Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • There is a lot of talk about bringing back the wooly mammoth that way but they are collecting funds and not delivering so far. I think some celebrity cloned their dog but IIRC they took samples while the OG puppy was still around. To be fair, I am not sure about that story.

    Technically, it’s probably possible with a human but the science isn’t quite there yet. They like to test this first on other creatures before they graduate to bringing back Napoleon or whoever. And that is saying nothing about ethical and legal restrictions on top of that.


  • I think it’s the same everywhere in the developed world. There are things that will just keep virtually forever, like honey or tea bags, but they come with an expiry date of some sort. Because at some point, allegedly, ol’ moneybags himself lobbied for legislation like that to make people buy more stuff.

    I’m in Japan and if I didn’t blatantly disregard the dates and guidance they print on bread I’d never finish a pack.






  • There is no such thing as a perfect translation. Granted, languages that are more closely related and in places that are culturally similar make it easier. But translation is also making choices. Different translators will make different choices. It would be madness to assume that any book would not contain parts that are at least questionable. That’s regardless of source and target languages. You’re operating under the false assumption that stuff in English is just better, maybe because it’s the most understood language on the planet if you count nonnatives as well. Free yourself of these biases.

    I would also point out that neither 死亡 nor 戦死 strictly mean “died.” Without very specific context or a version of an accompanying する they would be translated as death/mortality and death in battle respectively. There you can see how little mistakes can creep in.

    Also, since we are sliding into the movie Idiocracy by outsourcing more and more stuff to LLMs, expect more shitty translations. Who knows, your book may have been translated by a bot.








  • So there is a court ruling that the mother had sole custody. And the father tried to take the kids out of the country, possibly without the mother’s knowledge. That is probably illegally moving your children abroad. The fact that they are your own flesh and blood is superseded by the mothereffing courts. Whether you agree with it or not is irrelevant. So you have to stuff the kids into a big suitcase like any upstanding CEO of an automobile conglomerate or just not leave the country.

    There is a lot of meat on the Japan has catching up to do in regards to international custody battles bone. They favor the Japanese national, often unfairly, I think - although that’s a topic for debate for people who are more knowledgeable. However, you can’t take the law into your own hands just because you don’t agree with the decisions. And CPS could talk to the Japanese authorities if they want to (and can manage). But they can do eff all. The better point of contact would be the US embassy in Tokyo. They may not be able to do anything either but if anybody can intervene it’s them.




  • “Western” languages? There is no such thing. There are Turkic ones, Indo-European ones, Uralic ones, Afro-Asiatic ones. They and more are all west of wherever Chinese characters are used.

    You are picking a small number of Chinese characters that bear a distant resemblance to the meaning they carry to this day in languages that use them. Most of them have been abstracted to hell. Or simplified beyond recognition, I guess not just in the Chinese mainland. And that 火 means 🔥 was not obvious to me when I learned it. You need somebody to tell you to imagine a person with their arms on fire to see it. So the abstraction has progressed too far. Where you see a mountain I see a fork also. Therefore, I challenge your premise to the extent that this is obvious without being instructed.

    I can also teach you pyr(o) means fire and maniac is an obsessive crazy person. You can get to the meaning of pyromaniac from there too. That as a learning process is not too different from 火山 equals volcano.

    A lot of these images you presented strike me as linguistic retconning to aid children (and foreigners) learning the characters.

    The point of the Latin alphabet is not to tie meaning to the letters but to the sounds they represent in the language that uses it. So even if, hypothetically, you could trace back the letter O to a symbol representing a window in Egyptian hieroglyphics this has no bearing on how the letter is used today.

    It’s also noteworthy to me that any language using Chinese characters have invented a syllabary (like Hiragana and Katakana in Japan) or use the alphabet to an extent to teach the language (pinyin in the PRC, complete latinization in Vietnam). Korean adopted a syllabary that has a similar look and design but actually makes sense. There is a strong appeal to the utility of being able to read what’s on the page without having to think about anywhere from 1000 to 100000 abstracted characters.


  • Radio playlists are a science like marketing. Half the budget is wasted, you’re just never sure which half.

    Stations have a target audience. They will have focused grouped this. They know their favorite music, how long on average they listen, and how much they will expect to hear certain artists. The DJs are mere announcers, they have little to no choice in what they play, and they are grateful to have a job. So like anybody working in retail during Christmas, they can tune out the music in their heads.