Physicists Discover Evolutionary Laws of Language 287
Hugh Pickens writes "Christopher Shea writes in the WSJ that physicists studying Google's massive collection of scanned books claim to have identified universal laws governing the birth, life course and death of words, marking an advance in a new field dubbed 'Culturomics': the application of data-crunching to subjects typically considered part of the humanities. Published in Science, their paper gives the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English — a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster's Third New International Dictionary has 348,000), with more than half of the language considered 'dark matter' that has evaded standard dictionaries (PDF). The paper tracked word usage through time (each year, for instance, 1% of the world's English-speaking population switches from 'sneaked' to 'snuck') and found that English continues to grow at a rate of 8,500 new words a year. However the growth rate is slowing, partly because the language is already so rich, the 'marginal utility' of new words is declining. Another discovery is that the death rates for words is rising, largely as a matter of homogenization as regional words disappear and spell-checking programs and vigilant copy editors choke off the chaotic variety of words much more quickly, in effect speeding up the natural selection of words. The authors also identified a universal 'tipping point' in the life cycle of new words: Roughly 30 to 50 years after their birth, words either enter the long-term lexicon or tumble off a cliff into disuse and go '23 skidoo' as children either accept or reject their parents' coinages."
Scrabble (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone that has played Scrabble (especially against a computer) know that there's tons of words out there that no one has ever heard of, most of which you can't even find a definition for. What the hell is a Qi? I don't know, but I can get 66 points for it.
Re:Scrabble (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Qi is its about as "english language" as Shinjitai
Re:Scrabble (Score:5, Funny)
It's a show on BBC2.
Some Advice (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone that has played Scrabble (especially against a computer) know that there's tons of words out there that no one has ever heard of, most of which you can't even find a definition for. What the hell is a Qi? I don't know, but I can get 66 points for it.
Qi is a simple one, it's a two letter word and there are roughly a hundred two letter words accepted by TWL [phrontistery.info] which are hackable [lifehacker.com]. Qi is also something I've seen reading Chinese philosophy so that doesn't really upset me. The ones that really get me when I play against computers or people who cheat are actually the longer ones. Recently I have seen outgnawn, aliquot, mahoes, votive, the list goes on when your friends are using websites to look up permutations [hasbro.com].
You can study this stuff and memorize things like I-dumps: ziti, ilia, ixia, inion, etc. But in the end what really got my scores higher was studying the short 2 and 3 letter words and building thick crossword-like packs of words especially over TL tiles.
Re:Some Advice (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Some Advice (Score:5, Informative)
As a piano player/retailer, that was my first thought, chemists be damned. :P
Re:Some Advice (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks, I always knew that my time on Slashdot was not a waste and that I was in fact visiting a true temple of knowledge!
Re:Some Advice (Score:5, Informative)
Aliquot (proportional) wasn't a surprise to me either. It is a mostly legal term, though.
It's a term used daily in any chemistry lab, and regularly in chemistry classes, as well.
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What the hell is a Qi?
It's one of two common transliterations of a Chinese word that roughly translates as life energy. The other is Chi. Neither is a valid word under the rules of Scrabble, which restricts you to English words. Note that this doesn't prevent it from appearing in the official Scrabble dictionary, along with a large number of other words that the rules would disallow. Transliterations of Greek letters (such as pi, mu, tau) are also allowed by the Scrabble word list, but not by any reasonable reading of the ru
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I've heard English speakers use "qi" in English sentences, but can't ever recall hearing anyone use "quoi" on its own in an English sentence, so until we get an ascii-32 tile I think Scrabble is safe from "je ne sais quoi".
Words are imported from other languages all the time, and it's a judgement call when to start calling them English words. For a game like Scrabble where you need a black-and-white decision in each case, that means the only way to have a complete set of rules is to agree on a dictionary.
Re:Scrabble (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither is a valid word under the rules of Scrabble, which restricts you to English words.
What.
You're a bit wrong there. Qi and Chi would both be "loanwords", i.e. words taken wholesale from another language, usually with no change in spelling or pronunciation. Here, try some others using the official Scrabble dictionary [hasbro.com]. I'll just throw together a short list, and you see how many of these aren't in there because they're technically not English words at all:
hibachi (Japanese), karaoke (Japanese), cafeteria (Spanish), alpaca (Spanish), gulag (Russian), taiga (Russian), wiener (German), kraut (German), moped (Swedish), brogue (Irish).
There's ten different words from six different languages. Only one of that list is not in there - and it will be as surprising to you which one is not in the dictionary as it was to me.
I get what you're saying, the "je ne sais quoi" example is a good one. But there are certain words from other languages we use that have pretty much been adopted into the language, especially for concepts we really don't have or can explain as concisely. Granted, some you may have never heard - usually only marital artists could describe what a kiai or kata is, for example - but we have loads of loanwords that are in everyday use in our language. (It personally makes me cringe when people say "hibachi" (hee-bah-chee) and "karaoke" (kah-rah-o-kay) and mangle the Japanese pronunciations, but that's accents for you. The Japanes hilariously mispronounce English words sometimes too, and they certainly misuse [flickr.com] our words a lot of the time as well - surely some sort of revenge for all of those trendy kanji tattoos that so many of us Westerners like getting on our bodies.)
Incidentally, "qi" is in the Scrabble dictionary - at least according to the one on the Hasbro website (which I have linked above).
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La-di-da-di-da, La-di-da-di-da, what's the name of that song?
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Scrabble (Score:3)
It is the alternate spelling of "Chi", a concept in Daoist philosophy that represents the primal energy of the universe.
As in "tai chi". As in "qi gong". It is also sometimes spelled "ki".
The ancient Chinese must have played a lot of Scrabble
The Scrabble word that bothers me is "aa". I mean seriously. Who even wants to play with you any more? It's not fun when you start bringing out the scrabble dictionary. I thought we said no 2-letter words, anyway. And no, I'm not being a bab
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"The Scrabble word that bothers me is "aa". I mean seriously."
Why is this bothering you? Are you getting a little tense? Maybe it's time for a vacation somewhere? Hawaii is nice....
English-speaking people live in enough different places and have sufficiently diverse cultures and interests that there will *always* be words that seem obviously common words to group X and obviously made up to group Y. If you need a hard-and-fast decision for something like a board game, then you have to choose some authori
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Qi [reference.com]
Just sayin'...
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Life essence, alternative spelling of Chi? This is /. people, get you Qi straight:
Qi is a great lisp. It has a Turing complete, extensible type system and pattern matching like modern functional languages. It has a kernel called KI which is ported to classical lisps, clojure and javascript. Anything that has KI ported can be used for compilation of Qi compiler. The compiler generates code into host language and resulting code usually fast.
It is currently in great flux so I don't recommend actually using it.
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Was this Fox News, perchance?
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I was all prepared to note that most of what people call grammatical errors are not actually errors in grammar, but of style or register... then you have to go and break out examples of actual grammatical errors...
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then you have to go and break out examples of actual grammatical errors...
And there was I, thinking a "grammatical error" was a failure of a grammar to account for observed usage. ;)
Re:Scrabble (Score:4, Funny)
Normally I oppose the death penalty but I think that for grammar errors, it would be too good for the culprit.
Re:Scrabble (Score:4, Funny)
Now I don't want to be pidgin holed as one of those P-brains (or pee brains, even) who gets too obsessed over a little thing like spelling, when for all intensive purposes we can usually understand each other well enough, but sometimes you're words really due matter.
Aisle admit to some fussiness. I apparently have a deep-seeded need to correct verbal foe paws when I see them, ranging from stray apostrophe's to unnecessary quotes put around 'words' for emphasis, but as the mourning star shines, what really makes me cry grate crocodile tiers of frustration is the spelling error. Even when I'm not a steak-holder in the matter, such as someone else's conversation on a discussion bored (you really think they'd be more exciting), I still feel the kneed to make corrections. Old King Coal was a merry old sole, but apparently I'm a reel stickler for details.
Whether it's big causes like visualizing whirled peas or helping those starving euthanasia, down to the most miner house-holed conversations, proper communication is key. It *should* be as easy as pi, but four sum reason it's knot.
For example, recently Eye replied to an appalling posting which red, "your in this country, learn the language" with an offer to make the poster the first deportee, but my suggestion only earned an unappreciative "yore a jerk." Their may be a colonel of truth to that, but I still think it was the foolish poster who looked bad for making such a silly mistake. You simply can't expect someone to take you seriously while you're talking about a title wave, or a device that scans for finger prince, or most especially if you're trying to peek customer interest in a sneak peak of your product. Precise spelling gets a bad wrap at times, but you'll be mocked if you mangle the lyrics to Comma Chameleon, and calling someone a no-nothing will only cause readers to glance askance at the extent of your own knowledge (unless the principal of the double negative means you really intended to call him a "something-something," which may be fare game.)
In the same vain, if you try to take the reigns, be prepared for "your royal highness" jokes — far less likely to get any kings or queens than jokers and lumbar jacks. As the great barred once said, "Two bee, ore not too B." Or was that a line from The Malty's Falcon? I always get those too mixed up.
But that pails in comparison to the thyme my brother warned me to (and you'll have to pardon my French here) "look out for the big asshole" in the parking lot, and as I looked around for an improperly behaving pedestrian or vehicle, I ran through the big-ass pothole that he'd been trying to point out.
Now some may argue that the time spent trying to be precise is waisted if other people can figure it out anyway, but in my mind it's shear arrogance to save yourself the trouble of doing the thinking if it puts the burden on the other party. If you don't have your queue stick lined up with the Q ball, don't make it *my* fault when your intentions go awry. Even if you have the best can-dew, never-say-dye attitude, I refuse to let your accross-the-bored misspellings make a lyre of me.
Mostly it's the principal of the thing (have I used principal already? My apologies if the repetition wares on you), that if you have a capitol idea to share butt know-buddy is abel to understand it, then you mite ass whale not bother.
Pinning ... Going Steady ... Dating ... SO ... (Score:2)
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I remember an episode of 'Recess', a Saturday morn cartoon from the late 90's, where the main characters made up a word to replace swearing: whomps. It wasn't long before the school board dog-piled them, saying it wasn't allowed as they considered it a swear now since all the kids were using it to curse. It was a very interesting episode.
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'Culturomics'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just stop already (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just stop already (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like you should attend a class on Verbal Fatigonomics.
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Please. No more portmanteaus with -onomics on the end. I automatically think of Regan.
The good news is stupid -onomics words based on Reganonomics from the 80s, means we may finally be seeing the end of my nemesis, the (insert any noun)-gate as the journalist name of any controversy involving a politician, which came from ancient history in the 70s.
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Obligatory [youtube.com].
Dictionary size (Score:4, Informative)
Gullible (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gullible (Score:4, Interesting)
True story - I once convinced my coworker that gullible was not in the dictionary. She pulled out a very old dictionary, and proceeded to look it up, only to find that, no, it was not in there as a separate entry.
After I bit of digging, I did eventually find it as a conjugation of the verb "gull," meaning "to deceive."
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Websters throws out words when they are unused ...OED does not once it's in it's in forever ...
But a word needs to be in common printed use before it will be accepted in the OED, and is proved not to be an ephemeral word.... this probably accounts for the other 400,000 words they spotted, they will be ephemeral neologisms, common mis-spellings, and words not normally written down ...
I suspect the most common word not in the dictionary that is in their list is either "thier" or "teh" ...
Librarian Discovers Dark Matter Under Carpet... (Score:3, Funny)
...Grand Unification Theory of Cosmology Proven.
Organizing Language Vs. The General Public (Score:5, Informative)
My husband works for Merriam-Webster as an assistant editor/lexicographer. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff that goes on there. People will call and demand fame for a word. For example, some guy called in and said he'd been the one to come up with the word 'ginormous', and wanted credit for it. They don't seem to understand the process. MW's archives in the basement is a CIA-esque compilation of language; they'll use every collegiate they have for reference, going all the way back to the first one. Husband says it won't be long before internet-meme creations are included.
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Husband says it won't be long before internet-meme creations are included.
It doesn't take an insider source to figure that out. They included "d'oh" last year, and there's no reason to treat internet-memes differently than TV-memes.
Depending on your definition of "internet-meme" some already made it on there, for example lol [merriam-webster.com].
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Married to a lexicographer?
Surely you jest?
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Oh, lol, btw... I emailed my husband that I was being teased (nicely) about using flugton--and it's a word! He says:
"And, if it helps, flugton (pron: "floog-tone") is the pitch of the hum or buzz generated by an insect's wings. The word is German (loose translation: "flight-tone"), but does appear in a couple of older English-language entomology texts. So there.;)"
See? I was TOTALLY talking about insect-wings. ;)
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I'd probably be flagged and kicked outta here if I was as potty-mouthed as I am in daily life
There's not much fucking chance of that happening.
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See this all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
I see this all the time (I have a PhD in the humanities and I am a software engineer) where someone from outside the field does something and claims it is a universal law but really, they just worked on English and cannot (or will not) prove that it works for other languages. Usually, these papers also lack any kind of literature review and ignore many of the problems that this would uncover. I saw one paper by a physicist that tried to use bit fields to model language change; it was just massively reductionist and couldn't explain anything at all for all the mathematical rigour.
I go to my University's language lunch which has lots of this and scare the pants off grad students by saying "this is all very well but does this work for Japanese or Old Irish or any other language?" This usually makes their faces go white because naturally English is the ONLY language that matters and is therefore "universal".
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Re:See this all the time (Score:4, Interesting)
English - An Indo-european language closely related to the Romance, and Germanic languages
Spanish - An indo-european language one of the Romance languages
Modern Hebrew - Hard to classify but has many influences from European languages mainly Indo-European Romance and Germanic languages
They didn't pick a very diverse range of languages, mostly one family, of heavily related and cross influenced languages ...
Pick something else like Yorùbá, or Mandarin Chinese ....?
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Hebrew not that controversial to classify (Score:4, Informative)
I agree with your main point, and agree that the modern Hebrew vocabulary is subject to diverse influences, including European languages.
That said, Hebrew [wikipedia.org] (modern or otherwise) is not that hard to classify -- it is firmly in the Semitic language grouping [wikipedia.org], itself part of the Afroasiatic language family [wikipedia.org]. Hebrew is a cousin to Arabic, and a cousin to ancient Egyptian, Touareg, Somali, and Amharic (Ethiopian).
Cheers,
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Actually, I'd have been a lot more interested to know about French, since it's one of the few languages out there that's actively curated by a central organization attempting to limit and document the language's morphing.
I'd be curious to know whether this is actually affecting the language's evolution in any meaningful way. Considering its close ties to English and Spanish, among others, it would be fairly easy to compare them and notice the influence, if influence there is.
Elementary anthropology (Score:2, Funny)
So physicists have reinvented battleship curves. Congratulations! We couldn't have done it a century ago without you!
Irregular verbs (Score:4, Informative)
There has been mathematical studies on how long irregular verbs might survive in the English language [scienceblogs.com] for a long time. I remember seeing the first such article a while back.
Basically the more used a verb- the longer it will take us to be liberated from its influence. Some like the verb "to be" are so enconsced in our language that they may take many many generations to eliminate.
Of course- this ignores any political movement to eliminate them- as countries become closer- if English remains the language of democracy- there may be a push to make English more standard. A new English without all the rule contradictions it currently has would be double-plus good.
The source of the new words (Score:3)
I'm sure Americans will have created 8000 of those new words each year. Not content with the ones we British gave them, they wanted their own.
After reading this all I can say (Score:2)
3 years ago it was a different discovery (Score:2)
Is this really a new discovery? (Score:2)
Google Books inaccurate (Score:2)
Google Books is notoriously inaccurate, especially with dates. I don't know if it's enough to throw their data off, but I wonder if the researchers realize this.
Here's the Google Ngram viewer (Score:2)
http://books.google.com/ngrams/ [google.com]
Don't spend the whole day on it.
Descriptivism, folks (Score:2)
Published in Science, their paper gives the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English—a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster's Third New International Dictionary has 348,000) with more than half of the language considered 'dark matter' that has evaded standard dictionaries (PDF).
Umm, no. The phrase "true number of words in English" is sufficiently ill-defined to make the question meaningless. There are two ways people think about whether something is
similar analysis to count species on Earth (Score:2)
Opportunity (Score:2)
30 to 50 years isn't anything new... (Score:3)
Tempest in a teapot (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a linguist (working on my Ph.D.) this is something of a tempest in a tea-pot. The most relevant use would be for glottochronology [wikipedia.org] - a field that's largely been abandoned by anyone seriously working on historical linguistics because of the various problems involved with that approach, including what the authors of the paper find, that the rate of word loss is not constant over time. They have a better idea of the rate of word loss, which could help improve glottochronology, but the method has a lot of flaws regardless.
Also, the question they're asking - how do words change over time, in terms of coining, becoming current, and becoming obsolete - really isn't a question historical linguists are that concerned about. Historical linguists are much more interested in how the forms of words change over time (phonological change), or how their function changes over time (grammaticalization), whereas the coinage and loss of words isn't often so important, especially on the large scale statistical level. Furthermore, this type of model probably handles languages with phenomena like avoidance speech [wikipedia.org] poorly, since that would change how and why words are kept or lost.
Their language sample is at heart a convenience sample - they happened to have access to lots of data in those three languages, and it is largely written data. Spanish and English are both related languages with very similar cultural contexts, while Hebrew is a strange choice in that is has an ancient history, but only quite recent revitalised usage. Whether most spoken interaction (which is what linguists tend to be more interested in) has even a tiny subset of the total number of words they are talking about is an open question and would be better tested against corpora with a large quantity of spoken data such as the British National Corpus or the International Corpus of English.
It's an interesting study, but if it hadn't been written by physicists I'm not sure if it would have ended up in Diachronica or the Journal of Historical Lingiustics, much less Science. Their "statistical rules" are interesting, but really not of any great use to wider linguistic inquiry. I think its import is really just exaggerated by the fact that science editors read Science and NOT most linguistics journals, and therefore they think it's really impressive.
Bad Title (Score:3)
Poorly worded title, I don't see any laws, theories, or other predictive content.. just some analysis.
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Firefox's English (UK) dictionary also doesn't recognise "snuck". Then again, it doesn't recognise "Firefox", either (But the US dictionary does - still no-go on "Snuck" though).
I actually hadn't noticed that before, but I agree with the above poster - "sneaked" sounds weird and wrong to me, "snuck" is what I've always used and heard others use.
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As someone born in the UK and moved to the US. Words like Sneaked/Snuck I use both.
I've found when I'm talking about events in the past- especially my childhood I will use the English version of the word- when I'm talking about more recent versions of the word I'll use the American version of the word.
Re:I hate "snuck" (Score:4, Interesting)
All languages evolve like this. The only reason we feel the need to fixate them on a standard is it gives a pretence of security. The rules themselves are just a long winded way of trying to legitimise the eccentricity of a language (English) pasted together from various other European languages. Our words are disparate, our Italian alphabet is lacking several letters and our accent changes every five miles down the road in a country of 80 million. Occasionally, we are lucky enough to get away with flouting the rules without being shot down by some jobsworth pedant. There will never be any kind of reform from the top down, if that were possible in any way whatsoever there would be no French 'weekend' for sure.
You want to put the rules in perspective, consider the many millions of human beings to come that are born into the world all thinking the same thing: 'frankly, I could not give a toss about cultural heritage mammy, now where is my coke and crisps please?'. If you don't want to be paddling a canoe up a waterfall the rest of your life, then it is much more pragmatic to be relaxed about such matters, because people are much more willing to respect convention when they are not beaten over the head with it.
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people are much more willing to respect convention when they are not beaten over the head with it.
My (anecdotical, of coure) experience is that people not willing to respect language convention aren't usually willing to do it in any case. It's the ones willing to listen to a suggestion I'm interested in.
Re:I hate "snuck" (Score:5, Funny)
That stupid word always drived me crazy.
Yeeeaaaah!
Re:"Universal laws"? (Score:5, Funny)
This looks like really interesting and important research - perhaps even a tenth as important as these physicists think it is!
What physicists do when they are bored ... take away research from other fields
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(As an aside: that page is the second hit for googling "google jobs" for some reason.)
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Not surprising really. What does an astrophysicist do? Point hyper sensitive instruments at random portions of the sky and generate humongous data sets that need heavy processing to extract structure and meaning. A really large part of Astrophysics these days is data analysis, almost all of it done with automated codes.
Which is for example why Renaissance Technology has a lot of Astrophysicists on board as well.
Re:"Universal laws"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Universal laws"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bringing mathematical rigour...
Physicists are widely known for their lack of mathematical rigor. David Hilbert, perhaps the most influential mathematician of the 20th century (who incidentally discovered Einstein's field equations before Einstein, though who was also nice enough not to get into a priority dispute since most of the work leading up to the discovery was Einstein's), is often quoted as saying some variation on, "Physics is too difficult for physicists!" His meaning was apparently that the mathematics required to rigorously justify assertions in advanced physics is often beyond the reach (or inclination) of physicists. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, by the way, but it indicates the traditional lack of rigor in physicist's math.
The paper itself says,
We use concepts from economics to gain quantitative
insights into the role of exogenous factors on the evolution
of language, combined with methods from statistical
physics to quantify the competition arising from correlations
between words and the memory-driven autocorrelations
in u_i(t) across time.
Perhaps "Bringing quantitative statistical analysis..." is a better phrase.
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All this reminds me of when a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were told of a man who is across the room from a woman and moves half the remaining distance to the woman every minute. The mathematician said, "The man will never reach the woman." The physicist said, "In twenty minutes the man will be within an atomic radius of the woman and can be said to have reached her." The engineer said, "No problem, in five minutes that guy will be close enough for all practical purposes."
Please adjust thi
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Re:"Universal laws"? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that similar, actually. In the above "paradox", you have a sum of the total distance covered after x time. If they were 10 feet a part, then after x minutes it is 5 + 2.5 + 1.25 + ... until you have x terms. As x goes to infinity, this sum will approach the full 10 feet. So the math is right, never will 10 feet be reached. And so the physics/engineering joke is fine, technically they will not meet following those rules, but there's always a point of "close enough". The rule itself is impossible to follow, though.
In Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, it works like this. The tortoise is say moving at 1 foot per second, and is 10 feet ahead. Achilles moves at 10 feet per second (~7mph), so after 1 second he will reach the point where the tortoise is now. But after that 1 second the tortoise will be another foot head, so Achilles must take another 0.1 seconds to reach the new point, but in that 0.1 seconds the tortoise has moved again, and so on forever, with the next step taking 0.01 seconds but still not catching the tortoise. Even if you allow for the physics/engineering "close enough" at no point is Achilles EVER past the tortoise, only "close enough" to call him "caught up". The reason this is different is that x terms in the sum no longer take exactly x minutes, since each term is over a shorter time as well as a shorter distance. If you take the limits on the infinite sum, the distance between them goes to 0, and the total amount of time goes to a finite number, not infinity (in this case, that finite number is 1 and 1/9 second, exactly what you get if you just ask how long it takes a person going 9 feet per second to cross the original 10 foot distance). Mathematically there is no problem with taking a finite amount of time to go a finite distance, so there is no paradox, the equation works out exactly when Achilles catches up to the tortoise. It's not a time reachable in the sums you came up with to describe it, but it's still a finite time. Where in the dance paradox above, the time it takes to reach 0 distance IS infinite.
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Please adjust this joke to the sexual proclivities of your audience as needed.
Haha, thanks. I already did ;)
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What physicists do when they are bored ... take away research from other fields
My thoughts exactly. Would this not fall under anthropology?
That's about as far from physics as it gets.
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Applies to software development too (Score:2)
Why use something that already exists when you can re-invent the wheel.
Corpus was English, so *not* "universal" (Score:3)
From TFA, the researchers were analyzing Google's corpus of primarily English texts. Anything they have to say about the development of language can thus only be said to hold true for English .
Different languages work differently, and are subject to different pressures of usage and culture and global politics. Somehow I doubt that Mori or Arabic or German are changing in quite the same ways or at quite the same rates as English.
TL;DR: "Universal", my shiny white honky ass.
Re:Physicists? (Score:4, Interesting)
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How about no.
This is what physicists think.
But in several areas of nature (and technology), there are "layers of abstraction" that abstract physics away.
Processor instruction sets have nothing to do with physics (apart from processor limitations, granted)
Human language has barely nothing to do with physics, hence the variety of them
Yeah, you can say that those have to do with physics but then, math has to do with physics, math notation has everything to do with how we can write, hold a pencil, and think sym
Re:Physicists? (Score:5, Funny)
Why would physicists be studying this kind of thing?
When you graduate with a PhD in physics, you get three things:
The third means that you are obliged, at least once, to submit a paper about some other field to arxiv.org. Ideally, this paper should not cite any relevant research in the field - only other papers by physicists - and, for bonus points, should base its entire thesis a weak statistical correlation.
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Re:To the Bane of Grammar Nazi. (Score:4, Insightful)
First off, I'd say your lack of language skills is indeed impacting your ability to coherently formulate an argument. Otherwise you would have noticed that the original post is not, in fact, about grammar at all. Rather, it's about words.
That said, I would also say that HOW you present an argument is just as important (if not more so) than the content of the argument itself. The point of making an argument at all is to convince someone else of the validity of your viewpoint. This task is impossible if you are unable to make yourself understood, and it's very difficult if people have dig through your statements in order to tease out your meaning. Also, the better your language skills, the less the chance your arguments will be misunderstood.
The reality is, though, it doesn't really matter how terrific your ideas are if you are unable to efficiently articulate them. Which makes the better point?
1) "I took my - you know - thing .... the thing thats sits on the round things.... you know - the THING.... yeah - with the keys and stuff - the THING. Anyway, I took the thing to the place... you know - where I do stuff... there's coffee and papers and stuff - the PLACE... and the guy who tells me what to do... you know - the PLACE."
- or -
2) "I drove my car to work."
Re:To the Bane of Grammar Nazi. (Score:5, Insightful)
s/threw/through/g
"through" is an adverb indicating a passage between locations or a change of state.
"threw" is the past tense of throw.
Grammar Nazi's often get a bit extreme but when your basic spelling is up-to-shit the actual meaning of your writing gets lost. Yes language evolves - this means we coin new words, we gradually change laws of grammar - but it is not a license to write whatever you want and claim it means what you intended to mean.
I'm fairly certain from context that you intended to write "through" for example - but if I hadn't recognized it I would have been wondering if you were so badly bullied that teachers actually threw you around in school.
>I have only learned to dislike people who feel the need to correct every detail, and discredit my arguments
It's not a discrediting of arguments to correct grammar mistakes. However, repeating them when you have been corrected just makes you look stupid. Worse, it makes you an asshole. Yeah, YOU are the asshole. Why ? Because using the proper conventions of language (grammar, spelling etc.) is a form of politeness. It makes your writing easy to read.
Furthermore, it is to your own advantage as well. When you ignore good language rules what you write more often than not doesn't mean what you intended it to mean. Some of your readers will simply misunderstand you. Others will be annoyed. Very few will actually have a clue what you were trying to say- because what you were trying to write and what you actually write no longer bear any but the most limited of resemblances.
The only thing that saves the grammar-ignorant from being completely illiterate is the human ability to infer meaning from context - but context is incredibly culture, time and location specific. So the meaning of your words now become discernible exclusively to people who share your background. Everybody else (that could literally be people who live two neighborhoods away) are just sitting there shaking their heads and wondering what the fuck you're trying to say.
Oh and for a little encouragement... I am writing in my THIRD Language and very nearly all of the fucking time I get it right... you first language speakers have absolutely no excuse.
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At least I have the excuse that I'm not writing in my first, or indeed even my second language.
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Because using the proper conventions of language (grammar, spelling etc.) is a form of politeness.
On this point (and while I concur with your sentiments overall), I would like to point out that it's not so much that using language correctly being a form of politeness, but taking the point communicated and the communication medium seriously. Interchanging their/there/they're, two/to/too, for/four, than/then, through/threw, and other such errors imply one of three things:
1) Non-native speaker, confusing one word for another.
2) Ignorance on the writer's part.
3) Carelessness.
Two of the three boils down to n
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Hey, I heard that Newton guy got all his laws overturned. What an idiot! Better not use Newton for anything anymore.
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