Lionel Mandrake
Lionel Mandrake's JournalI watched a few minutes of Netflix's movie "Io".
I like science fiction when I can suspend disbelief, but "Io" makes that impossible. The film should have had a science advisor, who would have pointed out a couple of howlers:
1) Putting humans in orbit about Jupiter's moon Io makes no sense. Jupiter is ridiculously far from the sun. Furthermore, Io is right in the middle of a band of intense radiation, which would kill people very quickly.
2) Back on earth, scientists were trying to extract oxygen from ammonium, which contains no oxygen.
German lumpers and splitters
Is German a language or a family of languages? Experts disagree about this. Depending on how you answer the question, you are either a lumper or splitter.
Similar questions can be asked about other languages and even about taxa in biology, where the struggle between lumpers and splitters can be intense. But I digress.
I'm no expert, but I side with the lumpers. I think of Standard German, Swiss German, Plattdeutsch, etc. as dialects of a single language, because having taken German classes in school I find that I can understand most of them to some extent. Plattdeutsch, aka Low German, is borderline. It's close to Dutch, which I can't begin to understand.
Once I tried having a conversation with someone who was fluent in Yiddish. The experiment was moderately successful. Therefore I would argue that even Yiddish is a German dialect, although it's usually classified as a separate language.
parsing the title of Newton's opus magnum
Newton published the most important book in the history of science in 1687. The title of this great book is
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
The usual English translation is "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy". Obviously the book is in Latin. What is the syntax of the title? I'm no Latin scholar, but here's my take on it.
The title is a noun phrase in nominative case. The word "prīncipia" is the plural of the neuter noun "prīncipium", which means "principle".
"Prīncipia" is modified by the form of the adjective "mathēmaticus" that agrees with "prīncipia" in case, number, and gender. "Mathēmaticus" is a regular first and second declension adjective meaning "mathematical".
"Philosophiæ" is the genitive singular of the feminine noun "philosophia", which means philosophy. The phrase "prīncipia philosophiæ" (which is the title of a 1644 book by René Descartes) is usually translated "principles of philosophy", but a more literal translation would be "philosophy's principles".
"Nātūrālis" is a third-declension two-termination adjective. Here it agrees with "philosophia" in case, number, and gender. The meaning is "natural", i.e., pertaining to nature.
Frontier, Spectrum, or DirecTV?
They're all bad, but which is worst?
Frontier took over Verizon's customers in California, including CaliforniaPeggy and me. We have Frontier fiber to the house, which brings us bundled TV, telephone, and internet service.
Frontier TV service sucks. This year Frontier dropped Turner Classic Movies (TCM) from our tier. To get TCM back we would have to switch to the "ultimate" tier, which includes many channels we're not interested in and costs an additional $100 or so per month. Frontier also dropped the music channels this year; nobody who subscribes to Frontier can get them any longer.
I'm thinking of switching TV service from Frontier to either Spectrum or DirecTV, if either of them offers everything we used to get from Frontier at a reasonable price. But which of them is worse?
DirecTV lost many customers after being acquired by AT&T in 2015, presumably because of lousy service. Now that DirecTV has been spun off, has the service improved?
Spectrum used to be Time Warner. We had lousy service fro Time Warner in the 1990s. Is it any better now?
Profile Information
Gender: MaleHometown: The Left Coast
Home country: USA
Current location: electrical wires
Member since: Sun Jul 1, 2007, 06:47 PM
Number of posts: 4,076
