Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
The real problem here is that the FDA is recommending throwing out the butter purely based on the labels.

If they said, "throw out the butter if you (or whomever would have consumed it) have an allergy to milk as this is dairy milk-based butter", or if Costco said, "return it because it was not clear this was a dairy based butter" it would make more sense.

Comment · 2 years ago
That taboo is long since gone (I'm assuming you're talking about South Asia, though).
Comment · 2 years ago
This reminds me of when Sony disabled their officially supported OtherOS support (used to install Linux and other os's dual boot) with an update. Of course without the update, no access to the Sony Store, games that require the latest Sony PS3 stopped working, etc...
Comment · 2 years ago
Your politicans, like Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, believe that the laws of Australia trump the laws of Mathematics, in the context of trying to weaken strong encryption. In at least some areas, they need a better education.
Comment · 2 years ago
It makes sense but it's not trivial to discover, since languages separated by about 10,000 years have changed enough that it's almost impossible to find similarities. This paper talks about separations from 12-24 thousand years.

Proto-Afro Asiatic (edit: ancestor of Coptic, Hebrew, Amhara, Arabic, Tigre, the Berber languages, Aramaic, Hausa (IIRC), and a number of less commonly spoken languages) likely dates back to more than 10K years ago, but we have the benefit of more than 5,000 years of writing in both Egyptian and the Akkadian. We don't have that benefit with any of the indigenous languages of Siberia or North America.

Also, linguistic typology is not the best way to show relatedness, since languages change. For example, proto-Indo European had Nominative Accusative alignment, and was highly inflected, but modern English is almost completely uninflected, and Hindi has Ergative-Absolutive alignment for some tenses.

I looked at the structural features they mentioned, and at least some of them are well known to change quite dramatically. (Some Indo European languages picked up a difference between exclusive and inclusive we, places of articulation change, languages develop and lose gendered nouns, others have lost some distinctions of number (dual has been lost in most IE languages).

But I'm not a linguist, so any linguist can comment on whether these are fair criticisms.

Also, as others mentioned Na-Dene (Navajo is the most spoken language in this group), is already believed to have a connection to the Ket language of Siberia.

Comment · 2 years ago
Lowered IQ, impulse control, and increased levels of aggression.
Comment · 2 years ago
There's been a massive problem of diploma mills, both in America, and even worse in Canada, where colleges have basically been admitting students for fake degrees for pay, just because it gets them work permits post graduation much more easily, as somewhat of a workaround Canadian immigration.

Canada recently has cracked down on (I believe undergraduate) student visas recently, with effectively a per-province cap. I'm not sure if Canada has a problem with diploma mills at the Master's level though.

Comment · 2 years ago
In general, when the SHTF, or things rapidly deteriorate. When the war finally starts. Etc.
Comment · 2 years ago
No, you're not.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands is the closest thing to being a US Protectorate without being a US posession.

It is officially an Associated State with a Compact of Free Association with the US. Its (non-naturalized) citizens have a right to work in and live in the US, equal access to welfare programs (that even green card holders don't have), and many US domestic agencies provide services there (the US Post office, and FEMA amongst others). And of course they have DoD protection (Edit: for Marshallese owned ships only), and use the US Dollar.

But it's even true in places which are _definitely_ not US proxies. Note that the US financial sanctions have an insanely wide reaching effect, given the need to be able to transact in US dollars.

Because of the US sanctions against Carrie Lam, the previous Chief Executive of Hong Kong, she had to withdraw her own salary from the Hong Kong SAR government in cash, because no bank in Hong Kong could deal with her and also offer US dollar denominated services.

Comment · 3 years ago
Now I wonder whether wearing photochromatic lenses (transitions lenses) would have reduced the damage. I do believe they are triggered by UV.
Comment · 3 years ago
Malabaric seems to be both Malayalam and Tamil here.

Malabaric 2 is from Tranquebar -- the Danish factory in modern Tamil Nadu.

Malabaric 3 could read as Tamil, and I believe could read as Malayalam too, but I'll ask the Malayalam speakers here to comment.

Malabaric 4 looks like a strange form of either the Malayalam script or the Grantha script. (Modern Malayalam has a very curved ka -- this one looks more like the Tamil ka, but Tamil does not have the same repretoire of characters that Malayalam does. Grantha (traditionally used in Tamil Nadu to represent Sanskrit, and with a greater visual similarity to Tamil) does.

They also list Tamoulic (Tamil in French is "Tamoul") on page 293, which is somewhat like modern script but not really.

Talenga is listed right above Tamoulic (presumably a corruption of Telugu), but it also states that this language is also called Badega. Badaga is a minority Dravidian language in the area, but closer to Tamil and Kannada.

They made lots of mistakes.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
In California, at least, they seems to be recommending it. (I'm currently in the market to replace my Central Air system and talking to vendors.)
Comment · 3 years ago
I'd like real numbers, but I've come across, a disproportionate number of people in interreligious, inter-ethnicity marriages, and presumably inter-caste marriages, except that I can't really tell one's caste unless they have a caste based lastname, and I know that name is associated with a caste.

I've heard of numerous cases where Indian-Americans didn't know their caste until they were asked about it by people not of Indian origin, who seemed to have the 4 caste + outcastes model in their heads, which barely maps to how caste is understood in modern India.

(Parents came here from India in the 1970's).

This may also differ by generation.

Comment · 3 years ago
I think the question we need to ask is how fast climate can change and how much can climate change.

For which I'd say, at a rate and total amount of change low enough to be compatible with the survival of human civilization, not having mass deaths, and keeping ecosystems intact, even if changed.

Civilization developed during a time of relatively stable weather. Rapid instability can cause mass dieoffs which at the very least will cause havoc with our food supply -- think fish. Or what's happening with peach production in Georgia.

We need to stop the bleeding (by going carbon neutral), and in parallel think about how to mitigate the problems, and reverse the changes.

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