In Cambodia coagulated pig and chicken blood are common, especially in soups and rice porridge/gruel.
I eat it daily. Pig blood has a firmer texture and a more neutral taste -- it's comparable to tofu in both regards. I strongly prefer it to chicken blood.
It can be done quickly and accurately. Check out Peter Norvig's implementation of Viterbi algorithm for text segmentation.
Segmentation is typically used for scripts of languages like Thai and Khmer that don't feature word boundaries. I don't know the ins and outs of German word compounding, but it should work for breaking apart compounds too given a fully conjugated/declined word list as input.
I wouldn't worry too much. I was very late learning to walk among other things and a doctor told my mom that I was "not exactly gonna be playing outfield for the Yankees". No Yankees yet but I ended up an all-state athlete, plus a two-sport college athlete. Most days I'm not totally stupid either.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but the high demand from foreign language students is likely because US colleges often have a foreign language requirement. At my college it was four semesters, which is pretty common.
The effect is that you get a slew of totally unmotivated, clueless students who slow things down for everyone else. Spanish especially, since it's the "easy" foreign language for English speakers, was overloaded with students who had no desire to be there, at least until you made it to the 5th semester and beyond classes.
The relevant concepts here are preposition stranding and pied-piping. These are not "mechanical transformations" in the sense you mean -- there are certain constraints on when a preposition can be pied-piped and when it can't.
International shipping is much riskier, so people are usually advised to only order domestically. Certain countries are known for stringently checking international packages -- Australia is at the top of the list, though the US is tough too.
Good packaging consists of multiple layers of vacuum seal and some kind of visual barrier. Fake names, vacant addresses, no return address, trying to mask smells with coffee/foods, etc. are all generally thought to be criteria for 'flagging' a package for more careful review (drug dogs, x-ray machines).
I did that basically, but I saved up enough to move to and live comfortably in SE Asia for at least 3 or 4 years.
I spend less then $400 a month, so maybe this lifestyle is not for everyone, and it's certainly not feasible with a family, but the move has totally changed my life. Before, I felt stuck and directionless. Now though, after a little less than a year of total freedom, I've finished two big projects that I'm proud of. I have a much wider range of skills and I'd be confident walking into an interview at a tech company. I hope I never have to though!
I would absolutely recommend a similar path for anyone struggling with the full-time work grind.
Adverbs and adverbial phrases can move pretty freely in English. These all sound fine to me:
we are going to go to the airport by bus tomorrow
we are going to go by bus to the airport tomorrow
tomorrow, we are going to go to the airport by bus
we are going to go to the airport tomorrow by bus
we are going to go tomorrow to the airport by bus
The last sentence sounds a little more awkward, but if you're emphasizing when the event is occurring, it would be fine. Similarly, in the right context:
to the airport, we are going to go by bus tomorrow
by bus, we are going to go to the airport tomorrow
It's good practice to check your intuition on things like this against a searchable corpus. According to http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/, "most wicked" just barely edges out "wickedest" in terms of frequency, 22 to 20.
In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.
And unfortunately social interaction is severely restricted and punished in K-12 education (in the US, which is the extent of my familiarity).
I volunteered at an elementary school for a year, and the kids there had little opportunity to socialize freely. Recess and lunch were limited to a combined 40 minutes, including transition periods to and from the classroom. Gym/physical education was a "unit", only attended one week out of every three, and much like I remembered from my own schooling, more than half of that time is spent explaining the rules to some highly-structured, barely-constitutes-exercise activity.
Studying another language, especially a radically disparate one, reveals nuances in your native tongue that are hard to come upon otherwise. If you accept even a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, then it's desirable to be aware of these nuances, as they may color your understanding of the world.
As far as the sciences are concerned, seeing alternate ways to encode information into language is extremely useful for people working in knowledge representation, ontology building, etc.
EDIT: I would also say that ""it gives us different ways of thinking" is all the justification needed for language preservation. That sounds pretty valuable to me.
I am not following much of what you're saying. I think you are deeply out of touch with what it is that linguists actually do -- this has nothing to do with the "needs of professional linguists".
If you don't standardize the language, then it evolves to become unpredictable, inconsistent and impossible for non-natives to learn without years of immersion.
Imagine if Ivy League universities used a complex idiosyncratic dialect
English and all other languages on the planet are idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and impossible to learn without years of immersion. You can try to prescribe away some surface irregularity ("the singular of data is datum!"), with maybe limited success among a small network of people, but that won't even make a dent in the overall complexity of a language.
My point is that if you think the rules we learn in school about language are the same rules that allow us to communicate and understand each other, you're failing to realize the massive complexity of language.
As for those "bi-" words, there seems to be more consistency with "biannually", than with "biweekly", or "bimonthly". Oxford only gives a single definition for "biannual":
The rules you've consciously learned about language constitute a tiny fraction of the rules that govern our use of language. Many of them ("don't split infinitives!", "no prepositions at the end of a sentence!") fail to be descriptive.
Not that it matters, but "biweekly", "biannually", and "bimonthly" have always only had a single meaning for me. I've heard the debate about them, but I don't think I've ever actually seen them used to mean "once every two weeks/months/years".
Typically ecstasy is MDMA pressed in pill form together with an amphetamine, although as you noted MDMA is often changed out for some other 'research chemical' that is cheaper to source, and sometimes very dangerous.
Yet another obvious reason to legalize all recreational drugs...
She says people who commit suicide are losers can't apologize properly and work hard to make up for their mistake, or people who don't have the guts to weather through the hard times.
Charming attitude.
I doubt that many suicidal people have anything much to atone for, more likely they had some horrible things done to them or are just wired in a way that makes them deeply unhappy.
I don't see suicide as brave or cowardly. Depending on the situation, suicide can be in an individual's best interest -- a terminally ill patient in extreme pain who chooses to undergo a painless physician-assisted suicide would be a good example.
Even beyond terminal illness, I imagine that there are some people who have either been through such massive trauma, or are wired so badly, that suicide is a better option than living in misery. Granted, depressed individuals may not be capable of making decisions in their long-term self-interest, but I still wouldn't condemn every suicide as a "bad" decision, let alone "cowardly", "shameful", or any of the other pejoratives that come up around this topic.
I eat it daily. Pig blood has a firmer texture and a more neutral taste -- it's comparable to tofu in both regards. I strongly prefer it to chicken blood.