They even mention in the article, just above the cut, that they’re afraid this article will get paywalled lol
And below the cut, that they’re aware of the irony, but surely people who pay for journalism can see why journalism is important, which is like… good point, I guess. Sometimes the system sucks and we have to work with what we have.
It’s fiiine, I thought it was funny and also possibly true
Anecdotally, and perhaps ironically, they were right, I am dyslexic, and I definitely do perceive letters as permuted quite often. The second link really chuffs me because it’s clearly a non-dyslexic person openly speculating as if they’re authoritative, but this theory of “3d processing” words jives with neither other literature about dyslexia, nor my own experience. I’m pretty sure this is just someone showerthinking about a disorder. The errors I make are pretty incompatible with seeing whole words from the wrong “angle”; letters are switched, sometimes even between adjacent words (I might see “angle” as “angel”, or “and rain” as “an drain”), similar graphs are misread as each other (the classic example is [b / d / p / q], sometimes also g depending on font; [w / m / E], [e / a], [T / L], so on), words can be entirely displaced elsewhere in a sentence…
So yes, like, I definitely do see some letters backwards or upside down or mirrored, etc.
The headset even says “Mac User” a few seconds before this.
Even more technically, the line between dialect and language is a blurry one, decided in part by the speakers’ intent and identity. British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, and Indian English are dialects, but Scots is its own language? Danish, Swedish, and Norweigan are separate languages, but Française French and Québécois French are dialects?
English speakers tend to have a very binary view of language vs. dialect, because English exists in this weird linguistic zone where its closest living relatives are all… slightly different English. Sure, it can be a bit difficult to grok some terms from across the pond, but with a short list of vocab words you can generally understand other Englishes just fine, whereas you’ll understand other languages pretty much not at all. There’s not really any mutually-intelligible other languages that English speakers can more-or-less communicate with. At best, you can pick out a handful of similarities in germanic/scandi languages because of shared heritage.
That’s not the case, globally. The Scandinavians (sans Finland) can all talk to each other, (the old running joke of <x language> sounds like <y language> drunk and/or with a potato in their mouth) but they’re “different languages”. Germans and the Dutch can generally understand each other, maybe not at full speaking speed, but at very least reading. A lot of African languages are essentially a spectrum of regional variants on each other, and so speakers of one will be able to make themselves understood to varying degrees to speakers of another depending on how far diverged they are; the same is largely true for the Middle East. But then we say Portugal and Brazil both speak Portugese; Spain and Mexico both speak Spanish. Even though there’s quite the adjustment period for a person from one visiting the other.
There’s no objective standard of what’s “dialect” and what’s “different language”, but a large deciding factor is clearly national identity; people from different countries usually speak different languages (again, English is rather an outlier). The language spoken in Ukraine is not identical to standard Russian. They’re at least as different from each other as some separate languages. So if Ukranians say they speak the Ukrainian language, not Ukrainian Russian, that’s their call.
Around here we call them “bootleg trails”
To be fair, I didn’t know his handle was MatPat, because I only knew about him as “the Game Theory guy I stopped watching almost ten years ago”. If you told me Game Theory was quitting the internet , I would know who you meant.
The body spray is Axe. And both spellings are accepted for the tool, with axe being the common spelling and ax being the american, so it’s not a matter of correct or not.
It was worse when I was a kid, in winter we had to heat the house to blistering on friday afternoons and just hope it stayed warm enough til sabbath ended (if it wasn’t, we had to get a non-Jewish friend to come turn the furnace on for a bit, and there was all sorts of rules about whether that was allowed too). And if you turned a light off at night by reflex, it stayed off. Nowadays there’s all sorts of “sabbath mode” gadgets lol
The really short version is that the jewish belief is that an omniscient god wrote the torah with the complete foreknowledge that people would be debating over its intent in edge cases for the rest of time, and so he wrote exactly what was necessary for rabbis to collectively come to the correct conclusions. If an interpretation would’ve been wrong, then god would’ve written that part differently.
Essentially it’s D&D rules lawyering
Unfortunately not, just normal elevators programmed to go up and down to each floor automatically at regular intervals rather than requiring any user input.
those loopholes are the fence around the Tora?
That is essentially correct. The torah itself is sacrosanct, and Rabbinic derivations are not seen as loopholes, so much as expert notes to aid in understanding the intent of the torah and accidentally violating the letter of the law. The really short version is, god is omniscient, and therefore knew when he spoke how his words would be interpreted for all time, and so if he didn’t want people to interpret them a certain way, he would’ve said something different. In other words, following the letter of the law is integral, but rules lawyering is not just allowed, it’s expected. There’s actually a famous jewish parable about a time rabbis exiled god himself from a debate because if he wanted to influence the proceedings, he should’ve done so in the torah.
“The torah says we can’t start a fire on the sabbath. But what counts as ‘fire’ or ‘starting’, exactly?” “The torah says we can’t carry a heavy object more than 4 cubits while outside our private domain on the sabbath. What counts as heavy? What is a private domain?”
To be fair, that’s pretty close to describing the Jewish faith. One fundamental tenet is that God put loopholes there on purpose, and it’s the rabbis’ duty to debate legalistically to extrapolate what he meant based on what he said. That’s why they’re called laws. (I was raised jewish, for the record)
One common one that most people have heard of by now since they went viral on youtube a couple years back, is eruvim. Since there’s a bunch of rules around how much effort you’re allowed to exert on the sabbath (e.g. you’re not allowed to move anything from inside your house to outside, or to carry anything heavy more than about half a meter while outside), people hang a wire, called an eruv (plural eruvim), encircling an area ranging from a small neighbourhood to several city blocks to the entire island of Manhattan, proclaiming it to be one big “home”, allowing practicing Jews to do anything they’re only allowed to do at home, anywhere inside its area.
Another fun one that has a lot of ramifications is that we’re not supposed to “start a fire” on sabbath, and rabbi have traditionally declared that turning something electrical on or off is “starting a fire”. Because of this, jewish hospitals have elevators that run constantly between floors so people can just walk on without actually pushing a button and causing a circuit to close. Or lightbulbs; for the longest time, the “solution” was just to leave your lights on all saturday in case you needed them, or maybe spring for electronic timers, or just get your goyim buddy to come over and turn em on for you, but with the modern prevalence of LED bulbs, there’s now jewish smart lights called “shabulbs” that have internal shutters which cover the LEDs without actually extingishing them, so you can turn it back “on” again without breaking the rules. Some places even sell ovens with a shabbat mode so they stay slightly warm all day and never turn all the way off, don’t show the display screen, and don’t turn on their internal lightbulb when you open them after sundown on friday! All this because there’s a rule against starting fires.
Maybe I got a bit off topic, but my point is, In some ways you might say that finding loopholes in Abrahamic law is practicing religion lol
Epochalypse…
Hey, don’t you bring Billy Talent into this
I mean, the premise was “vindictive or mean editors who ‘own’ pages and refuse to allow changes to ‘their’ article”. The goodness or badness of the edits are not in question; there are editors who camp a page and find technicalities to revert anything that isn’t theirs or that they don’t like. Sometimes they don’t even find technicalities, they just do it, relying on their own reputation and your ignorance. The fact that one has to learn to do an end run around them and engage in wiki politics, hell, essentially learn an entire second legal system, to “have the truth prevail” for even a minor fact with citation is exhausting. It filters out good potential editors who nonetheless have no time to engage in the behind-the-scenes drama proceedings. It’s not like this hasn’t been a known issue for years now.
Aggregating a biased list of sources is worse than not aggregating at all. I would rather someone not know a story at all than they know one side of it as “the truth”
Often, collecting and correlating sources that agree with one viewpoint of a complex issue, which is the whole problem we were discussing. If a wiki article is camped by an admin with a slant, as they often are, the sources do not represent some neutral middle ground or wisdom of the crowd, they represent the things that ended up in the article and nothing more. If you want to learn the facts of a controversial topic, why would you start with a potentially biased list?
But like… do I care? “I” will survive, even if I’m not the one who does the surviving.