When the potential long-term impact of the events keeps increasing, but the actual long-term impact keeps decreasing.

Maybe people who talk to themselves are just songwriters who haven’t figured out a melody yet.

Do identical twins not count?

Not consistently—the more usual pattern is to use þ at the beginning of words and ð internally, even if the internal sound is voiceless.

In both languages, the two sounds are usually allophones and are perceived as the same sound influenced by context—the way the “th” sound in “breath” and “breathe” are perceived as the same consonant, just influenced by the preceding vowel. (If we wrote “breþ” and ‘breeð”, the different letters would hide the fact that we hear them as the same sound.)

Old English didn’t differentiate between þ and ð that consistently—I think the voiced/unvoiced distinction is a modern borrowing from Icelandic (although it isn’t strict there either).

Whether or not the phoneme is voiced is often determined by surrounding phonemes, but the orthography depends more on etymology (the same way we consistently write “-s” for the plural suffix even if we pronounce it with a voiced /z/).

The Fall of France and the Vichy regime were pathetic, but the French Resistance was legendary.

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It doesn’t necessarily sound like the FAA’s concerns were petty.

Sporting events existed for thousands of years before advertising—don’t mistake current conditions for necessary ones.

The same is true of physics, inasmuch as it lets us divide hypothetical scenarios into possible and impossible.

All of them are systems for separating scenarios into those that conform and those that do not.

Realism gives rise to more epistemological issues—anti-realism is more logically rigorous insofar as you’re making fewer assumptions beyond what you’re explicitly given (i.e., a stream of sensory impressions).

Even if you’re a realist at heart, it can be instructive to see how far you can get before taking the leap of faith that the source of your senses is actually what you think it is.

The title has nothing to do with the linked article. Did you mean to link to this?

https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/goats-can-play-role-multi-pronged-restoration-buckthorn-invaded-woodlands

They’ve got a case of manfluenza.

I figured it was just bad OCR.

Any group can be empowering for its members. If it’s a group that already has an unequal amount of power in society, exclusive meetings will tend to exacerbate the inequality. But if it’s a relatively powerless group, it can counter the imbalance.

I studied linguistics in the 90s, and that was the general attitude about Chomsky then (specifically universal grammar and to some extent X-bar theory—his work on generative syntax and formal grammar from the 50s was still considered foundational).

But I’ve lately discovered the research of the Minimalist program that he was working on for the last few decades, and that seems pretty solid and groundbreaking even now.

Chomsky’s attitude seems representative of a lot of men and women (most of whom were younger than him) who had always described themselves as feminists, but who had similar feelings that #metoo was unfounded hysteria.

Epstein was capitalizing on that and promoting it, not just with Chomsky but with a lot of other academics outside of his usual circle.

What I find most damning in the correspondence isn’t Chomsky’s defense of Epstein—he seems to have genuinely believed in his innocence—so much as Chomsky’s subscribing to the framework that the #metoo movement/“cancel culture” and associated wave of sexual assault allegations was a baseless collective “hysteria”. Valeria’s statement implies that this was a stance Chomsky arrived at independently of Epstein.

Kanzi selected the correct, “full” cup in 34 of 50 trials – better than would be expected from chance – suggesting he was able to understand the concept of pretend liquids.

While that’s slightly better than chance, it’s not as good as I’d expect if he were imagining it the way children do.

Maybe he was interpreting the fake pouring motion as a signal of intent or a general disposition of the pitcher to tilt into that cup, and was then indicating where he expects the liquid to be poured next?