Supergrunch

Watching that made me realise how Okazaki looks older now, so I did a comparsion: (that's episode 1 of season 1 on the left, and episode 13 of season 2 on the right) Nice when they change character models to show age - it's even more noticeable in Hikaru no Go.

Well, abbreviations are a more general class, including any shortened words, so as well as acronyms and initialisms, things like Dr. and so on. I'd imagine these are mostly instances of the phrases they abbreviate - usually noun phrases, although not necessarily. Abbreviations are by their very nature orthographical, and so not always relevant to how we use and process natural language, but it's interesting when the way we use them actually ends up changing the language, as is the case for acronyms.

Erm, initialisms actually, but it's not like everyone makes the distinction. I've actually written a bit about them on the internets before:

Katanas are sharper and lighter, and so while they do not have much force behind them they can cut more readily - this makes them good for killing lightly armoured people like Japanese peasants. (and to some extent, other samurai - Japanese armour was never that thick) Broadswords, on the other hand, are heavier and blunter, and so are better at cutting through the heavy armour that people like knights would have worn. It's like the difference between a penknife and a razor blade. It makes swords kind of less romantic when you think about what they were actually used for...

Here's a misconception: that things claimed as "facts" on QI are always as true as they are claimed to be. They're sometimes simply hearsay or even just made up - the show never cites references (which I'd forgive, but their book doesn't either which is inexcusable), and I've personally noticed instances of mistakes, where I have evidence and they don't appear to. Of course, I'm sure most of what they say is true, but the unreliability means I can't really take it seriously. Anyway, I have many instances of more interesting misconceptions. I'll try and think of some interesting ones. Hmm, there'd be some differences. Most notably that native Americans have a lower genetic diversity as a result of the founder effect. Actually, that's a nice misconception - that Caucasians have the highest genetic diversity. I think this stems from the fact that Caucasians look diverse to other Caucasians - in actual fact, native Africans have the most genetic diversity.

Clannad 15 was... wow. So nice to see it all animated.

Hmm, mine was just over £300 for three weeks, I suppose we have the credit crunch to blame. Still, it was very much worth it, as a single Shinkansen journey can cost as much as £70, and it covers both long distance journeys and about half of the Tokyo subway. So if you're going from place to place a lot, it's almost definitely the cheapest way to do things.

Lolz, that was nice and pretentious to reread. What I basically meant was that I seem to be able to watch myself being a drunk idiot, without being internally affected, and perhaps the fact my grammar and spelling (but not necessarily meaning) remain intact is evidence for this.

Hmm, I'm currently experiencing the bizarre bifurcation of personality I always seem to get when drunk or tipsy. While on one semi-concious level, I'm pretty pissed, I always get the impression that "I'm" occupying a higher and more aware level that's observing the other with amusement. To what degree this is an illusion, I don't know, but the one thing I know for sure is that I can always type fluently when inebriated, so there must be something coherent in there. Of course, syntactic and orthographic coherency is by no means a guarantee of semantic adequacy.

Erm, it's highly likely you'll need to both have Asian fonts installed and have your default language setting for non-unicode programs as Japanese. I have these on permanently (various games and linguistics based things require one or both), so I'm not sure if it works on a default PC but I'd imagine not. Incidentally, it can be bought if you wish to do so, and relatively easily - try paletweb (unreliable but cheap) or HimeyaShop (reputable but expensive). I suggest you get the standard version without voices, as it's cheaper, you can always patch voices in, and it's more compatible with current translation patches.

Only place I've been other than Tokyo is Kyoto (mostly Gion district). It's worth going if you want to see all the temples and whatnot - I personally didn't like it as much as Tokyo, but my friends preferred it. Just don't attempt to find an international phone there...

Yeah, you might as well watch it really once you know what happens - you can laugh at the souless destruction of all the characters. I found it compellingly awful. Anyway, I not surprised there's a manga but I've heard nothing of it so I doubt it's wonderful - for non-terrible Clannad in addition to the anime, your best bet is to wait until the game translation comes out. (which shouldn't be too long, there are various beta-y things floating about)

Happy birthday Dyson! You share a birthday with a physics student I know.

All apart from gamma rays, which are attenuated by it, and pretty much stopped if it's thick enough.

Yep, that's another difference.

Gamma radiation is higher frequency, and more ionising as a result of this.

Yep, as Shorty says I've played a fair bit of the visual novel, including all of after story, and yes, it's pretty awesome. There's a translation in progress, which should be finished in under a year. I'm not sure if there is a manga, though there might well be - there is a film, made by a different animation company, which is awful and will spoil after story if you watch it. So you're probably best sticking with the KyoAni anime for now.

Happy (belated) birthday)

Something like that, but with a full stop rather than a question mark, although it's hard to translate it into good English without context. Anyway, in my opinion the best site for learning Japanese grammar is this one.

The day the heavenly wind cave was opened, the road to tommorow came into view?

That's always the case with the frontier of science. If everyone took that attitude, then we wouldn't have explained anything - it's not like there were never alternative (and accepted) theories for what we now consider to be fact. Hmm, I'll have a go at better explaining it tomorrow.

That's always the case with the frontier of science. If everyone took that attitude, then we wouldn't have explained anything - it's not like there were never alternative (and accepted theories) for what we now consider to be fact. Hmm, I'll have a go at better explaining it tomorrow.

And of course there may be no such thing as what things "really" look like. Of this theory? Well, it advances physics, and we understand more about the universe, which aside from being interesting has a multitude of potential (if distant) applications. And maybe, if it becomes accepted, we may go on to understand how and why we interpret space as three-dimensional.

Basically, for the calculation to work, you have to take black holes to be three-dimensional rather than four-dimensional. Well, your point works in some respects but not in others. Yes, our interpretation of the world is pretty much what it is to us, but that doesn't mean that more advanced scientific models won't contradict this interpretation - indeed, they do it all the time. For instance, while for most of human history people thought that there were no such things as microorganisms, current theories suggest (well, make it pretty obvious) that they exist. Science needn't be consistent with what we literally experience (though of course it must agree with observations, which often aren't what we actually experience), and indeed often isn't, as it trys to come up with explanations for things that we don't generally encounter or understand. Everyone thinks the sky is blue, but under current scientific models colour is merely the way our brain interprets a narrow band of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. That doesn't make colour any less real to us, but it does mean that it's just a construct of the way we view the world. Incidentally, the eye thing that Chairdriver mentioned is quite cool - it results from your retina interpreting the image before it's been flipped by the brain, and so is upside down.

Right, well think I roughly understand this theory, seems somewhat bizarre and I'll ask some physics and maths people about it this evening to see what they think. Anyway, in my understanding: Black holes were originally said to have no entropy (basically, degree of disorder) because they resulted from perfect solutions of Einstein's equations from general relativity. However, it was later realised that as they suck in things with entropy yet have no entropy themselves, they must be decreasing the overall entropy of the universe. This contradicts the second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental physical principle which states that the entropy of the universe must always increase. So this instead predicts that black holes have a huge amount of entropy (to cancel out the entropy of everything they suck in), and so it's been proposed that they are maximum entropy objects, having more entropy per volume than anything else in the universe. The proposed entropy of black holes has been calculated to be finite, and as temperature is closely related to entropy, they must also have finite temperature, meaning they have to balance out the temperature of what they absorb by radiating energy, to stop their temperature increasing indefinitely. This radiation is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, if we attempt to calculate it, it suggests that the entropy of black holes is related to their surface area, rather than their volume, which is counterintuitive because you'd expect the entropy to be a calculation from the possible arrangements of all the particles in the volume of the black hole, rather than just its surface. Furthermore, the interaction of ingoing and outgoing particles from the black holes contradicts standard quantum physics, as to be consistent the outgoing particles should be in a states of various different possibilities, yet there is nowhere for these states to come from. This paradox can only be resolved by using a modern and unusual interpretation of gravity, with one major catch - it suggests black holes are of lower dimensions than we usually interpret them. Both these conclusions are consistent with the idea that space is two, rather than three-dimensional (with spacetime presumably being three, rather than four-dimensional), and so the holographic principle has been developed to resolve this conclusion - that while space appears three-dimensional to us, it is simply a projection from a two-dimensional plane. Crazy, eh? But I don't see why people get worried about things like this - it's not like it changes the way we interpret the world in our day to day lives, though that doesn't stop it being interesting.