@Cerberus "within"

@Cerberus That's odd. The sentence seemed totally okay to me. I even didn't notice the "with in" typo.

@M.A.R. Even then it still makes no sense to me.

@CowperKettle I don't know if that was the issue, but the question didn't make sense to me either way.

The question was: can any word exist at all, if there is no language? Can a person who has never learned any language still use "words"? Are there word-shaped bits of information inside the brain, or is there some interpreting apparatus to turn non-word thinking into words?

Was Nessy really Jack the Ripper?

We may never know the answer to these questions.

@CowperKettle Okay, that still isn't a super logical question for me, especially in the context of what language a word came from, but least it is sensible.

I tried running once every three days. It was nice the first couple weeks, but now there's haze in the right eye again. Now I'll be back to running once every seven days.

I want a digital interface to my visual cortex, so I could run every day, a half marathon if I liked.

I hope they invent some visual interface sooner or later.

I'm sorry to hear that.

How about another sport?

@Cerberus I don't want to bicycle, but I will have to, I guess. It takes so much more time than jogging.

The worst thing on Twitter is psychological and inspirational quotes from the greats. I wish there was some browser plugin to block all inspirational self-help quotes from ever appearing.

To what end do you wish you bicycle or run?

To exercise

Maybe try some machines?

Like a rowing machine?

@CowperKettle Or just do not use Twitter.

(A Russian jocular verse)

I suppose that is somewhat true.

@Cerberus Yes, that would be the better choice

Though "healthy" would require definition.

“Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.”

I read this as "where the Catholic brown bear roams", so I had to re-read it carefully

Afternoon naps have a small to medium benefit over multiple cognitive tests. (review and meta-analysis)

I'm listening to The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes, and I can feel that he is putting a spin on things.

The books is interesting, but what if somebody takes it as an impartial reflection of the facts.

I feel that he has a simplified set of beliefs, and is trying to fit the events into this simple set.

Hmm are the flaws?

Some of these beliefs might be true, but one needs a whole statistical research to check them.

He thinks that Russia had no true land propertied class of peasants, and that is a drawback that doomed the society. But this needs thorough, complicated research, with thousands of pages of analysis.

Hmm.

Who knows what factors really influence societies.

I would not be surprised if Russia had as few as Prussia did.

Especially considering the prevalence of serfdom until, what 1860?

The climate is too precarious in Russia. Maybe peasants could only stay alive if they banded together.

One can be a prosperous farmer for 10 years, but then a freeze comes, and you are dead, if you are not part of the Mir (peasants' community) to help you weather the storm.

It's not Europe, there is no Gulf Stream close by that would make a winter mild.

And when the Bolsheviks took power, there was a surge of personal farming at first, thanks to all the chemical fertilizers and other improvements (I guess). But they found the Mir system easier to manage and suppress the people. Hence the Collectivization of 1929.

They just switched Russia's villages back to the mid 19th century.

Easier to manage.

Hmm.

Collective farms were like the 19th century Mir communities, with some positive changes, and a lot of negative changes.

Peasants in the USSR were only allowed to have personal passports, permitting travel at will throughout the USSR, in the 1960s.

I heard that the kolkhoz system was not so bad initially?

Up to 1974, a kolkhoz member needed a certificate for each instance of travelling out to a city or somewhere else.

@Cerberus I'm not sure. Maybe it was not bad when people banded together voluntarily.

Imagine you have an illness. You would need a written document to visit a doctor in a city.

You cannot just buy a ticket and travel to Moscow to see an epileptologist, if your child has seizures.

Yeah that's not great, but it is only one aspect.

We live in more liberal times now.

Even people in China can now travel across the country sometimes, I believe.

Much less so than we, though.

People in villages joined the Army for the sole purpose of getting a passport and settling in a city.

And before the kolkhoz system?

Up to 1935, they could travel

> According to the Ministry of Public Order of the USSR, the number of persons now living in rural areas and not entitled to a passport reaches almost 58 million people (aged 16 and over); this is 37 percent of all citizens of the USSR. The absence of passports for these citizens creates significant difficulties for them in exercising labor, family and property rights, enrolling in studies, receiving various types of postal items, purchasing goods on credit, registering in hotels

(in 1967)

I see.

There's a street surveilance cam video of two boys in Kherson walking, one with a machine-gun, the other with an RPG that they had discovered somewhere. He is playing with the RPG and it fires at a house nearby, nearly injuring the other boy with the back-blast. They throw their weapons and run away. Then there's smoke from the hit building.

@CowperKettle War is just children playing with murderous weapons

Then after it's all over, people who haven't been there come up with lies like honor and glory, and it's so convincing it makes people want to do it all over again

Machine Algorithm That Detects Sepsis Cut Deaths by Nearly 20 Percent

> "Learn to make friends with Russia - that will save you some teeth" (Russia's main state media TASS quoting Ramzan Kadyrov)

Sometimes wars are inevitable.

> On 9/20/73, the day before his single "I Got a Name" was released, Jim Croce and five others were killed when their chartered Beechcraft E18S crashed into a tree during takeoff from the Natchitoches Regional Airport in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Croce was only 30 years old.

> Exposing mice with various different types of cancer to 4°C activated their brown fat tissue, prompting it to burn glucose, which tumours rely on for growth newscientist.com/article/…

Curiously, a friend of mine used a crackpot theory together with his friends, to try and help a person ill with cancer. They thought that heating the body will help.

> A trade-off was observed across four experiments; specifically, high-frequency words were produced even when less aligned with messages. These results suggest that implicit decisions between words are impacted by accessibility. Of all the times that people have produced cat, sometimes they likely meant kitten.

"Cat" is easier to pronounce, so people sometimes use "cat" even when "kitten" is more precise.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976221089603

@Cerberus are you sure? if they're inscrutible, is it not your ideas that are great?

@CowperKettle the mashup I never knew I needed :D

twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1558938967982080000

twitter.com/barmijo/status/1559031651656536064

twitter.com/AnnaHelhoski/status/1558950353109925889

A college degree is below the bachelor's degree?

I think TED talks are not good. But this was provided in the Twitter discussion. But I consider Twitter discussions of poor quality. So.. I don't know why I'm curious about this.

I'm suspicious of all drastic statements made in TED talks.

@CowperKettle "can any word exist at all, if there is no language?" Depends on what you mean by word and language.

I think language means a collection of things: words, word elements, syntax. I think of semantics and pragmatics as peri-linguistic things that are most prominent when discussing language.

So if there's no syntax (no special meaning for different orderings of words) then I'd say it's not very language like.

If you have a large vocabulary but no syntax, that might be considered a language. (but an impoverished one, where you're just pointing at things and labeling them distinctly.

If all you have is a handful of words that label maybe people (who can be referred to when not around) or locations or animals, then that is in the language direction, but not yet language.

This means that I am saying that words can exist without a full language.

"Can a person who has never learned any language still use "words"?" That's a question for experimental psychology and neurology, and requires the natural experiment of finding someone deaf (because language in humans is physiologically primed to be mouth and ear based) from birth, and also been raised without sign language, and see if they can learn an -arbitrary- label (i sign language) for some thing.

And that's been shown to be the case many times. (lots of people ...

Wait.

Just the existence of human babies that learn individual words first, then eventually learn to string them together, that's an example. Forget all this deaf stuff. Just language learning in people starts with word things before they have full language.

"Are there word-shaped bits of information inside the brain, or is there some interpreting apparatus to turn non-word thinking into words?" That's a much more involved question. Most thoughts are not linguistic. They just feel linguistic because when we want to explain to others what they are, we're automatically putting these thoughts into words.

How do you open a can with a can-opener? Don't tell me, just do it. That requires thought that doesn't use words. How do you plan a trip to the capital for the weekend, leaving tomorrow?

First you have to look up the train schedule and buy a ticket, you have to pack and you have to get to the train station somehow and... I'm telling you through words, but planning those is wordless. You have a number steps to do in the right order, and you could tell me what they are in language, but actually thinking about what is necessary to do is non-linguistic.

@M.A.R. A large part of my childhood was, if not doing it very often, at least thinking very strongly about how to cause explosions. Of course in a safe and unassuming manner such that parents or anybody else wouldn't find out.

Spoiler alert: OMG did they find out.