Zompist Bboard Again

I wonder if Zompist has a background in canvas painting, there's a painting-like quality to his work. I am particularly in love with the picture of Eretald (drill 3) on the Drilldown page. I've always wondered what the process was behind creating that specific image (the only physical painting for ...

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Pétain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, ...

And if the lack of certain consonants is an artifact of our reconstructive methodology, we would unwittingly create a circular argument. I think it inevitably is, because reconstructions are not phonetics. For this particular question, if you reconstruct *f, that could easily have been an [f] or an...

In any case, now there's something to be done, they want to do it, and to some extent, they turn into a human version of a busy anthill. Now, in a movie or a TV or streaming show, the usual way to show this would probably be some kind of quick montage sequence. But is there any good way to bring th...

More questions: how would NAE speakers describe a relatively cheap unassuming place that mainly serves coffee? That is, one where some food might be served, but the food is not the main focus. In German, a place like that would usually be called a "Café", but I've got the impression that ...

How much of a chance would someone in today's USA have to get hired for anything if they'd tell their would-be employers "I've never been to college, and I've never been to any kind of vocational school, either, but I once did this really great internship"? Narrowly: qualifications are ex...

Thank you! or implies things like plumbing work. Alternatives include trainee or intern. I am thinking of blue-collar work. Trainee might work, but do internships usually involve training that counts as a professional qualification? Yes, that's the whole idea. An internship may be paid or not, but ...

Then I spent the next 15 seconds actually being sick . Would it work in US English? Nope. If I write about a fictional character who actually is an apprentice, that is, in vocational training after school, would using that word to describe them make people think of that show? That wouldn't occur to...

In less gloomy venting, how do you all manage to conlang if you have aesthetic holdups? To me, conlanging is first and foremost an art, so there will always be a focus on style that only exists in natlangs by accident. I start a lot of conlangs that i quickly scrap because i think they're ugly in s...

Zompist does raise an interest and perplexing question about my situation, namely that I feel terrible about problems that fundamentally aren't my own. Regardless of how far the Trump regime takes its reactionary program, the practical impact on my own life seems quite marginal. Despite that, I hav...

Well, all you need is math and a way to read it out loud. Take your example of mahaugha = 10 62 . Wikipedia helpfully annotates it as "hundred novemdecillion". I'd put it to you that almost no one could read that and work out what a novemdecillion is. It's obviously 10 114 . Lots of us ha...

True enough, although science and other developments have introduced the concrete need for very big (and indeed very small) numbers. Any language capable of functioning in the modern world needs some way of handling such numbers clearly and efficiently, otherwise its speakers will struggle with ast...

According to the relevant Wikipedia articles, ancient China and India both had words for massive numbers, such as 載 zǎi for 10 44 and महौघ mahaugha for 10 62 . Given the absence of anything like trillion-dollar corporations or high energy physics, what exactly were they using such large numbers for...

How do we feel about the idea that /f/ is a post-neolithic innovation? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav3218 Whenever I see someone doing statistics on languages, I get antsy. Languages are not independent variables. Language families , maybe. The maps are certainly interesting, but t...

Russia will not sit idly by. I expect them to replicate, innovate, and mass produce the technology, just like they've already done with drones. Of course both sides are trying to make advances. The Ukrainians seem to make them faster, though. And if Russia's oil export capacity is devastated, so is...

I don't really know that much about art. I think in most arts, I would probably be able to tell if someone is really bad at the art in question, but I couldn't tell a good and talented amateur from one of the world's best. Now, that makes me wonder: is there really that much of a difference there? ...

Thread on Mastodon from a radiologist on whether AI can do radiology. Short answer: no. Jensen Huan g ... seemed to suggest that the task of automating our field had essentially been completed. ...Dario Amodei claimed that it's well-established that AI can read a scan better than a radiologist... T...

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2026 3:33 am Now there's been an incident at an Air Force base in Britain.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqrm99mm9l84o

Looks grim.

Looks like it was thieves trying to steal oil, and doing so too near an RAF base.

I wonder how the residents of (the unfortunate Ukrainian cities which are currently under more or less constant bombardment by Russian missiles) feel about their country "winning", however. What do you think the Ukrainians feel about their country being invaded by a fascist power? War is,...

Let me ask you this: do you think Ukraine could win a war against Russia? Rather than 3x the population of Russia, it's 1/3. It had little military experience and a large number of Russian speakers. Yet it's winning. I wouldn't say that Ukraine is "winning". It's very slowly losing ground...