> Populations of the weeds have been found that are impervious to nine different classes of herbicides. The plant can grow more than two inches a day to reach eight feet in height and dominate entire fields. Originally from the desert Southwest, it boasts a sturdy root system and can withstand droughts.
Well, I'm sold. Where do I buy Palmer amaranth? What about water hemp - is it edible?
Another issue I ran into recently is that `Symbol.for(str)` will cause the entirety of `str` to be allocated forever in Chromium, but not in Firefox. (It's inevitable that `Symbol.for()` will have some memory impact, as a global allocation, but it's possible to mitigate it somewhat.)
IMO it's too bad that the effort to create a Node-alike driven by Spidermonkey instead of V8 never got anywhere.
> To tap into the core layers of language, Starostin’s team starts with an established list of core, universal concepts from the human experience. It includes meanings like “rock,” “fire,” “cloud,” "two,” “hand,” and “human,” amongst 110 total concepts.
In English, "rock" and "human" are loans and "cloud" is an innovative form.
> For Proto-Japonic, we introduce two distinctly different versions of the wordlist, since there are some significant unresolved problems in its reconstruction where adhering to one or the other solution influences the results of testing – namely, the reconstruction of Proto-Japonic by Sergei Starostin (1991), later adopted for the Altaic etymological dictionary (Starostin et al., 2003), posits an initial *d- for Proto-Japonic, whereas a more conservative approach prefers the phonetic interpretation of the same phoneme as *y- (Martin, 1987, gives no preference to either approach; both Vovin, 2005, and Robbeets, 2005, explicitly reject *d-; see Supplementary Material for details). Ultimately, we have to perform two sets of calculations because of these differences in interpretation of Proto-Japonic phonology.
There's no legitimate reason to follow Starostin here - that reconstruction is based on back-projection of an obviously secondary fortition specific to Yonaguni.
IMO "macrofamily" isn't a well-defined enough concept not to be disputed by definition. Sino-Tibetan and Afroasiatic are very large and very old, but not as controversial as Altaic; Austro-Tai and Dene-Yeniseian are classic "macrofamilies" in that they're positing old relations between different established language families, but they're increasingly accepted, at least as promising lines of research.
Lexical comparison isn't the standard for demonstrating language relatedness, though. Regular sound correspondences, morphological evidence, and commonalities in irregularities (e.g. English I/me ~ French je/moi or English good/better ~ German gut/besser) are ideal. Quantitative methods range from extremely preliminary to nonsense.
This might be unfair of me, but IMO research from the Greenberg school (the Starostins, Bengtson, Ruhlen, etc.) or the automatic phylogeny school (List, the ASJP, etc.) can pretty much be ignored.
> I thought all plants (by definition?) need photosynthesis to stay alive in non-dormant states.
There are parasitic plants that don't photosynthesize at all, like the Monotropoideae and Rafflesiaceae.
Among photosynthesizing plants, rhubarb can be "forced" (grown in complete darkness to reduce bitterness and get an earlier harvest), and potatoes can sprout if left in the pantry for too long.
Musk is a great hype man in an industry where hype is the difference between success and failure. If he'd started out in a different field, he could've been the next Tom Ford or Zaha Hadid. That's not necessarily a statement about the quality of his or his companies' work - Zaha Hadid does not make nice buildings, and I wouldn't buy a Tesla - but it's difficult to say whether Tesla would've succeeded if not for Musk's hype... and the point of great hype men is that people buy into the hype.
On balance, having a hype man for [PayPal Mafia voice] innovation in the world of atoms seems like a good thing. Musk may not be the best person for the role, but you probably have to be a little crazy to want to be a celebrity in the first place.
> I guess you could totally do it from mobile. But then you have to fight the app store's distribution/marketing model.
I don't know much about the mobile world, so this may be a stupid question, but could you route around the app store problem by making a progressive web app?
I assume a backend of some sort would be necessary, since JS in the browser is a pretty limited environment, but if Chalkinator Desktop is handling your server setup anyway, it could install a personal backend on it for you, and the PWA could talk to that.
Decomposition of glyph sequences in phonetic transcription alphabets (e.g. IPA representations of phonemes) into phonological feature sets.
Existing attempts to solve this problem are hackish and difficult to customize: they typically treat each glyph as a set of features and handle diacritics and digraphs by naive composition and awkward special-casing. They also aren't written with an eye to customization in either alphabet or featural model: they typically map an ad-hoc extension of IPA to an ad-hoc featural model.
I think a natural improvement would be to develop a specification language in which each individual glyph (base character or diacritic) is a function from a feature set to a feature set, with Haskell-style pattern-matching to allow graceful handling of digraphs and context-sensitive diacritics - although syntactic sugar for digraphs would in practice be required for usability. Ideally it would also be possible to map feature sets to feature sets, in order to preserve a human-readable intermediate form (e.g. "unvoiced dental plosive") which is later mapped to the more customary binary features.
In addition to the utility for phonological databases and the like, this would also enable more rigorous testing of crosslinguistic feature sets: every feature set is implicitly a set of proposed linguistic universals and existence claims. If two segments have the same featuralization, they should never contrast in a given language; if they do, the featuralization is unsound. And if a featuralization proposes the existence of many contrasts that aren't attested anywhere, it could probably stand to be optimized.
But most of my interest in this comes from my work on a phonological database. The database needs some method of handling featuralization to facilitate feature-based search, and I just haven't seen a good way to do that yet.
Chrome's Ctrl+F behavior is damned annoying for handling linguistic data. When I search for ʰ (aspiration), I don't want h (the letter, which appears in some of the column headers and most of the notes entries) - conflating the two makes searching for ʰ practically worthless. If I couldn't turn off "ASCII characters match everything that looks vaguely like them" in Google Sheets (i.e. enable regex search), I wouldn't use Google Sheets.
...and now that I've complained about it I notice that there are extensions to enable regex search in the browser itself, nice
I have pretty bad eye floaters, and they're more visible in bright light. Having crud bouncing around my entire field of vision does not make for an easy or strain-free reading experience, so I enable dark mode whenever it's an option. I found checking Zulip at work pretty unpleasant until I realized I could enable dark mode.
If you're running a scientific study and basing your conclusions on the average of all participants, you might not pick up on things like that. And if you're running a scientific study on people with normal vision, a sufficiently strict definition of "normal vision" guarantees that you won't pick up on that, although the studies in question probably didn't use so strict a definition.
Even if dark mode is "scientifically worse" for most people, whatever that means, it's a useful accommodation. In fact, the Nielsen Norman Group article that this post links to argue against dark mode recommends dark mode as an accommodation for people with vision impairments.
A few weeks ago I got curious about the phonological development of Rotokas and figured I'd see if any reconstruction could be done on the North Bougainville languages. The only documentation I could find for Ramopa and Askopan at all were Rosetta Project Swadesh lists on archive.org - talk about coverage!
The DC area is pretty suburbanized. It's not uncommon for people who work in DC to have hour-long commutes - when I lived there, I met people who commuted to DC from as far out as Frederick and Mt Airy - but the MARC is (in my experience) reliable and some of the suburbs aren't bad. Zillow has $300k-$400k houses in Germantown.
The methodology probably wouldn't be comparable to Tyshchenko's, but there is an estimate for the lexical distance between Tocharian and the other Indo-European language families (10.2307/601651) - Tocharian comes out closest to Germanic and Greek.
Then again, Tocharian wasn't spoken anywhere near Europe when it was attested, so it isn't strictly within the scope of the map - but it's unclear how it got there. The most popular view, as far as I know, is that it was the second family to branch off of Indo-European, after Anatolian, but Adams showed that it shares some innovations with Germanic (the reflexes of syllabic resonants and the expansion of the singulative function of the n-stems to adjectives) and Greek (a locative dual *-oisi, represented in the Tocharian B genitive dual), and Eric Hamp placed Tocharian in a 'Northern Indo-European' subgroup with Germanic, Balto-Slavic, and Albanian.
>Functional programming IS immutable programming the two are one and the same.
Yes, and many imperative languages allow you to use, in an idiomatic manner, a functional style that avoids mutable state, even though these languages aren't designed around the functional paradigm, and don't require you to adhere purely, in the colloquial sense that means "strictly" or "completely" but has fewer letters, to it. And the reason for this is that people have taken ideas from languages that were designed to be functional rather than imperative.
If you want to bring up map and reduce, what's their genealogy? Did the imperative world get the idea from ALGOL? Maybe they did, but I'd be surprised.
>See? Concatenative programming in javascript. And it's not less convenient.
It still isn't great. To avoid stepping outside the paradigm, you have to be willing to curry every function that needs multiple parameters. And I don't know what that recursion is doing there - presumably I don't know what I'm talking about again, but it seems to me that the entire body of `xToYPower` could be replaced with `return y => x y`.
Well, I'm sold. Where do I buy Palmer amaranth? What about water hemp - is it edible?