Why so many scientists are so ignorant Sign Up for Our free email newsletters Science has enormous cachet and authority in our culture — for very understandable reasons! One recent example is Bill Nye, the "Science Guy," who isn't actually a scientist but owes his career as a popular entertainer to his purported scientific expertise. As Olivia Goldhill points out in Quartz, Nye's answer was as self-assured as it was stunningly ignorant. The video, which made the entire U.S. philosophy community collectively choke on its morning espresso, is hard to watch, because most of Nye's statements are wrong. Nye fell into the same trap that Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking have been caught up in. There's obviously a grain of truth in this. More to the point, and more practically, all of the institutions that make modern life possible, very much including experimental science, but also things like free-market capitalism, the welfare state, liberal democracy, human rights, and more, are built on philosophy.
Art Quill Studio Steven Pinker: 10 'grammar rules' it's OK to break (sometimes) Among the many challenges of writing is dealing with rules of correct usage: whether to worry about split infinitives, fused participles, and the meanings of words such as "fortuitous", "decimate" and "comprise". Supposedly a writer has to choose between two radically different approaches to these rules. Prescriptivists prescribe how language ought to be used. They uphold standards of excellence and a respect for the best of our civilisation, and are a bulwark against relativism, vulgar populism and the dumbing down of literate culture. It's a catchy dichotomy, but a false one. But this does not mean that every pet peeve, bit of grammatical folklore, or dimly remembered lesson from Miss Thistlebottom's classroom is worth keeping. How can you distinguish the legitimate concerns of a careful writer from the folklore and superstitions? A rule should be rejected, in contrast, if the answer to any of the following questions is "Yes." and, because, but, or, so, also dangling modifiers
5 Minute English - ESL Lessons - Helping you learn English The Ancient Roots of Punctuation In his new book, “Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks,” Keith Houston reveals the stories behind esoteric punctuation marks, from the pilcrow (¶) to the manicule (☞) to the octothorpe, a.k.a. the hashtag. Many of these have their roots in ancient Greece or Rome, and have evolved over time in Medieval religious texts, Renaissance scholarship, and modern printed works (not to mention the Internet). Here, Houston, who lives in Scotland and also runs a Shady Characters blog, tells the origin stories of some of these marks. Octothorpe (#) Left, from the pen of Isaac Newton; right, detail from Johann Conrad Barchusen’s “Pyrosophia” (1698). The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or “pound weight.” Pilcrow (¶) Excerpt from a page from Villanova University’s “Rudimenta Grammaticæ” (1500). Ampersand (&) Manicule (☞) Diple (>)
2015 Sydney Chinese New Year Festival | The Official Website What Should We Call Self-Driving Cars? I’ve been writing about humanless carriages a lot recently. Okay, I know, “humanless carriages” is not an actual thing that people say. There are instead “driverless cars,” and “self-driving vehicles.” If driverless cars do eventually take over the roads, what will it do to the way we talk about driving? “A driver could come to mean the machine that drives just as a computer is a machine that computes,” Alexis Madrigal wrote for The Atlantic in 2014. It’s certainly less clunky than “autonomous,” or “self-driving,” and more precise than “driverless.” More than a century ago, there was a long debate over what motorcars should be called. This was, apparently, a matter that got people riled up. The goal was to find a term that was, the Times said, “at once significant, euphonious, and short.” “Of this wretched pair,” the Times groused, “it is hard to tell which is the more obnoxious. Here in the future, we face a similar etymological conundrum.
Consumers This section of the Fair Trading website is for anyone buying goods or services in NSW. Use the links in the grey left hand panel to browse to the topic that interests you. Every time you buy goods or services you are forming a contract which gives certain rights and responsibilities to you and the trader. You enter into a contract with the trader when buying a TV, lounge, computer or any other everyday purchase. Under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL), when you buy products and services they come with automatic guarantees that they will work and do what you asked for. The ACL covers refunds, consumer guarantees, unsafe and defective products, purchases using lay-bys and unsolicited consumer agreements with a door-to-door sellers or telemarketers. Top of page
Lengua española y periodismo (II) Hay un hecho de gran relevancia que los periodistas latinoamericanos y españoles creo que deberíamos tener muy presente. Hay tres lenguas de impregnación universal en Occidente: inglés, por encima largamente de todos, francés, en relativa decadencia, y español, cada día más pujante, con sus 450 millones de hablantes en todo el mundo. Y, así, el periodista que pueda ganarse la vida con esa lengua parte de una plataforma, un trampolín, superior a lo que pueda exhibir no importa qué otro idioma, sin excluir grandes expresiones culturales como alemán, italiano o ruso, del ámbito europeo. Por eso me parece urgente que, sobre todo nosotros los periodistas, seamos conscientes de la necesidad de mantener una unidad viable de la lengua, aunque siempre respetuosa del genio particular de cada área reproductora del castellano. Y ¿cuál es el estado, la salud de una lengua tan múltiple? Yo diría que básicamente bueno, aunque siempre necesitado de alguna atención.
Learn English Online Future - The secret “anti-languages” you’re not supposed to know Could you erectify a luxurimole flackoblots? Have you hidden your chocolate cake from Penelope? Or maybe you’re just going to vada the bona omi? If you understand any of these sentences, you speak an English “anti-language”. Thieves’ Cant, Polari, and Gobbledygook (yes, it’s a real form of slang) are just a few of the examples from the past – but anti-languages are mercurial beasts that are forever evolving into new and more vibrant forms. A modern anti-language could very well be spoken on the street outside your house. One of the first detailed records of an anti-language comes from a 16th Century magistrate called Thomas Harman. Byng we to Rome vyle to nyp a bounge, so shall we have lower for the bowsing ken – Thieves’ Cant As Green points out, many slang words concern our basest preoccupations. Yet the Thieves’ Cant also includes some intricacies that are not found in the informal language you or I speak. A “prigger of prancers”
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