Ann K
Senior Member.
@Mendel
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7v8Otn1__U
It's OK, there's no shortage.External Quote:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7v8Otn1__U
Giddierone
Senior Member.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Unfortunately.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
On the other hand,
This is a comment following a return to Beta III where they found out the locals had gone back to worshiping Landru once Kirk and the Enterprise went on to next week's mission... I guess a picture of Archer was not available. They leave the computer Landru with some yellow caution tape around him and a sign that says "Do Not Obey." The Prime Directive, as practiced, does seem to include a lot of qualifiers, like "...unless it is to get Spock's brain back," "...unless Kirk finds the female guest star alluring" or "...unless you think it's just generally a good idea."
NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
Unless of course Landru is telling you how to fix your deleted post!
Hevach
Senior Member.
The way I see it is that it's not meant to be a wall but a stopping point. Breaking the Prime Directive is a huge part of Star Trek, and it's only painted as bad when captains do it unilaterally or inflicting direct harm for an unjust benefit (Equinox being a good example of both). It's treated as the right and necessary thing when the crew stops and talks a about it, voicing both sides of the matter and then acting on the consensus (which is often made for them by the power of conveniently timed plot twist). As Picard says in Drumhead, yes he had violated the Prime Directive nine times, and nine times he faced his superiors and justified his decision. The only time we know that he was rebuked for such a decision was his decision *not* to interfere in I, Borg.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Sorry, my sole allegiance is the TOS {what Lower Decks calls "Those Old Scientists") era... I know not of Picard.
Ann K
Senior Member.
I'm glad you said that, as I was about to point that out! I don't think I'd trust someone who failed to notice that to be able to identify a UFO.
John J.
Senior Member.
Milk that beast? Pull the udder one!
It just struck me, in English there isn't a non-gendered singular name for one of those animals:
How on earth did this happen? Are there parallels in other languages? (Genuine question).
Edited to add: Being a scientist isn't a guarantee of even a basic understanding of livestock.
Here's meteorologist Tomasz Schafernaker, a regular weather presenter for the BBC, on the panel show "Would I Lie To You?" where celebrities read out improbable statements, and their fellow panellists have to guess if it's the truth or a lie.
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Ann K
Senior Member.
Because the sex of an animal is of primary importance to a farmer, of course!
FatPhil
Senior Member.
The answer to that question is probably best found in a reference that uses "kine" rather than "cattle" for the plural. Alas my copy of HHH is in a box in the office presently, I'm sure he has a section on such animal words. /Language history, language change, and language relationship: An introduction to historical and comparative linguistics/ https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110613285/html . Highly recommended as an introductory text for those who got a taste for the field through people like Crystal or Bryson, but found their morsels a bit too mignon.
Given that the PIE *ghou has evolved into words that now imply non-gendered, male, and female varieties of the animal, it doesn't seems obvious that gendering was the most important thing on people's minds when they were adopting the word, else the gender would have been preserved better.
Explicitly:
PIE. "*ghou" > (missing links) > L. "bos" > O. Fr. "buef" > Eng. "beef", where the modern French "boeuf" is gendered male (in contrast to their female "vache").
PIE. "*ghou" > (missing links) > Proto-Germ. "*kwon" > one of the germanic languages "Kuo"/"ku"/etc. > O.Eng./M.Eng. "cu" > Eng. "cow" now gendered female.
Who knows where along those chains/trees gendering was introduced, it could be in the leaf nodes, as there's no reason to rule out a spontanious symmetry breaking where the separate languages influenced each other *after* splitting.
(For completeness, arguably PIE. "*ghou" > ... > Eng. "buffalo", gendered neutral, too; so all three bases are now covered. However, that derivation is sketchier.)
(All etymologies ultimately synthesised from https://www.etymonline.com/word/*gwou- and the obvious links therefrom.)
But that doesn't answer your question - what word should be used for a non-gendered domesticated bovine? You already have your answer...
I think it's generally agreed that the stall animal being referred to in Chaucer's /Truth/ (the poem where the phrase "the truth shall set you free" comes from) is a cow - and he was a very learned man familiar with a wide range of animal words - but notice his word choice: "Forth, pylgryme, forth! forth, beste, out of thi stal!". A curious side note - this poem is being addressed to a lord with the name "Vache" ("Therfore, thou Vache, leve thine olde wrechednesse;" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43940/truth-56d222d5bf80c - that 4th stanza isn't part of the poem, it's an "envoy", a postscript to accompany the poem itself).
So, if in doubt, just call everything a "beast". If it's good enough for Chaucer, it's good enough for all of us.
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FatPhil
Senior Member.
In particular an ability to refer to things with the right terms. The workers who needed to understand livestock would have spoken something germanic. The scientists would have spoken something latinate.
Mendel
Senior Member.
"bovine"
Ann K
Senior Member.
It was my understanding that in Britain, cow, bull, ram, ewe, sow, boar etc (or their earlier Anglo-Saxon words for the same) were the words used by the peasant farmers in their own language. Meanwhile their Norman lords, who only encountered these animals on a plate, referred to them with the words derived from the French: beef, mutton, pork.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Latinate, ultimately from Latin "bos", and post-Linnaeus.
John J.
Senior Member.
Well, yes, I can see that- but we have non-sexed terms for an individual pig, sheep, goat, elephant, cat, person- but not for cattle, at least not in regular use. Mendel's "bovine" is a possibility, but I feel it's more a technical term (and usually an adjective).
No mum asks their toddler, "...and what noise does a bovine make?"
Genders in the French language are just... incomprehensible (to me anyway)
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FatPhil
Senior Member.
Bizarre. As every schoolboy knows, vagin/a, -ae (sheath, scabbard) is first declension in Latin, with female grammatical gender. CNRTL dates the french masculine usage (emboldened below) to its very first use in the late 1600s:
https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/vaginExternal Quote:
Mauro
Senior Member.
It looks like grammatical gendering is pretty fluid. In Latin female genitalia (cunnus) had a male grammatical gender:
While male genitalia (mentula) had female grammatical gender:
Both these words were passed to Southern Italian languages, keeping the 'wrong' grammatical gender: ie. cunnu ['kun.nu] in Sardinian and Sicilian and minchia ['min.kja] (derived from mentula) in Sicilian. Standard Italian instead uses the 'regular' gendering for the names of genitalia, but minchia has been imported from Sicilian and is used relatively often, in alternative to the male-gendered usual synonyms.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cunnus
While male genitalia (mentula) had female grammatical gender:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mentula
Both these words were passed to Southern Italian languages, keeping the 'wrong' grammatical gender: ie. cunnu ['kun.nu] in Sardinian and Sicilian and minchia ['min.kja] (derived from mentula) in Sicilian. Standard Italian instead uses the 'regular' gendering for the names of genitalia, but minchia has been imported from Sicilian and is used relatively often, in alternative to the male-gendered usual synonyms.
Mendel
Senior Member.
When an article says "some scientists think" then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn't given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.
I should also, on reflection, have practiced in private. I had an audience, which grew as my initial satisfaction at an hypothesis well proven, slipped rapidly through stages of qualm, disquiet, then alarm (mild through severe) and ended in full blown panic.
When one panics, one's muscles tense, which is of course, the opposite of what I needed here. I had been quite relaxed at the start, but now I couldn't get a finger between the orange and the very taut edges of my mouth.
Above and below, the orange, which was now under some pressure, deformed to make a nearly perfect seal against my teeth. I hadn't previously been aware of how much oxygen one needs to consume an orange, but I was made aware of it now by its sudden and ongoing lack.
I forgot for a moment that I had nostrils and tried to breathe in hard through my mouth. I have big lungs. When the doctor tested my lung capacity, I blew the end clean off the cardboard tube.
I've always been vaguely proud of that; mostly for want of more tangible achievements and because I am, when all is said and done, the kind of person otherwise predisposed to shove a whole orange in his mouth without cause.
Those enormous lungs - my pride and joy - expanding in this moment of crisis to their fullest extent, had created a hard vacuum behind the orange, which, at that point imploded.
From now on, things which had been unfolding at an almost leisurely pace, started to happen rather fast. So, I will take this opportunity to say that no one had actually tried to help me up till now. This was not for lack of opportunity.
Later, someone mentioned the kind of details - veins like worms scribbling incomprehensible messages across my forehead, eyes popping out as if on stalks, laced with tiny red veins - which one can only truly apprehend at a distance that wouldn't have made help impossible.
But back to the imploding orange. Although it didn't diminish appreciably in volume upon implosion, the released juice vaporised, turning into a burning acidic cloud that instantly flooded my lungs.
My lungs very sensibly responded by collapsing rapidly aided by an involuntary and powerful spasm from my diaphragm.
The vapour and oily zest from the orange's skin mixed with mucus scoured from my lungs (that spread flat, we must remember, would cover a tennis court) as well as the last of my residual oxygen, exited now through my rediscovered nostrils as a magnificently abundant yellow foam.
And, having a volume in excess of what could easily egress at speed via those narrow tubes, it also squirted out through nearby exits, including around my eyes.
Even that wasn't enough and the build up of pressure finally proved too much for the orange, which left my mouth like grapeshot from a cannon, like the superluminal jets generated by matter falling towards a black hole at relativistic speed.
Temporarily blind and gasping in my own private world of consequences, I was unaware of the cone of devastation that I had unleashed upon the unluckier segment of my audience, occupying roughly one steradian of solid angle to my front.
When I finally recovered my senses and the cycle of whooping inhalation and coughing fits had exhausted itself, I was greeted not by the concern that I felt such a brush with death merited, but with a disgust that later reflection suggests may not have been wholly unwarranted.
So, anyway, whenever you read "some scientists think", think about me and recalibrate the lower end of your expectations accordingly.
Source: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1554851031670001667.html
John Kennedy @micefearboggis Aug 3, 2022
I should also, on reflection, have practiced in private. I had an audience, which grew as my initial satisfaction at an hypothesis well proven, slipped rapidly through stages of qualm, disquiet, then alarm (mild through severe) and ended in full blown panic.
When one panics, one's muscles tense, which is of course, the opposite of what I needed here. I had been quite relaxed at the start, but now I couldn't get a finger between the orange and the very taut edges of my mouth.
Above and below, the orange, which was now under some pressure, deformed to make a nearly perfect seal against my teeth. I hadn't previously been aware of how much oxygen one needs to consume an orange, but I was made aware of it now by its sudden and ongoing lack.
I forgot for a moment that I had nostrils and tried to breathe in hard through my mouth. I have big lungs. When the doctor tested my lung capacity, I blew the end clean off the cardboard tube.
I've always been vaguely proud of that; mostly for want of more tangible achievements and because I am, when all is said and done, the kind of person otherwise predisposed to shove a whole orange in his mouth without cause.
Those enormous lungs - my pride and joy - expanding in this moment of crisis to their fullest extent, had created a hard vacuum behind the orange, which, at that point imploded.
From now on, things which had been unfolding at an almost leisurely pace, started to happen rather fast. So, I will take this opportunity to say that no one had actually tried to help me up till now. This was not for lack of opportunity.
Later, someone mentioned the kind of details - veins like worms scribbling incomprehensible messages across my forehead, eyes popping out as if on stalks, laced with tiny red veins - which one can only truly apprehend at a distance that wouldn't have made help impossible.
But back to the imploding orange. Although it didn't diminish appreciably in volume upon implosion, the released juice vaporised, turning into a burning acidic cloud that instantly flooded my lungs.
My lungs very sensibly responded by collapsing rapidly aided by an involuntary and powerful spasm from my diaphragm.
The vapour and oily zest from the orange's skin mixed with mucus scoured from my lungs (that spread flat, we must remember, would cover a tennis court) as well as the last of my residual oxygen, exited now through my rediscovered nostrils as a magnificently abundant yellow foam.
And, having a volume in excess of what could easily egress at speed via those narrow tubes, it also squirted out through nearby exits, including around my eyes.
Even that wasn't enough and the build up of pressure finally proved too much for the orange, which left my mouth like grapeshot from a cannon, like the superluminal jets generated by matter falling towards a black hole at relativistic speed.
Temporarily blind and gasping in my own private world of consequences, I was unaware of the cone of devastation that I had unleashed upon the unluckier segment of my audience, occupying roughly one steradian of solid angle to my front.
When I finally recovered my senses and the cycle of whooping inhalation and coughing fits had exhausted itself, I was greeted not by the concern that I felt such a brush with death merited, but with a disgust that later reflection suggests may not have been wholly unwarranted.
So, anyway, whenever you read "some scientists think", think about me and recalibrate the lower end of your expectations accordingly.
Source: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1554851031670001667.html
John Kennedy @micefearboggis Aug 3, 2022
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elvenwear
Active Member
I certainly will. That will put them slightly above science journalists.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Indeed - a shout out to all the experimentalist who are helping keep science real and practical.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
John J.
Senior Member.
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that's "Shin Bet", using the attached form.
Please remember to include your full name, current address and provide a phone number we can contact you on."
FatPhil
Senior Member.
I'm calling this humour as the Ignobel prizes are intended that way, when in reality this is just good debunking:
-- https://www.newscientist.com/articl...24-the-unexpected-science-that-won-this-year/External Quote:
RTM
Senior Member.
Reminds me of this criticism from an alternative medicine advocate.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/se...ppointed-that-nccam-hasnt-validated-more-cam/
On that note, there was excitement in /r/ufos last week about a post claiming the German Aerospace Agency was going to put a camera on a rover to look for UAPs on Mars, which some redittors thought meant looking for alien craft on Mars.
It's actually a proposed subproject of a team's proposal to use a swarm of robots on a future mission to look for signs of life in Valles Marineris, detailed at https://www.vamex.space/, and this all-sky camera would look for "Cloud formation, ingress of meteors or lightning and other short-lived luminous phenomena."
Ann K
Senior Member.
It looks as if "NCCAM" is now "NCCIH", the "National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health", to be found at https://www.nccih.nih.gov/
It seems that the words "alternative medicine" have been replaced. I recall a comment but don't remember who said it:
--- If it worked, they'd just call it 'medicine' ---
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RTM
Senior Member.
That article mentions pension fraud, it reminded me of something that happened in Ireland in the early 20th century where some peoples official age jumped more than 10 years between the 1901 and 1911 census.
https://www.aletterfromireland.com/the-night-of-the-big-wind/
John J.
Senior Member.
Almost certainly a coincidence
...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_in_the_United_KingdomExternal Quote:
(Ireland was part of the UK at the time, an arrangement not entirely supported by the Irish people).
John J.
Senior Member.
A clever debunker called Phil
Found humour a positive pill
Discussion intruded
He distaste exuded
And posted that we should all chill.
Ann K
Senior Member.
We are all just curious folk,
Though sometimes we make a joke.
To other topics, we're attracted,
And at times we get distracted.
Please forgive our random acts
As we flit to other facts.
Don't try to keep us on one path,
(I thought your Special Skill was math!)
Directing traffic on this site
Resembles herding cats, at night.
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