I once believed that most people have a basic understanding of how Solar system works. My belief in humanity shattered when during a discussion with with several graduates of physics (!) I discovered that most of them do not know what is the orbital period of Moon. An impromptu survey revealed that about 8 people from 10 thought it was one day or one week. One knew, one even asked if I want to know sideric or synodic period.
garabik
If you haven’t yet, read http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html by Charles Stross.Quite a good description of how book publishing works.
I am consistently pursuing a policy of releasing what I can under permissive OpenSource or OpenContent licenses. This includes educating my co-employees about copyright and legality and the whole OpenSource idea, in a fields where no-one ever considered it before (human language resources). I daresay I have been quite successful in educating them, less in actually persuading them.
My motivation is a bit on the ideology and idealistic side, but I sincerely believe that data should be free (and would make a better world). Though it is true that this does actually hurt a certain business segment and thus it is an open question what is the improvement/detriment ratio.
Maybe that’s because it’s a false memory?
It is very likely. Also from Chapter 3, when McGonagall told Harry about his parents’ murder:
And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry’s art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.
Arthur Clarke’s idea of reduced gravity prolonging significantly human life. Sadly, the available evidence does not quite point in this direction. But for a sci-fi story it might be quite OK (e.g. it is discovered that microgravity prevents Alzheimers’).
You had to try to live the other person’s entire life inside your own head, at least if you wanted to create the False Memories with less than a sixteen-to-one slowdown as you separately crafted sixteen major tracks of memory
Was this by any change a reference to Permutation City? That was 17× slowdown, but that could be explained by taking the ratio of real+simulated time. But I do not get the “sixteen major tracks of memory” then.
Far fetched, I know...
Are there other words that could be used instead of “AI” in this context?
“Od automatov po zombie” ?
Not an ideal variant, but I am afraid there are not many possibilities here…
At Esperanto meetings.
Learned Hangul (just the script, I have no intention of learning Korean ever). Not worth much of bragging, since it is indeed very easy, “a writing you can learn within a morning”—though it took me considerably longer.
My primary motivation was to have a sort of private semi-secret script to write my notes in, and something where syllables will be organized in blocks, which theoretically helps reading (though one has to read a lot to internalize the whole shapes to achieve this).
I have some relevant observations:
Hangul might fit Korean language perfectly, but is really, really unsuitable for a “random European language”. Not only there are many consonants missing, but the syllables cannot have an arbitrary coda, and arbitrary consonant clusters are right out.
The above point can be remedied somewhat by (re)using historical (obsolete) letters, but:
Historical letters have almost none computer support.
Arbitrary consonant clusters have none computer support, since:
There are standalone “jamo” letters in unicode block U+1100, but most applications cannot deal with them, requiring to use precomposed syllables insted
Even if I could use standalone jamo, font support does not go beyond initial consonant+vowel+(fixed set of) final consonant cluster, anything else just displays overlapping and utterly unreadable letters.
Syllables consisting of consonant+vowel are nicely readable, but:
Syllables witht he structure CVC(C) are less readable, requiring bigger font size, which kind of defeats the point of readability. Especially if one wants to use morphematic writting, as opposed to phonemic one—which was my original intention, to keep the word roots unchanged.
Thus, Latin script at smallish fontsizes tends to be more readable than Hangul at twice the fontsize.
Korean input methods under X11 leave a lot to be desired. Especially if you want to type something that does not fit Korean phonology, you are basically out of luck.
Considering all this, I indeed do use Hangul as my private semisecret script, and intent to continue doing so.
It seems like the north & south poles could be natural schelling points for storing information to transmit to far-future civs: they’re cold, so things preserve well, and they’re unique points on the earth’s surface.
Except that they are not—in geological times, they move (relative to tectonic plates). Even disregarding the drift, they are rather inconvenient as places for information caches, being both under tons of water—although something might have been buried under South pole when it was not under tons of water, but would we find it, without the builders making some kind of beacon? The same applies for a cache under North pole sea floor.
And if you are aiming at less than geological times, highest mountain makes much more sense. In particular, putting something on top of South pole ice is in danger of the ice melting (bad if you account for the civilization risk being climate-based).
hypothesis: Voldemort is pretending to lose.
Everything he said and did about Hermione is true—he wants Harry to have restrains and a sidekick (and a true friend, but his is an emotion he knows not). He knows that Harry has the best chance to defeat death, and so the best course of action is to move to the background to live a safe, boring life, now with his horcrux network, new body with who-knows-what capabilities, Harry being one of the very few things in the world that can hurt/kill him. So if Harry will think Voldemort is finally dead...
Against this hypothesis speaks the fact that Voldemort acts in a really stupid way—he surely must be aware that Harry might notice it. And he did not set up any plausible reason why he might act stupidly.So why would he be playing suddenly two levels down?
Hypothesis: The mirror (or the whole room) connects universes. More specifically, there is only one mirror, stable in the multiverse (quantum, mathematical, magical or whatever) of compatible universes. A compatible universe is such an universe where the mirror exists, i.e. most probably the one that did not branch off before the end of Atlantis (or boltzmanned into existence a moment ago).
Looking into the reflection, your (magical) brain picks the image from a different universe, the one that matches your CEV most closely.
Nothing can hurt the mirror, unless the measure of the universes the action is performed in is a “significant portion” of the multiverse—otherwise it just dissipates.
The map shows gibberish, because, well, there is everybody and nobody in the last room...
Help me obtain Sstone of Transsfiguration, and I sshall try my hardesst to ressurrect your girl-child friend to true and lassting life.
But not necessarily the same physical form—thus the Alicorn Princess.
I’ve made a decision to read fiction primarily in foreign languages, to get some side benefit from it (in addition to the entertainment). This did slow my reading down (I am quite a fast reader) - several times unless I am already proficient in the language. This is mostly because of my conscious effort to pay attention to the grammar and vocabulary (dictionary lookup not included) - otherwise the slowing down would not be so pronounced.
I found out that after 5 or 10 books (and introductory lessons), reading in a foreign language stops being a hard work and becomes enjoyable again.
learn Esperanto. The problem is that it takes up much more space than English
That’s not how Esperanto works—it is not a philosophical language. While in theory it is 100% agglutinative, it is not used in that way, and the wordbuilding affixes serve more like a mnemotechnical device when learning the language (and it is very cleverly designed and very helpful).
As for the size, Esperanto is not longer or shorter than any particular other language—it is English that is somewhat shorter than the others, due to many mono- and disyllabic words. Also consider the fact that translations are usually longer than originals.
I am starting to think that Lord Voldemort planned to commit suicide by proxy. Being without any personal aims, totally bored, without any happiness, surrounded by idiots, no chance of improvement—yet he cares about the world, at least somewhat, and realized that the original plan of playing chess with Harry would not alleviate his mood anymore anyway. And he has a better, happier and (age adjusted) more intelligent clone running around, so it is not like he will cease to exist altogether.
So he told Harry where to find Memory charms, prepared the plot, got the Stone (for Harry), made Harry take the Vow to keep his recklessness in limits, let him keep his wand and put him to the Final Exam.
The problem is that if he planned to be Obliviated, the plot was extremely complicated and relied on too many factors that could have gone wrong. So perhaps LV just threw the towel and said to himself, darn, let’s Harry try whatever he can think about to do with us, and if he fails, well, it’s not like I cannot try something else in some decades.
I shall take no chances… in not destroying the world...
Oh my… did Voldemort just magically imbued Harry to do his best to put the whole world into time-frozen stasis in the Mirror?
Though revealing this to LV would not do any good—there is a failure safe mode, namely killing Harry, and if LV learns what he did (apart from pointing out his own stupidity), he has all the motivation to kill Harry right now.
A single world language should be designed and promoted. Previous attempts have been too Eurocentric to take advantage of all useful grammatical features that are available.
There are so many constructed languages already that you do not need to design anything, if you have some criteria, just pick one that suits you, brush it up and maybe replace the vocabulary. And then goes the minor issue of promoting it and gaining speakers :-)
English is rather badly suited for an international auxiliary language, as the things go. But still better than French or Chinese, all things considered. Spelling is OK, it’s the pronunciation that sucks :-) And its weird syntax and internally inconsistent vocabulary.
Spelling reform (or a completely new, purely phonetic alphabet) is urgent.
You really, really do not want phonetic writing system—phonemic is what you should go after, but morphophonemic has certain advantages too, especially for non-native speakers.
I would advocate adapting Hangul for that purpose.
If you match your phonology to 15th century Korean, sure. Not so much otherwise without a substantial reform and introduction of new letters. Anyway, Hangul is more suited for a morphematic writing system, not phone[mt]ic one.
Depending on your free time, engage in some hobbyist activity.
E.g. subscribe to a foreign language course, where you’ll meet some people and gain the additional benefit of learning (at least the basics of) a foreign language (might not be applicable if you are in the USA).
Indeed. Harry raised his hand against his mentor, the one who made him, the one he loved (‘Harry was in love. It would be a three-way wedding: him, the Time-Turner, and Professor Quirrell’), and was the cause of Dumbledore’s downfall. Only, Dumbledore did not realize that he and Harry’s mentor does not need to be the same person.