Jamie123
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Posts posted by Jamie123
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18 minutes ago, Carborendum said:
That doesn't even come close to reality. Where did you get this information?
QuoteIn recent years, judges have often ignored altogether the question of whether an officer acted unlawfully. That way, courts avoid setting a precedent for future cases, which allows the same conduct to repeatedly go unpunished. As one federal judge summarized, this is a “Catch-22”
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1 hour ago, NeuroTypical said:
Subjects and citizens are both beholden to their rulers.
You can give up your US citizenship by leaving, and maybe filling out some forms. I assume a similar process is available for subjects?
I just realised I didn't answer your question. Yes you can make a "declaration of renunciation".
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21 minutes ago, Carborendum said:
There are many things that police do that is in violation of the law, but because they not-necessarily "should have known" they are given a pass.
The way I understand it is that no ruling can be made that a government action was unconstitutional unless a clear precedent exists that that action was unconstitutional. And since no ruling can ever be made, no precedent can ever be set. It might have come straight out of Catch 22.
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36 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:
Subjects and citizens are both beholden to their rulers.
You can give up your US citizenship by leaving, and maybe filling out some forms. I assume a similar process is available for subjects?
Nobody talks about "subjects" these days. (Except notionally, and in relation to the monarch.) We are British Citizens.
Maybe I am (like Terry Jones) "fooling myself", but king or no king, I can't believe we live in more of a dictatorship than a country where the police can beat you up and steal all your money, and then hide behind "qualified immunity" and "civil asset forfeiture".
I'll get flamed for saying that I know, but I'll bet every counter argument will boil down to one thing: "Don't spank my child".
(I wish Anatess was still here. She'd give me a run for my money for saying that!)
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https://youtube.com/shorts/-kMhnf0o9OM?si=c_eScjwJyj2hCk5L
Oh yes he is your king. It doesn't matter two hoots if you're anti-monarchy, if you're British then he is your king. Or do you think you're special and different from the rest of us, and get to choose your own personal head of state?
It's no different from silly Democrats saying that Trump was not their president. Maybe Trump is an idiot and maybe he's not, but either way, during his term of office he was president.
- Vort and NeuroTypical
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Quote
Ye Pow’rs wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,
Gie her a Haggis!
Everyone should try haggis. If you don't know what goes into haggis, don't look it up until you have eaten some. If you knew you wouldn't ever taste it, and once you have tasted it you won't care.
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20 hours ago, LDSGator said:
The increasing Jewish hate in our world is chilling.
They're always banging on about antisemitists here. I don't understand who these antisemitism are. I don't hate Jews. Do you hate Jews? I don't believe I know anyone who hates Jews. (I know people who get cross about Israel, but not liking Israel is not the same as "Jew hating". Israel is a country. It is not a religion or a race.)
One of my best friends at school was a Jew. Admittedly he was a bit of an idiot (and a lot of people told him so) but his being an idiot had nothing to do with his being Jewish. On one occasion half the school got so tired of his shenanigans that they carried him to a notoriously muddy patch on the edge of the soccer pitch and threw him in.
By the way, when I say he was "an idiot" I don't mean he was unintelligent. He was one of the cleverest people I've ever known. He was just a bit on the loopy side. But again, that was nothing to do with his race or religion*.
*Not that he was in the slightest bit religious. Neither were any of his family. They even had a Christmas tree every year.
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On 5/29/2024 at 6:15 PM, Carborendum said:
My German cousin said that the Dutch can understand German. But the Germans can't understand Dutch. Then I heard that the Dutch are also taught German in Schools. But the converse is not true.
I don't know, but I suspect that a German trying to read Dutch is rather like an Englishman (or an American) trying to understand Robbie Burns.
QuoteUpon that night, when fairies light
On Cassilis Downans dance,
Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze,
On sprightly coursers prance;
Or for Colean the rout is ta’en,
Beneath the moon’s pale beams;
There, up the Cove, to stray an’ rove,
Amang the rocks and streams
To sport that night … -
Thanks very much, and thanks to your nephew too. I really appreciate this.
1 hour ago, Carborendum said:But to add nuances, they make up a compound word, very much like they do in German.
They call this "agglutination" (a word I learned only recently). From what I've read, Finnish is famous for its levels of agglutination. The individual word elements they call "lemmas".
I recently found an interesting paper (A. Corral, G. Boleda, R. Ferrer-i-Cancho, Zipf’s Law for Word Frequencies: Word Forms versus Lemmas in Long Texts | PLOS ONE) where they have compared the Zipf laws for several languages including English and Finnish. My own code only looks at complete wordforms - theirs automatically splits words into their individual elements to study the frequencies of those elements, and does this for multiple languages! (I fear that may be beyond my abilities - though maybe I could persuade them to share their code!)
To give you an idea of the sort of thing I'm looking at, here is one of my graphs:
What I call the "beta index" is the log-log slope of the numbers of unique words exhibiting a particular frequency plotted against that frequency (e.g. 10,000 words appear once, 5,000 appear twice, 1000 appear 3 times etc.). The "alpha index" is the log-log slope of the frequency of a word plotted against its "rank" (rank 1 being the most frequent word, 2 being the second, 3 the third etc.) The Finnish cluster is more compact than the English (even accounting for the fact that far fewer Finnish items appear) suggesting there is less diversity in the alpha index, and also the beta indices are significantly higher.
Corral et al. found similar results for their wordforms, and to some extent their lemmas too (though oddly their beta indices for English are significantly higher than mine - though their study is based on only 3 English and 3 Finnish texts).
Plenty of room for investigation here - just so little time to spare though 😒
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Don't you think Ken Page is unbelievably brilliant as Old Deuteronomy? He makes me weep and shiver all over!
I never saw this on the stage - only on the movie with Elaine Page as Grizabella and Sir John Mills as Gus. The night we had booked to see it was the night my daughter was unexpectedly born early. Still, I'm not complaining! 😀
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2 hours ago, Carborendum said:
I'll forward the question to him. But I can tell you right now that the answer is yes.
I speak three languages and I am familiar with four others. And they all have such characteristics. I don't see how you can have a well-developed language that doesn't do that. And since Finnish is so grammatically complex, I doubt it would be absent such characteristics.
I'll get back to you when my nephew does.
Another thought: we often use the same word to mean different things - for example "head" could mean what's on top of your shoulder, or it could mean the person in charge of some group or organization, or it could mean the top of a sheet of paper, or it could mean a toilet on board a ship. In the latter three, the word is used by analogy. Another example, "tolerance" could mean the act of putting up with things that irritate you, or it could mean a range of values of some quantity which are acceptable for a particular purpose (like the tolerance of a resistor).
It is regularity of the language that interests me most. Particularly the Finnish documents are much truer to Zipf's law than the English ones. I have done some statistical tests that prove this is true, but I am interested in what causes it. There must be something about the language that makes it so.
By the way, I got the email today to say the paper has been accepted. I won't present it myself. I have a colleague who would get much more out of a trip to Cambridge than I would.
P.S. what I've read of Kullervo so far is very strange. It starts with a family of swans. (In the original they were apparently swans and chickens, but Tolkien's version only mentions swans.) A hawk and an eagle carry off two of the cygnets to different countries, where they appear to grow up as humans. No explanation for what's going on. The remaining cygnet stays with his mother and grows up evil - again somehow becoming human along the way. I've not had much time for reading, but I gather so far the Finns have some very strange ideas!
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On 5/16/2024 at 9:32 PM, Vort said:
Don't ask me why, but I texted that joke to my wife. She said "That's not funny". I said "Why not? It's no different from 'parrots eat 'em all'!" She said "I get the joke, but with all the wars going on in the world I don't find it funny."
You'd think after 20 years I'd know better than to try!
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On 5/16/2024 at 8:35 PM, Carborendum said:
I have a nephew who served his mission in Finland. What particular question would you like me to ask him?
Thanks Carb - I appreciate this.
Knowing the right questions to ask is tricky, which is why I've thought it over for a few days. These are the sorts of things I am curious about:
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In English we have many words with very similar meanings:
- "Big" and "large" mean almost the same thing, but there are subtleties: we would say "big wheel" for a carnival attraction or a child's scooter, but we wouldn't say "large wheel". Similarly we might say "there is a thief at large" but never "there is a thief at big".
- I remember once as a kid asking by father why the label Lee and Perrins sauce bottle said "Original and Genuine" when those two words mean the same. He told me that no two English words mean exactly the same: we wouldn't for example say that "genuine sin" means the same as "original sin" - though "genuine Picasso" could be interchanged with "original Picasso".
- Similarly "Contrition" and "remorse" are similar enough to be confused, and people do often say "remorse" when they really mean "contrition". (One could be remorseful about something without being in the slightest bit contrite.)
- Similarly "resolution" and "will" don't mean quite the same, though people do confuse them. For example, you can resolve to do something, and yet still not do it willingly. I'm sure that wasn't always the case: the name "William" for example is usually said to mean "Helmet of Resolution" - coming from the German Wilhelm = will helm = "helmet of will". The subtlety of distinction had (presumably) not yet emerged when the name was coined. Are there similar things to these in Finnish?
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In English we write and talk differently depending on our audience.
- When we talk to children we use different words than we would use with adults.
- Similarly we would write a technical or academic paper using different language to what we would use when talking about the same things.
- Some people use a form of Early Modern English when praying (the, thou, thine) that they would never normally use.
- You would use different language in a love letter to your girlfriend/boyfriend than you would use in a letter to your boss. Again, do these kinds of differences appear in Finnish, and if so to what extent.
Sorry if that's rather a lot. I could probably research these things myself, though I doubt very much I have the skills to learn Finnish properly. I've just started to read J.R.R. Tolkien's adaptation of the Finnish legend of Kullervo - it says in the Intro that Tolkien never particularly mastered Finnish (and we're talking here of a man who invented languages of his own!) so I doubt I'd have much of a hope. One year I came equal bottom of the class in French! (Though in my defence, I did come top in English the same year.)
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In English we have many words with very similar meanings:
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I go through phases of feeling very sorry for this woman - but I seem to be very much in the minority.
I'm sure she did know deep down that the Post Office position was a heap of garbage, but her brief was to protect the business and maximize profits. She could have called shenanigans, but that would have brought her up against some very powerful people. She would have been broken like all whistleblowers.
It was easier for her to put her money on the Post Office, hope for the best, and try not to think about it too much.
Question though: how many of us have our own "Post Office Scandal" hidden in the cupboard?
(Sorry - this should probably have gone under Current Events.)
P.S. I was just thinking: there's a parallel here with the movie Capricorn One. [SPOILER ALERT!!!!!] NASA had a mission that couldn't fail, because so much public money was invested. (As it was in Post Office Horizon.) When the technology did fail, they faked it. (Like claiming Horizon worked perfectly and postal workers had filched the missing money.) This eventually involved murdering the astronauts to keep up the deception after the (empty) spacecraft crashed. (Cf. bankrupting and imprisoning postmasters, making them pariahs of their communities and driving some of them to suicide.) One astronaut escaped to spill the beans. (Alan Bates.) The movie ended there, and we are left to imagine the fallout... but it was bound to have been similar to what's happening now!
P.P.S. Not a perfect analogy I know. Faking a Mars mission requires a little more deliberate maleficence than turning a blind eye to computer bugs. But malice is malice, whether active or passive.
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8 hours ago, Vort said:
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.
It's worse than that! It's physics, Jim!
I used to get so excited every Friday evening when Star Trek TNG came on. I would unplug the phone (no interruptions!) and sit in front of the TV rubbing my hands together and singing this song - with Jean Luc Pickard inserted instead of Captain Kirk.
Then a couple of days later I'd wonder why I'd had no phone calls and realize the phone was still unplugged.
- zil2 and askandanswer
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7 hours ago, Traveler said:
We have information from Voyager 1 and 2. Here is a fun link to NASA https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ (note that the Cosmic ray detection system is still operating.)
The Traveler
Surely the start of "interstellar space" is something that has been defined by humans. Like ol' wassisface Branson saying he can put you on "outer space" - if you assume "outer space" begins exactly 100km above sea level. (I'm making like Shania there; it don't impress me much.) How do we know that whatever Voyager is passing through isn't something like the van Allan belt? In any case, it'll be a long time before or gets close to the Oort cloud.
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On 5/19/2024 at 10:54 PM, Traveler said:
But beyond the reaches of our solar system, beyond the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt and into deep space there is deadly cosmic (gamma) radiation.
Do we know this for certain? It would have to be inferred indirectly because no radiation detector has ever been placed that far out.
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...if you say it loud enough you're sure to sound precocious. Or maybe not...
One that never fails is "Executive Summary". Whenever you write a report, make sure you have a section at the start called "Executive Summary". Do that and no one will care too hoots whether the rest of it makes sense. "Gosh I feel so grown up using words like 'Executive Summary'. I don't even have to know what's 'executive' about it to feel the cleverness oozing out of me."
Of course, I was never a pretentious little undergrad myself! (Fingers crossed.)
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Anyone know Finnish? Perhaps did their mission in Finland and had to learn it?
Running statistical analysis on Finnish texts reveals some interesting properties - namely a much larger vocabulary and a closer adherence to Zipf's law than English, and Finnish texts are much less varied in their properties. I've had little time (or energy) to investigate but I've submitted a short paper for a conference in Cambridge this coming July.
What I do know about Finnish is:
1. It is not Indo-European, but is related more to the Slavic language family.
2. It is highly "aggluninative" (a lovely word which I've recently learned - it means that new words are made by sticking other words together. We have a bit of it in English (like "policeman" or "postmaster") but Finnish uses it much more.
3. The language is highly inflected. While Latin nouns have six cases and Classical Greek five, Finnish nouns have fifteen!
This certainly accounts for the much larger vocabulary, but I wonder about the rest - the strong Zipfian law and the lack of large statistical variations between texts. Is it a "purer" language? - unlike English which is a horrible mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Norman French, Dutch, Latin and Greek.
I'd be most grateful to anyone has any insights, or can point me to any helpful books on the subject. 🙂
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36 minutes ago, zil2 said:
Thank you.
Klaw wouldn't let me sit still for more than 10 minutes without wanting to play, so I got him a buddy.
Here they are play fighting in the kitchen sink:
Don't worry, 2 is my limit - can't afford more.
I'm glad they get along! When I was a kid we had a cat called Ko-Ko. When he was about 18 months old my parents thought he would like a playmate. So we got a second kitten we called Coffee. Ko-Ko was absolutely furious and for about a week he would do nothing but hiss and snarl and growl at Coffee whenever he saw him. Eventually they did become friends, but it took a while!
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19 hours ago, Carborendum said:
I take it you had some recent run-in with the real-life version?
It wasn't recent - it was 1986. I was staying in a house with "residents only parking" during the day, and although I was a resident, I didn't have a resident's permit. That meant I had to move the car a few streets away every morning and then back to the front of the house every evening, to avoid getting ticketed. Eventually I found out the Town Hall was where you got permits from (though this was by no means advertised) and that was only open week days and was about 20 minutes walk from my workplace. So during each lunch hour I had exactly 20 minutes to negotiate with the Town Hall people. During the first visit I just about managed to find the right department, and the next day I went in and got the forms. I brought them back again the next day, but you had to pay a fee, and the place you paid the fee was different from the place that issued the permits. Furthermore it had a different lunch hour from the permit office, so the next day I had to get special permission to be away from work during an hour the fees office was open to go in to pay the fee. Of course I had find the right room and then queue up to pay, but I did just about manage to hand over the cash and get my recept just before I had to dash back to work. The next day I had the forms all filled in (or "out") and I had the recept... so I finally went back to the first office to claim my permit...
... and they couldn't find the permits.
They hunted around for about five minutes looking in cupboards and filing cabinets, and then the guy came to me and said "could you come back tomorrow?"
I bit my tongue, but I wanted to make the noise that Winnie-the-Pooh made when he was trapped in the heffalump pit with the hunny pot stuck on his head, just at the moment Piglet looked over the edge.
Luckily the look on my face (despite the fact that I was only 21 and looked younger) sent him searching again, and a few minutes later I had my permit.
At last no more playing musical cars. Luxury.
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I think the writers must have experienced the joys of trying to get a parking permit from Preston Town Hall in the 1980s. I still have nightmares...
Thank you.
Here they are play fighting in the kitchen sink:
"Not my king!"
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by Jamie123
Added link to Steve Lehto video where he notes this problem
Perhaps mine was an exaggeration. But I've seen the same (or similar) in enough places to think it must have some element of truth. I've even seen it on Lehto's Law.
Very senior judges have something similar over here. In extreme circumstances they can be impeached, but they cannot be prosecuted the same way you or I could.
Absolute immunity does apply to the monarch, but I'm pretty sure a misbehaving monarch would be forced out one way or another.