Ummm… I do. It’s not a hard b sound, but it is there. It sort of moves the location of the “t” sound down towards a “b.” It defiantly does not sound like “det”.
And I distinctly pronounce the “b” in “plumber” (another example in the article.
We all have our faults. But we don't need to promote them.
There is also no "t" sound in "often", never was. Some officious busybody thought "offen" and "oft" ought to be related. so put "often" in a dictionary. Now people who don't know any better pronounce it. But it's rare to find anybody trying, foolishly, to say the "b" in debt and doubt.
I doubt anybody tries to pronounce the "l" in "could". That one appears to be the product of busybody typesetters, imagining some parallel with "should" and "would" (related to "shall" and "will"), which also do not get any "l" sound; but "could" is related to "can".
There very much is a 't' sound in 'often,' but it depends on how you talk (whether or not there was before, language changes). If you're saying native speakers are saying it wrong, then I don't know what to tell you.
Maybe you're young or speak a nonconventional dialect. In my local dialect (Midwest American), the "t" is almost never pronounced. I wouldn't say it's wrong to hammer the "t" home, but it sounds clumsy to my ears.
Linguists call it "spelling pronunciation": pronouncing as written, pedantically, despite not hearing it spoken that way. It's silly, but less silly than many other things. Of course, the more it happens, the more other people hear it that way and come to believe it is normal.
> There is also no "t" sound in "often", never was. Some officious busybody thought "offen" and "oft" ought to be related. so put "often" in a dictionary. Now people who don't know any better pronounce it.
Hmm? The etymology dictionaries don't appear to back you up on this.
> often (adv.): "repeatedly, again and again, many times, under many circumstances," mid-13c., an extended form of oft, in Middle English typically before vowels and h-, probably by influence of its opposite, seldom (Middle English selden).
> From Middle English often, alteration (with final -n added due to analogy with Middle English selden (“seldom”)) of Middle English ofte, oft, from Old English oft (“oft; often”)
It's one thing to recognize two words have the same root, and mean the same thing, and something completely different to take a letter from one and stick it in the middle of the other one where it is never pronounced.
It's the same thing as debt and doubt. And, now there are people trying to pronounce that letter just because they see it in the word.
No, "often" is derived directly from "oft". This isn't a case of two words having the same root; it's a case of one word metamorphosing into the other word.
Both words were in use at the same time, by the same people, for different contexts. And, none of them who wrote the two-syllable word, on earliest remaining records, spelled it with a "t".
To demonstrate that "often" came from "oft" would require evidence that does not exist.
The difference between 'doubt' and 'doute' is the vowel sound, not a presence/absence of 'b'. 'debt' and 'dette' don't sound quite identical to me (as a native English speaker and learner of French) but they're very close and the difference isn't that there's a 'b' sound in there. Maybe it's that French 't' is slightly different.
French t is dental, English t is alveolar---in non-technical language, that means the French t is pronounced slightly further forward in your mouth, compared to the English t.
The English t is also aspirated a lot of the time (though not as consistently at the end of a word as at the beginning), while the French t is never aspirated.
There could be differences between the two short e sounds as well, but that depends more on which particular accents of English/French you're talking about.
That was my thought too - on the origin of troll imagery, but not "don't feed" (or at least it's not explicit in the story which is more 'my brother is bigger' as I recall)
There are lots of things that wouldn’t exist if humans didn’t exist. The question is whether or not math is one of these things. No one is doubting the existence of mathematics. What is doubted by a great many people is whether or not math exists independent of human existence. If math is an intrinsic part of the universe then is logic also an intrinsic part of the universe? If so is it the standard logic used in mathematics? Does it include the Law of the Excluded Middle?
In other words, we're still taking sides. The existence of asymmetry in the universe, isomers, strongly suggests foundational elements of mathematical logic are inherently part of things, and that we can construct all the usual inductive layers up from and/or/not in some form mechanistically, purely from things as they are, reason absent. Beyond inductive, philosophical questions and completeness and p/np are perhaps innately artefacts of conciousness. Most of the maths of things as they are lies outside these problems. It's a very big universe to argue humans define all states of being... but I grant that the idea of a number which is one more than the value you count to, before entropy prevents all counting is "out there" as a value beyond existence as we understand it, and doubtless countless other numbers and values and expressions. I live in hope some shrimp like thing, or a gas giant conscious cloud is working on that problem.
The logic used by most mathematicians is uses exclusive or, law of the excluded middle, and is first order logic. There are some mathematicians that don’t use all of these and there are branches of math that don’t use all of them. So when someone claims math is an intrinsic part of the universe without addressing these nuance it gives the impression of an opinion without a good foundation. Assuming a finite universe (and the observable universe is finite) then math is much bigger. At most, one should say a subset of math is intrinsic to the universe.
Fair. I like Polyani so I shall put a Polyani quote here which I feel goes to your point: Mathematics as a purely formal system of symbols without a human being possessing the know-how for dealing with the symbols is impossible (1969) the wiki page I found it on is the Brouwer-Hilbert controversy (constructivism vs formalism, which seems a reasonable laymans take on a component of your point) and says: Despite the last-half-twentieth century's continued abstraction of mathematics, the issue has not entirely gone away. which is I feel, what I first said. It's a continuing difference, and as a non mathematician I take heart in that. All of these observations stem from looking at the law of the excluded Middle btw. There was a causal chain of weblinks to get there, I didn't just grab at random.
Math is fundamentally a description of the physical world. Mathematicians don’t like to hear this because they have their own ideas about the platonic realm of math, but it is true. We can debate which logical rules or axioms to include, but fundamentally any math has to have some sort of rules for deductive reasoning, which carry over from observation about the physical world: effects have antecedents, with a causal link between the two.
Now we have gone from that to the present day when we have maths which aren’t yet found to align with physical reality. So I can see why people want to say that it is a mental construction. But still, even these abstract maths operate according to rules we derived from the physical universe.
You sidestepped the question about what rules of logic are intrinsic to the universe. There are different versions of logic. Is Law of the Excluded Middle intrinsic or not? A great many physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians don’t believe logic is intrinsic to the universe. Is ZFC intrinsic to the universe? Do large exist as a deduction from the math that is intrinsic to the universe?
The law of the excluded middle is also known as the “sandwich theorem” because it drives directly from a physical observation. I happen to agree with the constructionists that mathematics is better formulated without it, but it is most definitely a rule derived from analogy to the physical world.
As a physicist myself, I’ll tell you that there isn’t a single one which believes that the universe doesn’t operate according to knowable rules. That’s kinda the definition of what it means to be a physicist.
Statisticians have a saying, “all models are wrong, some are useful”. What we have is that math is useful for modeling physics. But it is just that, a model in so far as we know. Believing that math or logic is intrinsic to the universe is not all necessary to using math and logic for modeling physical phenomena. There are quite a few physicists and mathematicians who don’t believe math is an intrinsic part of the universe.
It’s not at all clear that the Law of the Excluded Middle is an intrinsic part of the universe.
While true, I find it hard to believe that moving water from one tank to another is some kind of grave threat to humanity like the article wants the reader to think. In the worst case scenario can't they just put these tanks in a big hole and pour concrete on them?
and what happens with concrete when the ground trembles...? it breaks. apart of that concrete is still damaged by radiation and such wholes and concrete needs to be redone after some years (there's already second one i chernobyl). and then after some years you have a lot of contaminated cement, which you need to cover again... and again... and again... it'll need to be redone even after both you and I die (assuming I don't get to my dream of changing all organs for new ones and living to 500 ;))
Hiding problems from sight doesnt solve them. It justs hides them. Its like a temporary patch, but the ground will be radiated for long time. What then? Another spot? Then again in another spot? So my and your grandchildren will basically have live to on radioactive waste/a ticking bomb? Thats not solution.
This is how landfills work currently so it is not much of a deviation from the status quo. It would still take millions of years before we run out of land to put all the nuclear waste ever created in.
There’s not that much radiation in this water. None of those concerns would apply. They could literally just dump it into the ocean without measurable effect, which is the plan of record.
Did you live during the Cold War? I struggle to understand why someone would want to live under that constant existential threat of nuclear annihilation.
> Did you live during the Cold War? I struggle to understand why someone would want to live under that constant existential threat of nuclear annihilation.
Ummm, we still live under that constant existential threat.
He didn't say he wants it. I think he means that times of renewed rivalry and tension are coming whether we want it or not, and he hopes some good can come from it.
Both Russia and the US still have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out much of humanity. All that changed is that we don't live under is the constant reminder of that existential threat.
It works in principle, but it's a very big engineering task, and an enormous expense to boot. To avoid noticeably different acceleration between head and foot,* it's going to have to be substantially larger than any spacecraft we've ever built, and the biggest spacecraft we've ever built cost over $100bn. It's also going to have to withstand stresses larger than anything we've done before.
There's no reason to doubt we could do it, but it's a very big step from where we are now.
* And if we don't do that, then we stray into the realm of untested biological issues. We have no idea if people can live safely and comfortably like that.
It is literally two things connected by a rope. A tether-based spun spacecraft is trivial from an engineering perspective, and can have as large a radius as you need to avoid differential “gravity” effects.
- What material are you making the rope out of? What data do we have of that material's behaviour under tension in a vacuum?
- How is the craft connected to the rope? Is it a fixed bond or is there freedom to move? What are the tradeoffs?
- What happens when one of the two ends is accelerated? How do you reestablish a stable rotation?
- How do you manoeuvre it? Can you?
- What happens in the event of a catastrophic failure of the rope? What safeguards need to be in place?
And this is all on top of the fact that we're discussing two things connected by a rope under conditions that rope has never been tested in, doing something that's never been done. Space exploration isn't in the habit of trusting that our untested models are reliable, especially where human life is involved.
It is unknown if it will be that easy. For obvious reasons, there have been no long-term studies in partial gravity. If 0.05g stops bone loss, great. If a full 1.0g and nothing less is required, then that's going to be a really onerous design constraint.
I wonder if this unknown may, in the end, turn out to be a great reason to motivate space exploration. A full G is the norm on Earth. Micro-G in orbital stations have known long-term negative effects on health. What if fractional-G actually has beneficial effects, like say, increasing average human lifespan a lot. The human circulatory system tends to fail early, causing a disproportional amount of deaths due to strokes or heart failure. It's far-fetched speculation on my part, but is not hard to imagine operating in a fractional-G environment could decrease wear and tear here, acting as a sort of medical treatment. In the end, people would have a great motivation for leaving Earth. Just dodging death, the ultimate enemy of all living things.
If a full 1.0g is required, that also makes it a much more difficult challenge on the moon. Spinning a module of a space station in zero g is one thing... trying to get a portion of a moon lab at 0.16g to 1.0g is a different challenge.
The advantage I see on the moon is that you have local mass to use. Yoy can build a large, banked circular track underground ground and then add cars as you expand.
It depends on how much gravity is needed for how much time to stave off the long term effects of zero gravity. If we're lucky, then just sleeping at a higher G may be enough and you just need the bunks built in a centrifugal train.
