Zompist Bboard Again

Perhaps it was because I wrote "if" when I really meant "of"?

Oh, and it's alice, not Alice, paving the way for case-sensitive pronouns.

Getting back on topic:

foxcatdog wrote: ↑Tue Mar 14, 2023 6:49 amLegolas isn't really an elf

Discuss!

So JRRT ripped off JKR? I never thought if it that way before but... you may have a point. Even the names are just different enough to avoid copyright lawsuits, too.

I've often wondered about the statement in The Hobbit that "three parts of the goblin warriors" died in the Battle of the Five Armies. Tolkien doesn't say which parts, or how many parts there were to begin with, but I've always assumed that he meant three-quarters. Does anybody have any ot...

But was it clarified that it was the subvariety of X-ray gun capable of coition? Surely that would make a difference. The invention of X, and the application of X to human coitus, are usually separated by a gap measured in seconds, going back to Ogg, who invented both the bone, and the bone with gr...

But was it clarified that it was the subvariety of X-ray gun capable of coition? Surely that would make a difference.

I've read GEB, or tried to. Some of it is genuinely interesting and provocative, but I remember struggling with other bits. Which is a long-winded way of saying YMMV.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:34 pmIs there a name for this particular flaw in democracy?

It's informally known as The Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.

It's there as a dog-whistle to the rabid right wingers who make up the majority of the party's support.

And alice was enlightened! Danke.

It's a bothersome gap in my knowledge; can anybody enlighten me? It was something in a (science-fiction?) novel I read long ago, but I can't remember any more. Googling doesn't help.

An odd question but something I have always wondered. Plenty of chemical substances cause euphoria or pleasure when consumed. But does anything have the opposite effect, making you miserable? It has always seemed odd to me that drugs with largely opposite effects, like stimulants versus depressants...

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 4:07 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 2:38 pm I think the idea is to use a regular DIY kit, the kind that is usually used for home repairs, for that task.

You have to be careful to select the right drill bit.

And not the left one, as this is the Daily Mail.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 8:50 am Look, I'm not asking them to stop being evil or repulsive, because I know that would be pointless. But would it be too much to ask that they might start showing a little bit of self-respect?

I think you can probably guess the answer to that.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:01 pm

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 6:47 pm I'm also not sure about the phonotactics. Only coronals are permitted word-finally (weird but attested in Finnish)

Wasn't this also true of Old Spanish?

Yes.

This is just to make sure: someone with the initials RM wants to read cd.pdf. If it's somebody here I'm happy to grant access.

New, rather long and sometimes a bit repetitive, somewhat pedantic blog post on one particular aspect of Democratic Party politics: https://guessishouldputthisupsomewhere.net/2023/03/01/how-representative-are-us-house-democrats/ I don't understand the moral panic about wealthy people supporting lef...

On a rather different note, someone pointed out the potentially delicious irony of a Hindu Prime Minister and a Muslim First Minister of Scotland arguing about partition of the United Kingdom.

yeah just chiming in to say the /v/ thing is the only thing that stuck out to me either. i would either expect the language to also have /z/ (and possibly also the voiced equivalent of /x/), or else expect /v/ to have descended from an earlier /w/ and thus the current language to lack /w/. it's not...

I'm hereby stealing the idea of reusing 'ether' for 'spacetime' for conlanging purposes. There are also plenty of interesting potential analogical chemical uses, too. 19th-century physicists should have figured out that there were flaws in their theories by simply observing that we do not constantl...

A bit late here, but it looks entirely sensible (and oddly like some of mine ) You might have to think about justifying /v ʍ/ when you already have /f w/, but that's not hard.