They found some purported (maybe confirmed?) wreckage did they not? Seat cushions and other lightweight parts washed up on a beach somewhere? But never the flight recorders.
I think the confusion is because of simplified vs. traditional characters. 机 is made from 木 (wood) and 几 (table) radicals, and in Japanese it really does mean desk/table. But in Chinese it's the simplified form of 機 (machine). The 几 is just a substitute for some more complicated strokes, and 木 is just for the sound.
When reading the original article I thought, this guy seems off, maybe becoming a professor does that to someone, probably no big deal.
Then I skimmed through your link:
> I predict that in a few years, fluffy feminist divorce court judges will start being assassinated by young women, as the latter increasingly see the source of their misery coming from these judges. These young women, manless, loveless, sexless, and especially childless, due to the mass exodus of the MGTOWs will then express their hatred against these judges in the form of assassination.
His writings on the subject of the interaction between men and women scream "frustrated virgin." He's full of rage toward women and their place in families and society.
Heh. The funny thing is that in a way everything on that page makes a lot of sense. If you take mainstream feminist and egalitarian ideology at its face value, and then you look at how things actually play out in the real world, then something like his masculism makes sense. However, most people when noticing a difference between the ideology and the reality will question the ideology. Other people won't think about it too hard and will accept some rationalization for the contradictions. It takes a special soul to make a reductio ad absurdum and actually completely believe the reduction.
This article is particularly relevant to me. I’m originally from a suburb of Cleveland less than half an hour from where the OP works, and I’m currently an undergraduate at Harvard. There are definitely some differences between the areas, and I can’t say that I have the overwhelmingly positive vision of the Midwest that the author of this post has. My feeling is that people in the Midwest are more content with the status quo — they understand what a comfortable life is, and they seek to achieve that. Life is very safe and sheltered, especially growing up there, and I feel that my peers from elsewhere have been exposed to so much more of life than I have.
The Midwest also lacks the intellectual vibrancy that a place like Boston does. It just seems to me that there are overwhelming concentration of smart, ambitious people from the coasts compared to those from the Midwest.
Personally, I love it here in Boston, way more than I do at home. Ohio was a good, safe place to grow up, and I imagine that it’s a great place to raise a family. However, I couldn’t imagine spending any more of my life there than I already have without dying from boredom or a creeping sense of mediocrity.
This rings true. I grew up in a suburb of Kansas City and, looking back, see it as a safe friendly place to grow up.
At uni, I was friends with a group of expat Manhattanites (not wealthy though) and similar to what you say, they looked at St. Louis as a quaint toy city. Many inconclusive dorm debates were held on the merits of the two environments. Of course neither of us could give ground, so similar to what you read nearby, we were talking past each other. Too defensive.
But that was 20 years and several cities ago. I still visit the Midwest and enjoy family and a few friends. I experience it as not open to newness, to difference, or to the exceptional. These things are just not valued. It is valued to be a regular person and to be comfortable and respectable.
This won't work for me. I love LA, where I live now, and have great respect for the Bay Area as well.
I think Midwest may be sort of a misnomer term. Chicago is midwest too and it definitely doesn't lack "cultural vibrancy". I think what you are referring to is more small town atmosphere rather than Midwest per se
I'm currently a freshman at an Ivy League school where no credit is offered for AP exams, and I believe that this policy is similar at many of our peer institutions. The exams can be used for placement purposes; however, they aren't really that necessary considering that prerequisites are very loosely enforced. I think the most important use for AP exams is actually during admissions. An applicant with an AP class on his or her transcript but with a low or missing AP exam score may cause an admissions officer to question the rigor of the class.
We do have one program that allows students to graduate early or earn a masters degree in four years. Most people here have enough AP credit to do so, yet they rarely elect to use it.
I went to Rice which was rather generous with AP credit. I used AP classes to cover lots of my electives and some intro math and science stuff. I skipped all the calculus requirements via AP. Some classes however only allowed you to skip classes without actually any credit granted. I think this varies quite widely by private universities.
I looked over the schools I applied to (over a decade ago) and it seems like the Ivies have gotten a little pickier about giving credit for AP exams.
I just spot checked some of the brand-name non-Ivy schools that my friends attended and all but one offer actual college credit for AP exams: Stanford, Northwestern (varies by college; I only checked one), Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and NYU all give college credit for AP exams. Boston College only offers advanced placement.
I made the other submission and it's actually the exact same article, there is just a small difference in the URL. Interesting to see how this took off when the other one did not.
Reading this story brings to mind the history of algorithms in the field of machine translation. Early attempts at the problem attempted to explicitly define the rules of converting between tongues using meticulously laid out systems of vocabulary and syntax. This approach proved untenable, in part due to the complex and ever changing nature of language. Modern systems such as Google Translation make use of machine learning algorithms that are fed large amounts of source material and computationally discern relationships between them.
I wonder if a similar approach could be taken with language construction. Instead of spending 25+ years fleshing out the details of a language in painstaking detail, computer programs could be devised that, using large amounts input, determine the most "efficient" means of expressing information. The approach would not only be far less labor intensive, it could also accommodate the rapidly evolving nature of language, for example adding to its "dictionary" in response to new phenomena in need of naming.
Interlingua was constructed this way, at least its vocabulary. They made the mistake IMHO to make the grammar naturalistic, which made it very easy to read for people who already spoke a Romance language; writing, on the other hand, was made difficult by this.
You could perhaps use a typological database with grammatical features of the world's languages and somehow select an "optimal" combination from it, but that's a far cry from letting a computer determine the most efficient means of expressing information; we have no idea how to define information/meaning, so that it's still an impossible dream. I don't think the problem is that designing languages is hard per se, it's that people can't be bothered to agree on one and learn it.
It sounds like an experiment worth testing out and could lead to some interesting results. On the other hand, I am imagine most conlangers enjoy devising the details of their language.
One of the techniques used is to computationally create a space of possible ways to partition semantic domains on a plane whose dimensions are simplicity and informativeness, in order to look at where in the possible space it is that real languages lie. While it's not been done (to my knowledge) for a whole language, it's potential direction to go.
