English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

user19161

00:00

@mahnax Boo!

user19161

@kit Hi!

Mahnax

@Skullpatrol Are you still going on about trolling‽

@WillHunting Hi!

Cerberus

This is really cool and fun.

Mahnax

What is it?

Cerberus

A protein.

fold.it/portal

I'm trying to fold it in such a way as to make it more compact.

And earn points in the game.

And help scientists by so doing.

See those white-and-blue lines? Those are hydrogen bonds, which are good.

Gigili

00:09

It's not cool, I just dragged some backbones or whatever is it and it said congratulations.

You need to know something about chemistry, biochemistry and biology.

Oh, and I'm talking to other users.

user19161

@Gigili So you are not talking to us?

user19161

@Cerberus For a moment I thought that was a screenshot of a Mac desktop.

Gigili

@WillHunting The person got what I meant. I'm talking to you.

To @Mahnax, for example.

Mahnax

@Gigili Hi.

Gigili

'Ello Mahnax.

user19161

00:14

@Gigili I see the two fingers have changed into something else!

Cerberus

@Gigili You're just playing the tutorial, I presume? That's just to get used to the tools. And the goal is to maximize your score, by the way.

There is a large community of scientists and laymen playing this.

user19161

00:54

I just created a new account on superuser. Yay!

Robusto

0

Q: Which is the correct ? "is" or "this"?

The "IS" and "THIS", have the same meaning. But, how to use it ? Thanks you!

grammaticality

Wow. Just ... wow.

user19161

@Robusto Your comment is too deep for me. I wonder how well the OP understands it.

Robusto

I can't fathom his question, so we're even. And by that I mean I really don't understand how he can think that is and this have the same meaning.

Cerberus

Yeah it's weird.

user19161

@Robusto This is also the first time I see "thanks you".

Cerberus

01:03

There's no-one in 'iz house.

user19161

I wonder what language "is" and "this" will have similar meanings, certainly not in Chinese.

user19161

Please don't laugh at my superuser question...

user19161

0

Q: Restart without shutdown on Windows

Is there a way to restart without shutting down first on Windows? On Linux this is possible using kexec and serves to minimize downtime. What happens is that one does not pass through the bootloader stage and no BIOS is seen.

windows shutdown restart

Robusto

@WillHunting Your mother thanks you.

Also, why would one laugh at people who are ignorant about Windows? If you have Linux cred, you don't need it.

Cerberus

01:33

My computer is now automatically folding ligands and protein sidechains.

user19161

@Cerberus Automatically?

user19161

Then that is a virus!

user19161

The worst virus I got was one which said "Please don't kill me, I am only a virus" after I thought it was gone. I then reinstalled.

JSBᾶngs

hey @Will, is your current avatar your actual face?

user19161

@JSBᾶngs Yes, it was taken over the weekend.

JSBᾶngs

01:37

nice

user19161

I like to use Peter Parker specs and think of myself as Spiderman sometimes. I am not a Superman fan though.

Robusto

@Cerberus Does it fold laundry?

Cerberus

@WillHunting Well, one can do things by hand and automatically.

Usually a combination give the best result.

@Robusto Try it.

Robusto

@Cerberus Masturbation, for example.

Cerberus

I trust your wide experience.

user19161

01:44

I do not use hands for that, but TMI!

Robusto

@Cerberus Wide is one word. Long is another. You could combine them into "massive" and that would satisfy the question.

@WillHunting "A woman is fine, but a melon's divine." The Fugs

@Cerberus: I made up a modest limerick for the occasion:

In medieval clothes, it's a cod
For Lawrence, perhaps, Aaron's rod
But when you describe
The members of my tribe
Then you're safe just to say "Oh my God!"

And since one good bawdy limerick deserves another:

If men are from Mars, not from Venus,
Then you women — a much different genus —
Must when handling my spear
Get it stowed right, my dear,
So that nothing at all comes between us.

I like the deceptive cadence in that one.

And another deceptive cadence, this time for the ladies:

A Shanghai gal's passion for Heine
Gave her husband a painful angina
Her lovemaking lyric
Was victory Pyrrhic:
He expired ... oh, somewhere in China.

What was the Heine lyric? Not sure. Possibly:

Du sagst mir heimlich ein leises Wort,
Und gibst mir den Strauß von Zypressen.
Ich wache auf, und der Strauß ist fort,
Und das Wort hab ich vergessen.

Nobody is even a little amused? Ah well, and so to bed.

JSBᾶngs

01:59

@Robusto i was amused, but i showed up late to read them

the first one is missing a beat in the first line. i keep tripping over "medieval"

but i suppose that arguing about the metrical attributes of dirty limericks is missing the point

Cerberus

02:19

@Robusto TMI.

@Robusto Eh, oh! I suppose I should be honoured.

Your limericking skills are perhaps only matched by Kit's and Matt's...

user19161

@Cerberus You forgot Mattie!

Cerberus

There.

user19161

@Cerberus Pencil marks can be seen!

Cerberus

@JSBngs: Would you like to fold proteins and help science at the same time?

user19161

@fae I noticed you changed your username!

Cerberus

02:25

fold.it/portal

After the first tutorial levels it becomes fun.

Now that I have finished the tutorial, I am a bit nonplussed.

But we'll see.

Vitaly

06:06

@Cerberus Funny, the interface doesn't seem to have changed much since I had first tried it in 2008

Cerberus

Ah, of course you have tried every site on the Internet...

Did you take part in the serious stuff?

Vitaly

Well, naturally, but it was time-consuming

Cerberus

I lost interest soon after the tutorial, alas.

Vitaly

Well, naturally!..

Cerberus

I need more of a reward than merely being told I "ranked up".

And on the non-rookie puzzles, I would need more guidance, because the link between the stated goal and the visual display wasn't clear to me.

But the tutorial was pretty fun.

Vitaly

06:13

if I remember correctly, they still give you rookie puzzles after the tutorial for a while so that they could offer a transition between those and the more involved proteins

I'd bet you are there now (the clue's "ranked up")

Cerberus

Yeah I got "ranked up", and I seemed to be close to the designated shape, but...

The points were unclear.

And not much fun fine-tuning a protein that looks close enough.

Vitaly

Well, you dropped chemistry at school, after all. ^^

Cerberus

I mean, I liked finding an optimal shape; but just mimicking a grey shape is no fun.

@Vitaly Yes, of course.

Dropped it after one year.

But the only thing I liked about it were polymers.

Well, not the only.

I also wish they'd provide more information about why certain shapes and formations are bad.

Like the voids and clashes: it wasn't explained what a void is exactly.

It does not correspond to simple geometrical distance between chains.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Oh that is provided at school to some degree, but mostly in uni-level biochemistry courses

Cerberus

Right, I was talking about the game.

Vitaly

06:23

I am talking about the game, too.

Cerberus

I don't need to know how it actually works in reality, but I'd like to have some clue as to what I should be looking for.

Vitaly

Hmm, yeah, they should have thought about adding a complete explanation for chemistry dropouts

Cerberus

You're mocking me.

I challenge you to provide the things I would say against that yourself.

Vitaly

Against what, adding a complete explanation?

Cerberus

Against your comment, including that phrase.

Vitaly

06:30

No idea. Unless you claim to be able to know what you don't know, you have no idea what you missed by dropping out of chemistry courses, and therefore you cannot see the relevance. So any things that you would say against my comment are irrelevant.

I am under the impression that the game kind of presumes that you studied chemistry at school.

Cerberus

There's your first mistake.

Vitaly

Pray tell.

Cerberus

What part didn't you understand?

Vitaly

Quote the part that contains my “first mistake”.

Cerberus

@Vitaly This, i.e. the line above mine.

Vitaly

06:35

@Cerberus How could you possibly know whether it presumes such experience or not if you haven't studied chemistry yourself?

Or do you need “We presume that blah blah blah” spelled out in large red letters in the game itself to think that they do?

Cerberus

Think.

Try to find arguments against what you would like to be the truth.

A handy skill.

Vitaly

OK, thinking... Oh! I know! When I played, the highest-ranking players were biochem majors or researchers. How's that for evidence? (And not an “argument”—I don't like philosophy.)

Cerberus

You don't understand the difference between argument and evidence?

If you would disqualify argumentation, then you should remain silent, and no discussion would be possible.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Think. Try to build an argument against what you would like to be the truth based on that piece of evidence.

Cerberus

No.

I know how unreasonable you can be, and how you like to keep me awake.

Vitaly

06:45

Now you are just in denial.

Mahnax

What's going on here?

Vitaly

@Mahnax Cerberus thinks that the game Foldit doesn't presume any school-level chemistry knowledge (and he dropped chemistry at school after one year).

Mahnax

@Vitaly As a student with no chemistry knowledge, maybe I can provide a useful perspective?

Vitaly

12 mins ago, by Vitaly

@Cerberus How could you possibly know whether it presumes such experience or not if you haven't studied chemistry yourself?

@Mahnax Sure.

Mahnax

@Vitaly Okay, let me try it out.

Cerberus

06:50

Don't mind Vitaly.

It's just His Way.

Vitaly

Don't mind Cerberus. He's just a philosopher.

@Cerberus OK, since you are in denial about this and go to such lengths as to claim that I am being unreasonable, let me try and bring up an analogy.

Mahnax

Well, here's the thing.

I can pass the levels, but I have no idea what I'm actually doing.

Cerberus

No analogies, please.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Would you agree that you wouldn't be in a position to discuss the taste of oysters if you had never eaten one?

@Cerberus Too late.

Cerberus

I said no, Platullus.

Vitaly

06:55

Ah, so you wouldn't agree. Well then, in that case discussing anything doesn't have any merit, because you just ignore the evidence outright. That would just be pure speculation (or philosophy by its other name).

Mahnax

It's almost 1 AM here.

I don't even want to think about chemistry any more.

Good-night all.

Vitaly

Night!

Mahnax

Well, good morning to Cerb, and I don't remember where you are, Vit.

Cerberus

Bye!

Mahnax

Maybe I never even knew. Anyways, bye!

Cerberus

06:59

@Vitaly Just read up on debating and argumentation a bit more.

You could really profit from it.

Makes it easier to understand and/or convince people.

Vitaly

@Cerberus The utility of being able to convince people of anything, including religion, is not really that large to me compared to the negative utility of losing time while reading philosophical texts, thank you.

Cerberus

Just as I expected.

And the art of debating is not so much philosophical.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Yeah, it's more of a social thing. With that I agree.

But the texts that talk about it are by and large philosophical.

Cerberus

How would you know?

Vitaly

Because I have at one point skimmed through those (as opposed to reading).

Cerberus

07:06

Your stomach could not endure even looking at the titles if they were philosophical.

So don't try to fool me.

Vitaly

@Cerberus You flatter me.

Cerberus

The fact notwithstanding that you spend a lot of time reading philosophy, like most LW posts.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Ah, but they make use of evidence, one way or another. I wouldn't call that philosophy.

Cerberus

This proves again that you don't know what philosophy is.

Vitaly

(And no, creationists' argumentation doesn't make use of evidence, although it may appear to do so. Those are two different things. Likewise, a philosopher pretending to make use of neuroscientific evidence may not actually be using it, just throwing it around.)

@Cerberus Think.

David Wallace

07:18

@Cerberus You mean after all these years, Vitaly finally made one?

Cerberus

@DavidWallace You read my mind.

David Wallace

@Cerberus I knew you'd say that.

Cerberus

I know you did.

Vitaly

@Cerberus OK, let me try again. I ask you to use the reply-to-message feature whenever something comes up with which you disagree. (Should we create a room for that purpose, BTW?)

Cerberus

@Vitaly What are you trying? I don't like using the reply function when there is no need.

This time was a special gift to you.

Vitaly

07:24

@Cerberus To see where exactly and why you disagree with me, because you haven't provided any counterarguments that are pointing to my messages via the reply-to-message feature.

Unlike @DavidWallace here, I can't read your mind.

David Wallace

My god, it's like being in a room with Skullpa-troll.

Cerberus

I am not interested in developing this dispute.

My apologies.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Why not?

Cerberus

If only because you formally forbade me to use counterarguments.

Vitaly

@Cerberus I permit you to use them for the time being.

Cerberus

07:26

Too late.

Vitaly

Any other obstacles?

Cerberus

Although I appreciate your liberality.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Ah OK. So is that an argumentation technique you have just used? I have seen professional debaters use that to score points with the audience.

David Wallace

I've just been reading the "Lindsey told Jessica that she had cancer" question. I thought there was a rule in English about this, namely that "she" returns to the most recent possible entity, in this case Jessica. Do either of you remember learning such a rule while studying English, or did I imagine it?

Vitaly

I failed to find such a rule in both Russian and English when that question came up in this chatroom.

That's not to say that the rule doesn't exist. I might have used wrong search queries.

Cerberus

07:30

That is not exactly a rule. Personal pronouns can theoretically refer to any suitable thing or person based on context; the location of the thing or person in the text (i.e. proximity) is part of this context, but there are other factors.

David Wallace

OK. I would research the English grammar books that I bought for my pineapple wife, except I think that she has lent them to her pineapple brother in law.

Cerberus

So in some situations that might work, but not in others.

In that sentence you quoted, context clearly tells you that "she" must be Lindsey, and that is not a problem at all, i.e. the sentence is fine.

David Wallace

In any case, the only contexts in which I can imagine this sentence occurring are (1) Lindsey is a doctor and Jessica is her patient; (2) the reader already knows that Lindsey has cancer, and is now learning that she told Jessica.

So the reader must have knowledge OUTSIDE of the sentence.

So if the rule that I remember (possibly incorrectly) is INDEED a rule, it must be one of those rules that is occasionally overridden by contrary context.

I was only asking if either of you remembered such a rule.

Cerberus

@DavidWallace Yes, more or less, but not necessarily: this sentence could be used without much context; in that case, I think most people would think Lindsey had cancer.

Because that is the most common situation in which one person tell the other that she is ill.

David Wallace

No, I don't think it would ever be used without the context, as I said in my previous comment.

Hey, I just awarded a 100 point bounty on someone else's question on SO.

Cerberus

07:39

@DavidWallace Take for example a scene in a television comedy show that has only short scenes. It might start with a guy talking to his friend, saying: "Lindsey told Jessica that she had cancer".

There is no specific context there—just our knowledge about the world in general.

David Wallace

and the audience would be expected to EITHER know that Lindsey has cancer, OR know that Lindsey is a doctor.

Cerberus

No, many such scenes, just as in novels and plays, deliberately start without any context. The audience has no idea who any of these people are.

The audience is left to guess.

So it could be either.

But then I believe most people would at first think of Lindsey as the person having cancer, don't you think?

David Wallace

Not if it was a medical show (Grey's Anatomy, ER or whatever) in which Lindsey is likely to be a doctor. In any other sort of show, it would be unusual to refer to a doctor by their first name; one might say "The doctor told Jessica that she had cancer" or "Dr Cerberus told Jessica that she had cancer". In the latter case, it would be reasonable to think she = Jessica, even if one knows that Dr Cerberus is a woman.

Cerberus

Right, the fact that a first name is used makes it even less likely that it was Lindsey.

A utterance without any context does not exist.

And Dr Cerberus is not a woman!!

2

Vitaly

Okay, so I have just consulted my 1800-page copy of CGEL and couldn't find anything about resolving ambiguities with anaphoric pronouns with multiple possible antecedents. Thus, it's safe to assume that no such rule exists in descriptive English linguistics and that this is a purely extralinguistic category (context and so on).

Cerberus

07:52

Yes.

Although location does play a part—just not so much in this sentence.

MS have removed the Start button in Win 8.

How silly is that?

Blind change ≠ innovation.

Change for its own sake usually sucks.

David Wallace

@Cerberus but if they don't try to confuse people, they won't make as much money out of their training courses

Cerberus

Heh, tru that.

Joel mentioned that MS may also be changing things in order to make it more difficult for the competition to keep their programmes up to date.

> There is a learning curve to be aware of. New skills will have to be learned and some of the interactions are quite subtle.

David Wallace

I don't see the sense in that.

Cerberus

This is exactly what we have been waiting for.

@DavidWallace If the developers of Word Perfect are surprised by new things in Windows that they need to adapt too, MS's own software has the advantage.

Or something.

Or it will suck some resources out of Oracle etc.

But it is bed time.

Vitaly

I have just found this: Comprehension of Anaphoric Pronouns, 1977

It's talking about ambiguities in the first page, but I haven't read it yet.

David Wallace

08:03

It researches the question quite thoroughly. If you post this link as an answer to the question, I will award it a suitable bounty.

Vitaly

May 14 '11 at 13:56, by RegDwight

You're so repophobe, Vitaly, that's really something.

Cerberus

@Vitaly The abstract sounds sensible.

The only thing is the word "causality", but, oh, well.

David Wallace

Not quite clear whether they're linguists or psychologists though.

Vitaly

The first two authors are involved in the field of neurology.

But then those ambiguities are extralingusitic, so, oh, well.

Cerberus

Yeah, well, it could be argued that their experiment doesn't add anything, but the conclusion is all right.

Vitaly

08:08

scholar.google.com/…

user19161

Boo!

Vitaly

Okay, so it appears that papers about coreference resolution mostly come from some kind of machine learning background.

scholar.google.com/…

Cerberus

08:25

> Even before the Stapel case broke, a flurry of articles had begun appearing this fall that pointed to supposed systemic flaws in the way psychologists handle data. But one methodological expert, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, of the University of Amsterdam, added a sociological twist to the statistical debate: Psychology, he argued in a recent blog post and an interview, has become addicted to surprising, counterintuitive findings that catch the news media's eye, and that trend is warping the field....

> "Through prestigious publications and extensive media coverage," he writes in a draft of a new paper, a portion of which he shared with The Chronicle, "the general public has been informed that engineers have more sons and nurses have more daughters, ... that people choose spouses, places to live, and professions because they share letters with their name (e.g., Jenny marries Jim, Phil moves to Philadelphia, and Dennis becomes a dentist, ... that people make better decisions when their bladder is full, ... that ovulation makes it easier for women to distinguish heterosexual from homosexua…

chronicle.com/article/As-Dutch-Research-Scandal/129746

At least the Dennis story has been uprooted.

Vitaly

Saying that the hypothesis is unlikely and that they should collect more evidence is, indeed, a nice way to uproot something!

Cerberus

I explained to you earlier what the flaw in the Dennis thing was.

Vitaly

Ah, so you are not referring to the article you have just posted. My wrong: I kind of expected that.

Cerberus

You didn't remember?

By the way:

> Mr. Wagenmakers advocates an alternative to P-value testing, called Bayesian statistics, which incorporates such information as prior expectations that a hypothesis is true.

Vitaly

Remember what?

@Cerberus Yes, it's been posted on LessWrong.

Cerberus

08:32

Didn't I explain why the Dennis story was bogus?

Vitaly

Jesus Christ on a stick, Cerberus! I was being sarsactic when I said “I find it convincing at p < .05”. I assumed you would understand my sarcasm because I assumed that everyone who read academic papers would know what p-value testing meant.

Cerberus

I don't remember the details of our conversation, but the you shouldn't speak like the Oracle of Delphi.

Vitaly

Well, you have to agree that my assumption wasn't entirely unreasonable. You do read papers when I post them, after all.

user19161

@Cerberus Does that come from Matrix?

Cerberus

@WillHunting Eh what? No.

@Vitaly I wasn't sure what you meant, and I wasn't sure whether I had mentioned that it was officially bogus, so I thought you might be criticising my "uprooted" remark in a sarcastic manner.

Vitaly

08:54

@Cerberus But on a more serious note, aren't arguments like that actually used in professional debating? I can imagine that saying that something contradicts common sense is likely to score you some points with the audience in a debate.

Cerberus

Well, common sense can be used as an argument.

user19161

I got an answer for my superuser question. I did not know one could restart without shutdown in the old versions of Windows but not now.

user19161

4

Q: Why do we say "Hear! Hear!"?

I don't know if this is a common expression anymore. The first time I encountered this expression, it was in a book. It is obviously used to convey the speaker's approval of the speaker's words, but why do people say "Hear! Hear!" instead of something like "Here! Here!" (just to let the speaker ...

meaning etymology

Vitaly

@Cerberus Yeah, like the watch on the beach, or what was it.

user19161

Duplicate.

user19161

08:57

1

Q: "if" followed by "then"

For computer programmers, an "if" is always followed by a "then" statement. Therefore, while writing a sentence that starts with "if", it's quite natural to introduce the "then" word after the comma. E.g., "If I go home early, I will attend the party" can be written as.. "If I go home early,...

word-usage

user19161

Duplicate.

user19161

4

Q: Is "so" more feminine than "very"?

Many Japanese textbooks of English mention the "feminine 'so'": the use of "so" for "very" is more typical of a feminine speaker. I don't think this is true in the US (I learned English living in Southern California and have now lived in the US for 10 years), but is it at all true in the UK? In o...

word-choice differences british-english

user19161

Not constructive.

Cerberus

@Vitaly What?

Vitaly

@Cerberus Well, one of the appeals to common sense goes like this: if you find a watch on the beach, it implies the existence of a watchmaker. Therefore, Yahweh exists. On, and I just googled this: don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#commonsense

Cerberus

09:08

@Vitaly If you use it like that, it is obviously not a good argument.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Why?

Cerberus

I was rather thinking of things like our assumption that a ≠ a is never true, and such.

Or that a person screaming "that hurts!!" is in pain.

Common sense tells me he is in pain.

If there is no reason to believe he is faking it, common sense is good enough.

But I have to go to bed.

Vitaly

Well, you have to agree that it is, indeed, an appeal to common sense. And it's a good argument because it works to score you points with the audience, which is the end goal of a professional debate.

Cerberus

No, and no.

Vitaly

@Cerberus Good night.

Cerberus

09:12

Good night!

Vitaly

@Cerberus Yes, and yes. Use your common sense. :P

We are talking about professional debates after all, not about finding out what is true.

Debates are about convincing your audience and possibly your opponent of something, regardless of its truth status.

Vitaly

09:47

> … debates function more as duels; the spectacle of combat is intended more to reveal relative mental abilities than to illuminate which conclusion is right. —Robin Hanson

David Wallace

10:54

Good night @Vitaly

Vitaly

Night.

Robusto

@JSBᾶngs No, it's not missing a beat. The line simply has a masculine ending instead of a feminine one (i.e., it ends on a stressed beat), and for the sake of the scansion one must stress the first syllable of medieval, so that the word becomes a dactyl.

@Vitaly One only has to witness the goings-on in a courtroom to see that this is true.

Vitaly

11:18

@Robusto Can I consider you a friend of mine?

Robusto

@Vitaly If the feeling is mutual, sure.

Vitaly

Haha. Well, I have a question in Chatzy, and I'd appreciate it if I got an honest answer.

Robusto

I will look. Moment mal.

JSBᾶngs

@Robusto the stress on the first syllable of medieval is what trips me up. The masculine foot at the end is fine.

Robusto

@JSBᾶngs I plead poetic license!

looks to see if he remembered to renew his Poetic License

In any case, the first syllable of medieval may be semi-stressed, and that's enough of a foot in the door to drive the whole word through as a dactyl.

0

Q: What is the difference between 'to understand' and 'to comprehend'?

Is there a difference in the meaning or the usage of the verbs "to understand" and "to comprehend"? Which one would fit best in the following sentence: In order to speak and understand/comprehend a language, there has to be a representation of the words.

differences

Gen ref.

Vitaly

11:40

Hi @JSB, it seems this question might need an answer from a person who is well-versed in linguistics. Pronominal anaphora resolution seems like an interesting unsettled area in linguistics and psychology of language.

Robusto

@Vit: See Chatzy again.

JSBᾶngs

@Vitaly Will's answer is as correct as you're gonna get. The sentence is simply ambiguous in English.

Robusto

/nod

Vitaly

@JSBᾶngs So I thought at first, but it seems that the majority of respondents assume that Lindsey has cancer, and only then admit that the sentence is ambiguous when you pressure them into it.

But I see what you mean, the linguistics-based answer would be too much for that particular question. Would a more general question be considered off-topic or too broad?

I would be interested to know what exactly happens in people's heads when they parse an English sentence that contains an anaphoric pronoun with multiple possible antecedents and choose the most likely antecedent.

Robusto

11:58

@Vitaly What happens is that, where ambiguity exists, the listener asks for clarification.

KitFox

I assumed first that Lindsey had cancer.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…