Supergrunch

Clearly, it was a depiction of you.

This is how much fun the chatroom is: This is how much fun it would be if you joined today:

Yes, what I really mean is "I wish I had put in enough effort and/or had enough talent to be able to draw reasonably well..." Yep, the same! And I'd never seen The Room before, so it was pretty fun. I was in the back row, which was useful for avoiding all the spoons.

I was at this! Prince Charles cinema, right - which performance? Also, this thread makes me wish I could draw.

You can come out of hiding now Magnus.

Pokey pokey.

Ugh, that's actually my least favourite thing I've read by McEwan (have also read Atonement which started out outstanding, and got progressively worse as it went on, and On Chesil Beach, which was pretty good). I'll go into detail when I'm more awake/sober, but essentially I think Saturday is McEwan's (perhaps unconcious) expression of his terror of getting older.

You say that, but it seems that Adobe are so terrified of photoshop becoming a generic trademark for all kinds of image manipulation software that they have this absurd disclaimer in their small print. I guess they don't want to end up like Hoover, where the company only has a comparatively small market share despite all vacuum cleaners being called hoovers...

Do people even give 90s? When I was an undergrad, the top mark was 85, and the highest anyone ever got was 80ish. Sounds good anyhoo. And I'm getting better at go, and actually (mostly) understanding some lectures on set theory. Now if only I could get a clearer idea of what I'm actually doing...

I recommend you get something with at least 7200 rpm, as otherwise the speed your computer can write to disk might end up being a bottleneck a lot of the time. Although the new prices make that harder...

If anyone's really bothered about seeing Wikipedia articles, the easiest fix is just to add ?banner=none to the end of the URL.

I think I mostly play on hard, but not one of those silly modes like insane. It can still get pretty irritating though.

It is time once more.

Not sure whether or not this has been posted, but:

Hm, the selection seems a bit small and faulty at the moment - I tried to watch Breaking Bad and Doctor Who and both were "temporarily unavailable"... Firefly and The Thick of It were working though.

Yay, another thing making televisions obsolete. I'll give the free trial a go.

The was pretty good. Oddly, the second half bore a remarkable resemblance to the visual novel/anime Higurashi no naku koro ni, but I'm guessing that was coincidence...

And Odwin successfully uncovers the contents of the video without watching it.

This looks pretty awesome, congrats guys! Somehow I doubt I'm welcome until I've seen Alien.

Here we go then... Nobody really agrees on a definition of "language," so it's impossible to say whether something is or isn't, but this sort of thing is excluded by most defintions, and I can't see a defintion that includes it being a particularly useful one to have. One key thing that's missing here is communication - after all, these sounds clearly aren't being used to communicate with (untrained) mothers, and it seems very unlikely that there's any communication with peers going on. Which isn't to say that communication has to be part of the definition of language - it's perfectly possible to exclude these baby sounds using, for instance, a more structural defintion. What do you mean by reflexive? Exactly (although it's debateable how referential human language is). And it's even simpler than a myoclonic jerk - as you can tell from the "explanations" for the hunger and tiredness sounds, it's basically just the result of an instinctive reflex (e.g. yawning) combined with vocalising. You could presumably extend this to things like the discomfort sound, which might result from heavy breathing, and so on, all though all this is speculative and should really be scrutinised by phoneticists and others to confirm it. I guess you're thinking of things like vervet monkeys, which have different calls to alert the group about different types of predators, which does seem more like human language, albeit still very far off. And there aren't very many examples like this. Yeah, although it does misrepresent things a bit, which isn't a good way of doing science. The research has potential to be interesting/useful though.

Oh yeah, Sherlock! Well, I can multi-task.

Yeah, mayhap.