Viewing profile — brettp

Australian here, like the author. Apple Pay (and equivalents) work _everywhere_ here, including at the tiniest market stalls, and for the smallest purchases. I stopped carrying my …

I've never understood the argument "humans only use vision and hearing so self driving cars should too". We don't constrain what we do with machines to what humans do. Humans don't…

The point is: grammatical gender (noun classes) are arbitrary. Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need to know that grammati…

That's not grammatical gender. Most people can distinguish between persons and nonpersons and map that onto the correct pronoun or relativizer to use. But in German the girl you me…

If you're arguing from simplicity, Mandarin actually has very simple grammar - much simpler than any of the other languages you mention (no gender, no inflections, no declensions a…

Arguably English became the default by a very large historical chance: that Napoleon sold off his North American colonies - a huge swathe of what is now the United States - to fina…

Celtic languages like Gaulish or Germanic ones like Frankish.

It's actually not that difficult to tell the pronunciation of a French word from its spelling - the rules are pretty consistent (much more consistent and fewer of them than English…

... and if you think that German is "orderly and precise" then you've obviously never had to learn its plurals.

Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speak…

English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people…

So many things wrong in this article it makes me doubt the rest of the (undeniably interesting) content. - English does not have 5 vowels; depending on the variety that you speak a…

If we’re going for ecclesiastical humour then we absolutely cannot go without mentioning Umberto Eco’s piece on Mac vs DOS: https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html

This does not explain a cat's ability to choose the thing to knock over that is most likely to annoy you and therefore most likely to get your attention.

Australian here. When you have the world’s most venomous spider which - has fangs that can go through boots - hides in holes in the ground - is aggressive - is common in the most p…

One thing I haven't seen anyone mention which I think is the most obvious reason for commission on outside purchases: if Apple did not charge a commission on purchases made outside…

The title is lifted verbatim from the abstract: > Those trends, in addition to decreasing diagnoses in foreign-born persons, contribute to rising evidence that leprosy has become e…

I wonder where that statistic came from too. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... the number of L2 speakers of English is ~1b or 12.5% of th…

1. Awful summary 0.6% recurrent event rate does not mean it was 99.4% effective. You need to know what the recurrent event rate would have been if everything else was the same and …

What a load of bollocks. And I think they misspelt his surname.

So in response to a vague and ambiguous query, you got highly relevant results including the one you wanted on the first page. And you're complaining about that? Incidentally, the …