> (Aside: I am intentionally sticking with U. S. customary units of pounds, miles, etc., to be consistent with much of the related literature.)
From the article, it sounds like dietary science in the US is done with imperial units. It was written by an American for a primarily American audience. Americans track their weight in pounds. Those seem like pretty good reasons to not use metric to me.
Especially with how close the precinct station is to Cal Anderson. We're talking ~3 blocks. Maybe it's a case of understaffing and/or suboptimal allocation of officers? I imagine Pike from 12th down past Broadway becomes a primary focus later at night. I imagine that's when most crime in Cal Anderson occurs. Time-of-day data would be awesome in this set.
At the same time, here in Argentina we invented the Convertibility: "One Peso equal to One Dollar" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Currency_Board The main difference is that here the pesos were always "actual" bills, but the real started as "imaginary" bills.
It worked initially (better than I expected), but we have an inflation that was 1% or 2% over the dollar inflation. So after 10 years we have a 20% difference in price, but we maintained the "One Peso equal to One Dollar" until it exploded. IIRC in Brazil the transition from 1-1 to 1-X was softer.
My understanding is that dumbwaiters and laundry chutes fall under a fire code which boils down to "Nah, dude. Don't do that" just about everywhere. Vertical passages are great for fires, and bad for people who like not being on fire.
There's a whole industry built around selling trash chutes and "soiled linen" hardware for hotels and skyscrapers in even the most authoritarian nanny states. So everything sold is NYC skyscraper firecode rated and NFPA certified or whatever even if its going in a 2-floor residential in a civilized area where its not even regulated. You can get a kit of the self closing doors for the top and a fusible link gadget that closes a door at the bottom for about the cost of a Really good video card, at least for a small linen chute. Its cheaper but probably less safe to have the fusible link thing, although you can put an automatic closing fireproof door in the basement end too. This is all standard COTS stuff nothing weird or custom.
Trying to do the safety stuff by myself would likely be super aggravating and end up being more expensive than just buying the doors and tube COTS. I'll have enough carpentry agony installing and trimming it out to make it look good, anyway.
Its apparently a lot of work to fireblock the tube where it goes thru the floor and ceilings and also trimming it out so it looks nice is non-trivial. If the hole were big enough for an elevator you'd just jump in, but if its barely big enough for a shoebox, how you do that work with out ripping away all the drywall is non-trivial. And that leads to lots of work.
The hack for a dumbwaiter is building all of it inside the tube. Any hole in the tube or a hole in the doors, even just to mount stuff, and I guess its not technically fireproof anymore. Adhesives would probably be OK? So there's some serious hacking potential involved here. You end up doing the "ship in a bottle" thing with a truss inside the tube at the top and bottom and the usual array of pulleys and ropes.
Another problem with dumb waiters is the price of the fireproof doors and tube is really cheap for "laundry chute size" but if you want to carry an entire laundry basket inside a dumb waiter inside the chute, it starts getting expensive, and a fireproof door the size of a dorm fridge approached 4 figures when I last looked into this.
Still, it would be pretty awesome, in my infinite spare time...
There are complicated ways of doing this, but the naïve way is as follows:
First you need a corpus of text that's grammatically correct
Each node in the chain is a word or piece of punctuation. Each word has a certain probability of being followed by every other word in the corpus, including itself. There are a few different ways to start the sentence. One approach is to start from the node for the punctuation mark ".", and only selecting a following node that is not a period, since sentences don't tend to start with punctuation. From there, use a random number generator to pick a following node based on your probability matrix, rinse, repeat.
If you'll notice, there's no guarantee that it will be grammatically correct. There's just some statistical likelihood that it will be.
My big takeaway from the Chomsky quote is that it's useless to ask if computers can think because one of the fundamental properties we associate with thinking is some biological/spiritual aspect. For a computer to "think", we'd need to redefine what we mean by think. And if we have to redefine what it means to think, why bother hailing it as an accomplishment to make a computer "think". The properties are incredibly important to our understanding of the world. The fact that we have different words for "think", "compute", and "calculate" gives some insight into the value we assign to the distinction as a culture. If those differentiations didn't exist, the problem of simulating cognition wouldn't change. What would change is our perception of the problem. If thinking, calculation, and computation all share the same word, it becomes a question of degrees of "thinking" rather than substantially different processes.
I don't think Chomsky is trying to elevate certain things outside of the laws of nature. He's describing how what we choose to differentiate changes our fundamental perceptions of those things. Submarines could "swim". They could also "read", but those words have a very specific set of properties associated with them.
> we associate with thinking is some biological/spiritual aspect
Well I don't.
> The fact that we have different words for "think", "compute", and "calculate"
Also my native language (Finnish) doesn't have separate words for "compute" and calculate". Both are covered by "laskea". (Also "suorittaa" is used, but that is "execute".)
So the words for a calculator (small electronic device used to do mathematics, usually arithmetic) and the word for computer (like a general purpose desktop computer, the thing that runs and OS like Apple OS X or Microsoft Windows 8) are the same? I'm assuming that you do have a different word for think though as you didn't mention that.
What about arvioida? Would that be used for compute?
This might be an instances where the Sapir Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir_Whorf) comes in to play. The idea would be that you don't consider computing and calculating to differ from thought because the [primary] language you use [or grew up using] doesn't make that differentiation.
> So the words for a calculator ... and the word for computer ... are the same?
No no. We have laskin ("calculator") for calculator and tietokone ("data machine") for computer.
If you don't know any other language than English, you'll be surprised about how many different ways different languages have come up with for words for modern things, like the computer. The etymology does not necessarily resemble that of the English language.
Actually, I think that just knowing English well one can see the same effect as knowing a few other languages - the etymologies of words being dispersed amongst Latin, Greek, Scandinavian, Germanic and French origins (as a first pass, of course there's influence from many, many languages) makes it easy to see how many words can develop for the same thing, each having a subtle twist of meaning. Like the use in English of beef/cow for cooked meat vs. the animal.
The only words I know for a computer are computer (English derived from a name for a person who calculates values), ordinateur (French, origin is Latin to do with organising/ordering; close to English "ordinator"), cyfrifadur (sp? Welsh, origin is account-er; similar derivation as English), and rechner (German, a cognate with English "reckoner") ... but in these cases I think everyone normally uses just "computer" or a transliteration of it like in Kswahili ("kompyuta", don't quote me on that spelling!).
Well in addition to Finnish "tietokone" (data machine, or information machine), there is at least Swedish (also Norwegian) "datamaskin" (data machine), nowadays usually shortened to "datorn", and Turkish "bilgisayar" (information counter).
So form of "computer" seems to be the choice in a large number of languages, though.
The difference between "think" and "compute" is the important distinction being made, and I tend to agree that moving the goal posts does nothing to help decide whether a computer is really capable of thought.
The term "hipster" has become more or less a catch-all for words such as
* pretentious
* egotistical
* artsy
* self-involved
* preachy
* irreverent
* trendy
and many many more. My favorite thing about the linguistic history of "hipster" is that it started out defined as "one who is hip", but has come to describe both the hip person and the hipness itself. Phrases like "hipster shoes" or "hipster band" come to mind.
> but has come to describe both the hip person and the hipness itself. Phrases like "hipster shoes" or "hipster band" come to mind.
(Note: Grammar quibbles ahead.)
I don't think your examples really support that. Saying "hipster shoes" doesn't require the shoes to be hip at all, it only means they are a kind that is popularly associated or made for hipsters. Naming something "Hipster X" is just an case of attributive nouns.
Similarly, consider a "Programmer Chair" being sold... Surely nobody is trying to say that the chair is able to code, or that the chair is itself a form of code, or anything like that, right?
Instead, "Programmer Chair" means a chair that is associated-with or belongs-to Programmers.
I think it's interesting that many popular nouns can modify other nouns in English, and that the order of the words matters, e.g. you would never say "shoes hipster"
From A Canticle for Leibowitz:
"In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended... house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection."
Even more subtly, there are things like adjective order that are also an important part of the english language that most native speakers just learn innately. Saying them out of order doesn't necessarily change the meaning of the phrase, but it sure sounds odd to a native speaker.
As an example, "a cute little paisley cat" would be considered the correct order, while "a paisley cute little cat" would not.
Although there are lots of examples where people switched the word order. It might not be historicaly accurate, but the example I remember being told is that an 'ear wig' was so named because it went from one's wig to one's ear.
I'm sure that Latin is also helped by the fact that word order makes very little difference, while we place a huge emphasis on it in English.
One thing I love about Latin is that you can have the adjective at the start of a sentence and the noun it modifies thirteen lines later (Caesar does this quite a bit), and the sentence is still perfectly readable. In English, not so much.
I would say a hipster is someone who thinks that everyone else has it all wrong and is missing the obvious right way to dress, think, live or do something. Which the hipster has all figured out.
The best thing about hipsters is they appear to not care about appearance (as only one example) but then almost always predictably dress a certain "hipster" way in order to conform to the way hipsters are supposed to look.
The most interesting definition I've seen is roughly: "one who fetishizes the authentic", but it seems the term has come to be a cheap way to heap scorn on certain categories of fashion.
The word is so overplayed and unuseful it ought to be retired (it's not hip any more).
Thanks. I'm well aware of what a hipster is and how the term is used in the context of modern slang, this doesn't really help answer my original question, however.
Fair enough. I think that's where we differ - I feel the word isn't quite as ill defined as you suggest, though it is commonly misused. A conversation for another time :)
You've just described the characteristics of a hipster - not a definition.
Not that it matters. Hipster is such a bullshit, reductive pejorative. I find the people that use it either:
a) Don't understand someone or something. Some guy genuinely into a genre of music you've not heard. Is it insecurity? Is it about looking dumb? I'm not sure. But rather than try and engage in an effort to gain knowledge about the genre, people just call it hipster and disengage.
b) Do understand. Someone's trying to do something that is fresh and original to them - but may be old hat to you. Let's say it's being into an alternative author or some kind of fair-trade delicacy. Rather than let this person have their authentic moment in the sun (regardless how unoriginal you know it is) - people label them as hipsters.
TLDR: Calling things hipster is a demonstration of the holier-than-thou attitude it seeks to mock.
"We do know what hipster means—or at least we should. The term has always possessed adequately lucid definitions; they just happen to be multiple. If we refuse to enunciate them, it may be because everyone affiliated with the term has a stake in keeping it murky. Hipster accusation has been, for a decade, the outflanking maneuver par excellence for competitors within a common field of cool."
While the name "Uncle Tom" comes from the book, the character of Uncle Tom from ~1865 onwards was portrayed almost exclusively in minstrel show retellings of the novel. Minstrel show's didn't quite... capture the anti-slavery sentiments of the book [1].
The novel's Uncle Tom was resistant to the harsher institutions of slavery, sometimes standing in vocal opposition to his masters. The minstrel show Uncle Tom was almost exclusively played by white men in black face, going for cheap laughs by exaggerating the perceived mannerisms of American blacks. Essentially, the novel was radical, progressive and extremely popular. In the process of turning it into a minstrel show, everything radical and progressive was stripped out and replaced with cheap, comfortable laughs for an audience with a concept of how black people are "supposed" to act.
And that's how people who have just read Uncle Tom's Cabin don't get why Uncle Tom is now an epithet for people perceived to be subservient, or cooperating with their oppressors.
I love this. Do you happen to know of any good reading materials on pre-Enlightenment or even pre-printing press scientific history? It gets boring hearing that there was no academic advancement from the fall of the Roman Empire until Galileo.
From the article, it sounds like dietary science in the US is done with imperial units. It was written by an American for a primarily American audience. Americans track their weight in pounds. Those seem like pretty good reasons to not use metric to me.