English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

1:22 AM

@tchrist I was guessing, so close enough for jazz

3 hours later…

4:33 AM

"Robotics research has vast academic and industrial interests"

"interests" vs "interest"?

4:45 AM

"Any protein must be stable in its environmental conditions for it to be useful."

Is the usage of "any" correct here? Can "for it" be omitted?

5:07 AM

> When the researchers increased the acetylation of mouse neurons in the experiment, this stimulated their proliferation, which led to growth and folding of the typically smooth mouse cortex. The pathway is via increased expression of the TRNP1 gene. medicalxpress.com/news/…

@Yashas Hard to say without knowing what, exactly, interest(s) is supposed to mean. It may be the wrong word. I'm not sure research can have academic interest(s). What does it mean?

@Yashas Any is correct, if it means what you want it to mean.

For it can be omitted, but I think I would prefer for it to remain.

5:35 AM

@Cerberus Sorry, yeah, that was a dumb example. The actual sentence was "Protein engineering is a promising ﬁeld and has vast academic and industrial interests".

5:55 AM

@Cerberus What about the use of colon? Should the sentence continue without the colon? Like "Popular real-valued targets are change in X, denoted by Z; change in A, denoted by B; and change in L, denoted by M."

I feel like there should be a pause after "are". It sounds better for my ears. But the comma looks weird and the semicolon looks very wrong. Colon is used to anyway write down a list, so I went with a colon. But rules on the internet say that the clause on the left of the colon should be independent.

Google and Apple have predictably cracked under the strain, and removed Alexey Navalny's app.

Putin's government have been slapping ever-increasing fines on them.

1 hour later…

Faheem Mitha

7:28 AM

@Yashas Protein engineering is not a person, so cannot have interests.

Here I'm including the broad definition of person as possibly including a business entity, for example.

I understand what you are getting at, but I think that sentence should be restructured a bit.

3 hours later…

10:23 AM

1 hour later…

11:24 AM

11:41 AM

Word of the day: repressilator

12:18 PM

12:57 PM

1:38 PM

> How much does a rainbow weigh? Not much - it’s pretty light

"Popular real-valued targets are a change in denaturation midpoint temperature, denoted by ΔTm; a change in thermal deactivation temperature, denoted by
ΔT50; and a change in free energy of folding, denoted by ΔΔG."

Should 'a' be used before "change"?

2:36 PM

@Yashas Yes.

@Cerberus the change is uncountable though

it's a continuous value

You can say, changes in temperature and humidity.

Maybe you could also use it uncountably in that sentence, but countable is how I would write it there.

@Cerberus "Popular real-valued targets are changes in denaturation .....; changes in thermal....; and changes in ....." Is this ok?

I did not mean that you should use the plural in your sentence; I just wanted to show you that the word change can be countable.

I would keep the sentence as it was.

With the articles.

In the context where the sentence appears, they are all continuous values.

2:55 PM

I think you're making it a bit too semantic: countability is a mainly syntactic category.

But it is also true that the use of article is partly idiomatic: it cannot always be explained with logic and rules.

1 hour later…

4:13 PM

@EdwinAshworth: Or maybe you can just leave people alone and try to keep the atmosphere positive on this site. Ultimately, the site is there for the users. — Cerberus_Reinstate_Monica 48 secs ago

1 hour later…

5:22 PM

@Cerberus TFG

Anyway Lawler doesn't give references from what I remember.

5:57 PM

@Mitch What's that?

@Mitch Yeah, he doesn't.

6:08 PM

Word of the day: Spindle of Necessity

user178758

6:19 PM

@Cerberus the situation is "Too Far Gone"

> Even though it is factually inaccurate, the main purpose of "the Spindle of Necessity" is to give a working, visual model to the solar system.

6:38 PM

@Cerberus it's actually a reference to Trump.

TIL that TFG is a TLA for 45

@Cerberus EA is stuck in a dumb catch-22.

eg All statements must be referenced. If a question can be answered with a reference, then it's Gen Ref and should be closed.

If a question can only be answered without a reference, it is not authoritative and so has no good answer and should be closed.

or (slightly different) If a question has multiple correct answers, they can only be differentiated by opinion, therefore the question is opinion-based.

These are my three reasons why all questions should be closed on ELU.

Myth of Er

The Myth of Er is a legend that concludes Plato's Republic (10.614–10.621). The story includes an account of the cosmos and the afterlife that greatly influenced religious, philosophical, and scientific thought for many centuries. The story begins as a man named Er (; Greek: Ἤρ, gen.: Ἠρός), son of Armenios (Ἀρμένιος), of Pamphylia dies in battle. When the bodies of those who died in the battle are collected, ten days after his death, Er remains undecomposed. Two days later he revives on his funeral-pyre and tells others of his journey in the afterlife, including an account of reincarnation and...

1) Again I read that in my faux Jafaican/MLE/Estuary accent as "The Myth of Uh"

or the myth of ... uh?

2) the myth says that there's this spindle, see, and like it's held up by the Fates (makes sense right, it being the center around which the Universe spins) and the mom of all these Fates, her name is... Necessity.

which is really a strange name for parents to call their kid. Not something romantic like Ariadne or Cassandra, but totally practical. "Hey, have you fed and burped Necessity?"

and 3) Wow that Plato dude (or his gang) had an imagination. And even moreso, the rest of Western Civilization is based essentially on one group of guys sitting around drunk making up shit?

2 hours later…

Robusto

8:28 PM

Britain Signals Intent to Revert to the Imperial System

1 hour later…