Genady

I wondered (just a little bit) what has happened to the "modern genius" Dembski. Did he mutate?

Images posted with no credit are assumed to be made by the poster, right?

To show in the sense of to demonstrate, not in the sense of to prove.

No, they are not venomous. "The spotted cleaner shrimp (Periclimenes yucatanicus), is a kind of cleaner shrimp common to the Caribbean Sea. These shrimp live among the tentacles of several species of sea anemones. They sway their body and wave their antennae in order to attract fish from which they eat dead tissue, algae and parasites." Spotted cleaner shrimp - Wikipedia

I can't decide. What do you think?

Certainly not.

Same kind of shrimp as 3 posts above. Different anemone. Or rather the same kind of anemone populated by a different algae (?)

Is this question referring to some other theory of gravity, different from GR?

This thought experiment attempts to show how cosmological redshift is NOT a Doppler effect. Let's imagine that the universe expansion, for some dynamic reasons such as strange behavior of dark energy etc., is highly non-uniform, i.e. it stops and goes. Just for the purposes of this thought experiment. At the time when the universe is not expanding, some far away galaxy emits light. While the light is in transit, the universe expands for some time and then stops again. At the time we observe the light, the universe is not expanding. The source and the receiver do not move relative to each other at the time of emission nor at the time of reception. Thus, there is no Doppler effect. Will we observe the light redshifted? (My answer: Yes.)

"An obsession is an unbidden, intrusive thought, image, or urge that intrudes into consciousness; attempts to dispel it are difficult and typically lead to anxiety. These thoughts, images, or urges are recognized as part of one’s own mental life." (Obsessions | Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Guide (hopkinsguides.com))

Me neither. This is so. But, the situation could be simply like this. Consider some people who live on an island with unique flora and fauna, from which they obtain their food and materials. They have to have a language to talk about these flora and fauna. No other language has anything like that, because no other people ever interacted with this kind of flora and fauna. It seems to me that in such case, this, although large but idiosyncratic part of their language has nothing to add to our understanding of how their language compares or relates to other languages. It even could work the other way around, i.e. understanding of other, more generic parts of their language could help to understand how this idiosyncratic part works.

It's a trade off.

Thank you. Rolling up my sleeves

Thank you. It helps.

I mean this page:

I thought so, too, but evidently it does not.

Is there a way to block a specific thread that I'm not interested in but it crams my All Activity page?

What a bunch of baloney. Reminded me of my argument with a chemistry teacher back in high school. She was "showing" us, as was required by the official propaganda, that the periodic table of elements is an evidence for the "law of transformation of quantity into quality", one of the "laws" of dialectical materialism. That argument got me in a big trouble, escalated to the school principal ...

You're right. Difficult questions. The only consolation is that we are not alone. The guys from fMRI studies have the same problems. Large randomized samples are not feasible. Kemmerer did not specify how the subjects were selected. Perhaps if I go to the original papers, I can find the answers. I know that each language was represented by a group rather than an individual, and that they selected a "preferential" answer from each test. How much will be missed if, when comparing two languages, we skip the idiosyncrasies like the ones you describe and focus on comparable parts only? There is still a huge common world out there to talk about. These idiosyncrasies are perhaps very important for these people and their society, but how important they are for linguistics? If they don't have any correspondence to anything in another language, why would they be considered for a comparison between the languages at all? Maybe instead of comparing everywhere, use a Dow Jones / S&P / "inflation basket" approach - fix a diversified set of representative domains that can be used universally. Body parts domain would be a candidate #1.

In the process. 350 dense pages. Unfortunately, it is already clear that available data just scratch the surface.

A cool little example of common confusion with partial derivatives, from Penrose's "The Road to Reality" (he attributes the words in the title to Nick Woodhouse.) Let's consider a function of two coordinates, f(x,y), and a coordinate change X = x, Y = y + x Because the X coordinate didn't change and is the same as the x coordinate, one could expect that the corresponding partial derivatives are the same, fX=fx. And, because the Y coordinate is different from the y, these partial derivatives, fY and fy, could be expected to differ. In fact, this is just opposite: fX=fx-fy fY=fy The confusion is caused by the notation: fX does not mean a derivative along X, but rather a derivative with a constant Y; and fY is not a derivative along Y, but a derivative with a constant X.

Exactly! And I was pleased to see that the suggested metric reflected this, albeit on such a small, statistically insignificant sample. Regarding the last point, words exist but are applied differently. This is a summary for a subset of 6 vessels from the total of 67 used in the study: Faroese speakers used just one word to describe all six vessels. Speakers of Belgian Dutch, Frisian, and Danish employed two words but drew the boundary between them at different points along the continuum of containers. Swedish and English speakers made three-way distinctions that differed not only from the common one mentioned earlier, but also from each other. And finally, speakers of Netherlands Dutch carved the referential space into four separate categories. Kemmerer, David. Concepts in the Brain (pp. 72-73). Regarding the other points, yes, they need to be considered. I don't think that language is separate from culture though. Linguistic differences reflect cultural differences. This is important if one asks what make them different. My focus is not on why but on how are they different.

One way to proceed is to compare languages by domain rather than 'overall'. Such domains would be, for example, plants and animals, artifacts, body parts, family relations, possession relations, motion events, events of giving and taking, ...

This is exactly what I am saying. I'm trying to evaluate how differently different languages map their linguistic elements into the outside world. I don't refer to any grammatical structures, including nouns, verbs, etc. What I refer to is, any thing, action, event, relation, feature, aspect, ... of outside world is expressed somehow in every language. Different languages group this actions, events, ... differently in their expressions. This specific study I used in the example above was conducted on 12 Germanic languages. I might use other studies in other examples if needed. In addition (it was mentioned in another thread) I speak three languages from three different families and understand two more, including one sign language (ASL, still a beginner). I very well aware of how different languages can be. In fact, this was my starting point. I start with simple things, because they are easy, but for other studies video clips were shown, short stories in pictures, etc. This is how other things are handled so far. Clearly, some things are very difficult or even impossible to study in the lab.

Thank you. No, I don't relate to what different languages call these things, but only to how they group them. To me, they could be called F1, F2, F3, and D1, D2, D3, etc. My interest is if F1=F2 and D1=D2? etc. From the same source, the Swedish words for the same three things were 'kopp', 'mugg', 'glass'. So, like Dutch, it gets (1,1,1). As you see, you are almost right, 2/3 Frisian was different. It called the x, 'kopke', and both y and z, 'beker'. So it gets (1,1,0).