Recent Comments by Bidouleroux 
1
1
comment listing type:
Top New Vintage Videos by Vote
Subscribe
Top 15 Sifters of All Time
Top 15 Sifters of the Past Week
VideoSift Links
Recent Comments by Bidouleroux 1 1 comment listing type: Top New Vintage Videos by Vote Subscribe Top 15 Sifters of All Time Top 15 Sifters of the Past Week VideoSift Links |
Building Topples Onto Another!
>> ^rougy:
>> ^charliem:
Yeah, cause everyone knows that every single building is designed in exactly the same way....
Exactly! Buildings are designed to fall straight down in a pile of dust, if they're designed correctly. The one above was designed to fall over sideways.
Are you kidding ?
Sound structural engineering takes into account worst-case scenarios.
You don't want a fucking sky-scraper coming down sideways in the middle of dense down-town Manhattan.
Its public domain, go look for yourself, the WTC complex was designed to fall in on itself in the event of a catastrophic failure, to prevent what happened in this video from occurring on a MUCH LARGER SCALE.
I was going to reply much in the same way, only by saying that I thought it was in fact a stroke of genius engineering that the WTC towers fell in place instead of coming down domino style all over downtown Manhattan. In fact, I think Al-Qaeda thought for sure that the towers would topple over easily if smashed on one of their sides with enough force. But of course you don't build a couple of 400+ meters high towers out of popsicle sticks. If they knew the towers would tend to fall in on themselves, they would have tried to crash the planes on the lower levels - the way you fell a tree - to at the very least prevent the largest number of persons from evacuating (better yet: one plane on the lower levels, then some time later one on the upper levels to give it a push over). Guess they should have hired structural engineers instead of airliner pilots!
The Dumbest Woman On The Highway
>> ^rottenseed:
10 bucks says she's a Christian. I hate to make a harsh generalization but come on...
Yeah I hate to make harsh generalizations, but anybody this stupid must be a <insert sterotypical group you dislike here>.
Doesn't work with every group that people like to dislike and stereotype... The majority of the group must be dumbasses who would fail basic third grade science, or even basic common sense 101. For example, while many people around the world hate jews, no one would think a Jew shrewd enough to divest you of all you own yet at the same time stupid enough to think a semi is running in reverse at 70 mph on the "35, going north" (guess the semi must be going north-south?).
Also, a car's not going faster than you are just because its in front of you, dumbass.
The Difference Between Democrats and Republicans - TED
>> ^chilaxe:
>> ^Crake:
Trying to explain...
Since when is...
my point is that democracy works on the assumption of free will,
Okay, I'm gonna stop you right now, because my bullshit meter just went through the roof. No one except religious idiots would have to assume free will to define democracy. I suggest you read more, especially J.S. Mill's On Liberty, of which I will quote the first sentence: Right from the start, he effectively asserts that whether or not you have free will is irrelevant to civil liberties and thus to democracies, which are based on these civil liberties.
The English Language is Dum
How, exactly, is he wrong sir gm?
Take there, their and they're as an example. If we were to spell them phonetically then they would all be the same. Now try to make sense of the following sentence:
"There over there with there children."
This phrase is unambiguous because of English's strict word ordering. Every native speaker will intone this sentence as "They're over there with there children" because an English sentence is Subject-Verb-Object. For example, try pronouncing this: "There they're with there children". Most native speaker would be reluctant to pronounce this because it's actually a grammatical conundrum. This last phrase is in fact impossible. If you do pronounce it, you will pronounce it as the equivalent of the the first one, that is "They're there with there children". When you change the word order, you CANNOT contract the subject and the verb. You would naturally say: "There they are with there children". (Here I'm writing "their" as "there" just to show that there's no ambiguity whatsoever between those two words, because they're both words but not verbs)
So, in reality there's no need to "translate". When you pronounce the first phrase, you will understand it just fine. The real problem here is that reading is not the same as speaking, unless you read aloud or subvocalize. But any which way you read, when writing you cannot convey the intonation of the voice. That's one of the greatest pitfalls of alphabets. For example, in this case to be phonetically correct, you would have to specify by a typographic mark that the first "there" is actually a spoken contraction of two originally distinct sounds "they" and "r", so that a reader who doesn't know English very well can put the correct intonation on the correct words. That way the sentence becomes as clear as it needs to be phonetically. Of course, it's not always as easy as that, and to convey pure spoken language in a textual form without all the usual typographical baggage that you find in linguistics is impossible. Even Germans do not always pronounce exactly as they should, but for example all the different nuances of the sound "a" are all rendered as the letter "a" and only that letter. When a whole word is pronounced differently it becomes a matter of dialect and not of pronunciation per se.
Another example: in French, intonation is always on the first syllable of a word, so individual words are easy to separate. Add to that a strict word order plus a plethora of articles and you get yourself a quite clear language that can be written however you fancy.
So spelling, and punctuation, add more information to the meaning of the words than merely how they are pronounced.
They do, but it's a pittance because a spelling not based on pronunciation is too arbitrary. When retracing the origins of a word, pronunciation is much more useful than spelling. If spelling changed without equivalent modification in the pronunciation, it would make the linguists' job harder. But it almost always happens in reverse: the pronunciation changes and then some guy decides he's going to spell it the way he pronounces it. And the linguists thank him. But some old words get spelled in new ways and some others keep their original spellings, and in the end you get the orthographical mess that is known as English (or French for that matter).
Sophia the Cleverest Escape Artist