36 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2025
  2. Nov 2024
  3. May 2024
    1. for - Denis Noble - Ready Noble - evolutionary biology - critique of Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene theory - critique of gene centrism - book - Understanding Living Systems - human agency

      summary - In this informative interview, brothers Denis and Ray Noble discuss their new book - Understanding Living Systems, and - dispel the 70 year old narrative of Gene centrism and the selfish gene as determining the high level behaviour of living organisms

  4. Oct 2023
  5. Mar 2023
    1. Why is it, then, that although publicly is far more common as the adverbial form of public than publically, the ratio of usage has diminished? Publically is becoming more common for the same reason that people write irregardless in place of regardless or write “diffuse the situation” instead of “defuse the situation” or “all of the sudden” rather than “all of a sudden”: evolution. Language is, in a sense, alive, and just as life itself evolves, so does language—but note that the primary definition of evolution is not “improvement”; it simply means “change.” And how does language change? The change is modeled: New words are coined, or new senses of existing words develop (or new spellings or new forms occur), because someone, somewhere acts to make it so, and the evolution goes viral.
  6. Sep 2022
    1. ow many sounds do you need to have a language well 00:30:33 think about a computer what can you say on a computer anything right I mean you can type anything that's why people get addicted to Facebook and everything but how many letters does a computer have it 00:30:44 has two zero and one you have a binary digit language and those I would like to call the sounds of the computer zero and one that's how it interprets everything or that's how it presents information 00:30:58 that is interpreted by the program that was created by a person with language you don't really need more than two sounds

      !- for : language evolution - how many symbols do you need for a language? - no more than 2, like a computer with "0" and "1"

    2. let's just 00:29:52 talk a little bit about their vocal apparatus what kinds of sounds could they have made very often when linguists are talking about the evolution of speech they talk about sounds were they capable of making sounds Homo erectus 00:30:05 would have been roughly a talking gorilla they had the vocal apparatus that is much more similar to a gorilla they couldn't have made all the sounds we made the sounds they made would have sound more muffled does that mean they 00:30:19 couldn't have language no it doesn't mean that at all there are a lot of people today that have speech impediments that can't make the same range of sounds we make but they certainly have language

      !- for : language evolution homo erectus vocal cords

  7. Aug 2022
  8. Apr 2021
    1. In many computing contexts, "TTY" has become the name for any text terminal, such as an external console device, a user dialing into the system on a modem on a serial port device, a printing or graphical computer terminal on a computer's serial port or the RS-232 port on a USB-to-RS-232 converter attached to a computer's USB port, or even a terminal emulator application in the window system using a pseudoterminal device.

      It's still confusing, but this at least helps/tries to clarify.

  9. Mar 2021
  10. Feb 2021
    1. The Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press (AP) both revised their formerly capitalized stylization of the word to lowercase "internet" in 2016.[3] The New York Times, which followed suit in adopting the lowercase style, said that such a change is common practice when "newly coined or unfamiliar terms" become part of the lexicon.
  11. Nov 2020
  12. Oct 2020
  13. Aug 2020
  14. Jul 2020
  15. Jun 2020
  16. May 2020
  17. Apr 2020
    1. While Web site is still doing well in the U.S., it is all but dead in the U.K. Current Google News searches limited to U.K. publications find only about one instance of Web site (or web site) for every thousand instances of website. The ratio is similar in Australian and New Zealand publications. In Canada, the ratio is somewhere in the middle—about 20 to one in favor of the one-word form.
  18. Dec 2017
    1. Although language seems to us so obviously useful that its cost is hard to discern, there is some truth to Thomas Hobbes’s explanation of why humans find it so much more difficult to cooperate than ants do. Ants don’t require a tyrannical monster to enforce cooperation, Hobbes argued in Leviathan (1651), mainly because they don’t talk. They can be harmed but not offended; they can’t make agreements and therefore cannot break them; and they don’t ‘strive to reform and innovate’ – all of which spares them quarrels, disagreements and generally bad feelings.