touch." This is a somewhat useless comment. I think it's meant to point out that "touch" is not a well-defined topic. Molecules don't have a real surface, so don't "touch" in the common sense. Instead, there are the electrons around a molecule, and these electrons interact with other molecules. At a far distance there's the electrostatic force, when a charged ballon causes long hair to rise up, we don't say that those are touching.
When two molecules get closer, there's an attractive force. Geckos use this to cling to walls. But even closer there's a repulsive force when the electrons are so close that they are trying to occupy the same volume at the same time. The Pauli exclusion principle describes this effect. The effect is that the two molecules start to repel each other.
This repulsion is very much like a hard wall (see the Lennard-Jones potential for a picture). And this repulsive force is what we generally talk about when we say that two things are touching.
Using that understanding, two things touch when their electron shells are close enough that their repulsive terms are a significant component of their force interactions.
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"what is the size of the contact area?" 0 "Would it not be infinitely small?" Yes.
But of course this is a non-physical world. If you worked out the force on that point it would be infinite, so something would need to give. The ball would become non-spherical, or the surface non-flat (and more likely, both), until the force in the contact patch - that's the area where the two surfaces touch - is no longer strong enough to continue to deform the objects. Either that, or one of them breaks.
But of course this is a non-physical world. If you worked out the force on that point it would be infinite, so something would need to give. The ball would become non-spherical, or the surface non-flat (and more likely, both), until the force in the contact patch - that's the area where the two surfaces touch - is no longer strong enough to continue to deform the objects. Either that, or one of them breaks.
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A "villavagn" is a trailer-syle mobile home. I haven't seen a double wide, in Sweden and looking now I can't find a way to distinguish between that and a single wide, so you'll have to leave it at that.
However, the right translation for this house style is "modulhus" - a module house.
"Me gusta" is "gilla", as in "IKEAs modulhus? Gilla!" It's pronounced "Yee-la", with the emphasis on the first syllable.
However, the right translation for this house style is "modulhus" - a module house.
"Me gusta" is "gilla", as in "IKEAs modulhus? Gilla!" It's pronounced "Yee-la", with the emphasis on the first syllable.
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Another Koyaanisqatsi fan here, and I completely agree with Madmolf.
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"In Biblical times, for example, people used sheep and cattle as currency"
While this line was meant for grins, the Bible uses a weight of silver as a currency. Genesis 23:15 says ""Listen to me, my lord; the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver, but what is that between me and you? Bury your dead."
Here shekel is a unit of weight, and not coinage, but it's still currency.
While this line was meant for grins, the Bible uses a weight of silver as a currency. Genesis 23:15 says ""Listen to me, my lord; the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver, but what is that between me and you? Bury your dead."
Here shekel is a unit of weight, and not coinage, but it's still currency.
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Jim: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremes_on_Earth#Greatest_vertical_drop . The one in Pakistan is listed as "greatest nearly vertical drop."
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Perhaps you missed the line "Gates’ munificence has resulted in vaccines for meningitis and malaria." ?
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In that case you're seeing very crisp images, but your eye doesn't expect that. Since the framerate is just at the threshold of perception, you end up interpreting it as "a paper doll or claymation figure." If the TV had a higher frame rate, then it would be less of a problem since your eye would end up processing several projected images, which ends up giving a blur effect.