I did some research a while ago with translation out of English into three different languages: Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese. We had groups of translators translate the same six texts into their languages, and then we also translated the six texts with groups of machine translation systems for each language pair. We found that the groups of translators tended to translate something into their language from English in increasingly diverse ways the more “distant” a language got from English (Spanish being closest, then Arabic, and then Japanese being the most “distant”), meaning, for example, let’s say 6 out of 20 Spanish translators translated a word differently into Spanish, but then 10 out of 20 Arabic translators translated the same word differently, and maybe 14 out of 20 Japanese translators translated the same word differently (things were obviously more messy than this but there were clear statistical patterns).

The crazy thing is that the groups of machine translation systems followed the same pattern. Those machine translation systems (neural networks) were trained on tons of existing translations and show evidence of a pattern in translator behavior on a very large scale. It was hard to compare our results with existing research (linguistic “distance” is a slippery concept that I really only saw addressed in one large-scale study; I’ll try to find this study later tomorrow to put on here), but I feel like our work was an empirical estimate or indication of the relative distance of several languages from one language (not from each other but just from that one other language, in this case English).

[removed]

Thank you. My main question was the timeline. The articles I have read seem to read like "Once a star produces iron, it is dying." And that sounds like non-scientific writing to me. Taking our sun as an example, if it's apex is Carbon, when does the fusion to carbon happen? For instance, if our star is mostly H with some He, is there already Carbon?

And I do understand that there are various chains, and it's possible to convert neutrons into protons. And also various isotopes of Helium that are stable.... more or less? I suppose it is not a linear graph as far as conversion of H to higher elements, because you would have less of protons and neutrons as the star ages.

Also, your second paragraph intrigues me. I previously thought (and this is NOT my career) that higher elements (such as gold) were created by fusion at higher energies thanks to the supernova explosion. But you have said the elements like Iron can absorb neutrons, and through beta-negative decay turn into higher elements prior to the supernova? Would this also include transuranic elements?

You don't solve it, you can only manage it. Same reason it's called as Dismal Science. As long as we don't solve first the mystery of human brain, or we don't act like robots behaving in certain ways there will never be a perfect economy. Also, the economy is much more complex than having winners/losers. There's such thing as win-win situations such as renewable energy or lose-lose situations like natural disasters. Only Technology can "solve" or compromise with our economic problems.

Much like how European settlers brought disease to the natives, will future space explorers be decimated by any planets that we find life on?

Io has a molton core due to tidal forces

Political science/recent U.S. history: What books or other resources are good for learning about the evolution of US policies that arose in response to 9/11, in particular the PATRIOT Act and the drone program, in an objective and comprehensive way? Obviously any academic or journalist will have their own perspective and that’s fine, but I want to avoid resources that are primarily partisan or activist in nature. I am particularly interested in how they changed in response to different presidential administrations.

>Ask Anything Wednesday

Could a reanimated sentient hand be fully mobile with just the muscles and ligaments in and below the wrist or would it require more of the arm present? How much more?

The hand appears to have adequate blood supply and central nervous system, so these factors can be ignored for the sake of the question.

[removed]

Wow, didn’t know that. What’s its connection to Egypt?

What are some good reputable sources and/or online courses? I could take to get an education on the basics of economics? Would be great if the resource could’ve also cover more advanced topics. I’m mostly interested in self learning, and to hopefully get a better understanding of our economy, and how the market reacts to various types of news

[removed]

[removed]

Unfortunately, dopamine isn’t able to cross the blood brain barrier. The way PD is treated involves use of levodopa (dopamine precursor) in combination with carbidopa (decarboxylase inhibitor;prevents metabolism of levodopa to help it cross the BBB). The nigrostriatal pathway is the dopamine pathway affected in pd, and through this pathway you get your basal ganglia dopamine responsive pathways that modulate motor activity. But in PD these pathways get disrupted so the dopamine system that applies the brakes beats out the pathway applying the gas. I’m very adhd and I suck at explaining things but would be happy to elaborate further! I do have to say there are some very cool therapies in the works for pd, I’m particularly excited about gene therapy

> only within the last 300,000 approx.

Pale skin emerged in a similar time frame. However, going that far back you're talking mostly about pre-human species. More importantly, you're talking about pre-human species that didn't live outside of temperate zones.

If cold = pale skin, then how did pale skin emerge hundreds of thousands of years before settlement of cold regions?

> Bergman’s rule and Allen’s rule are the two guiding rule for my statements.

I believe you're misusing them. They're intended for discussions of speciation, not minor variations within a single species.

> Climatic adaptation and hominid evolution: the thermoregulation imperative.

Your original point was about modern human beings and the variations we see, not about pre-human species that evolved into humans.

[removed]

Both, quite obviously. For context, look at the shape of our teeth and the subsequent food types said shapes excel at masticating.

[removed]

[removed]

They haven't followed their own advice very well, because they still seem to be colliding and near missing ships pretty regularly.

Just had two in San Diego bay a short time ago.

I agree the watchstanding needs an overhaul or at least get it back to it was in eras our ships didn't burn down pierside or collide with freighters regularly.

I can cite my literature review for you, again these are anthropology studies, which is now under biological anthropology or evolutionary biology.

Important point here: a lot of the prevailing ideas about our evolutionary history is based on assumptions, because we don’t have any living specimens of our evolutionary ancestors. How would we ever actually test these ideas with the scientific method.? This research relies a lot of comparisons, correlations, and associations with modern populations as proxy groups understanding that the conclusions may not be 100% accurate. Just because the methods aren’t the epitomized gold standard of science doesn’t mean they are invalid, incorrect, or to be ignored.

Also, anthropology as a discipline started in the 1800: as a “science” to prove racial difference separated humans into distinct species as a way to encourage slavery and as you mentioned eugenics. While that history cannot be erased, papers and research evaluating racial differences in such a way are no longer in circulation and no longer cited or built upon, they have been rejected and dismissed after numerous studies disproved the premises. I did in another post discuss the concept that head size and or brain size is not an indicator of intelligence for this purpose, similarly to why I explained melanin as functional for sun exposure and Vitamin d production, taking them out of the context of eugenics and placing them in the context of physiological function where they belong.

Moving on. Wearing clothing and indoor living are behaviors of modern humans/ homo species, only within the last 300,000 approx. years human evolution as far as the evidence we have extends back 7 million years. Behaviors are studied by cultural anthropologists and archaeologists and are not in my scope of research. However, when we are talking about biological adaptations, that is adaptations and variations in anatomy and physiology, we have to consider a much larger timeline of human evolution. What did we start with and how has it changed.

On body shape-

It’s important to note that shape is not the same as size, it involves relationships in different directions (long AND narrow, short AND broad) your points about the tallest people are more of a size indicator because we don’t have any information about the body shape from just height, are the lean or stout? Anyway

Bergman’s rule and Allen’s rule are the two guiding rule for my statements. They are well documented.

Here are some sources:

Ruff, Christopher B. 1993. Climatic adaptation and hominid evolution: the thermoregulation imperative. Evolutionary Anthropology

*Chris Ruff writes a lot of body morphology and climatic adaptation.

Beals, KL; CL Smith, SM Dodd. 1984. Brain size, cranial morphology, climate, and time machines.

Daniel Lieberman- Story of the Human Body

DeMenocal, PB. 2011. Climate and Human evolution

…. To be continued I’m sleepy.

The spoken form has vowels. The written form has them in the form of dots and lines that go around the letters (which represent consonant sounds, not whole words), but they're usually omitted other than in kids books.

For example, the word for friend is "חָבֵר" (chaver), but you'd usually see it as "חבר". It's written right to left, so if you look at the first letter, the ח is the "ch" sound and the Tetris-piece-looking thing below it is the "a". These are called "dots".

In practice, you get used to it pretty easily as a reader. Instead of "chaver", it's "chvr", but reading it still becomes second nature.

Consider that English only has 5-6 written vowels (depending on if you count "y"), but 14-15 different vowel sounds in American English. So, how do you know if an "o" is the sound in "owl" or the one in "owe" or the one in "on"? You just learn it when you learn to read. Same thing with Hebrew vowels.

There are some letters that seem vowel-y (like א, which is roughly like an "ah" sound), for historical reasons. What they actually are are consonants whose pronunciation is either subtle or silent (depending on the letter, and one's accent/pronunciation) and which are almost always associated with a particular vowel sound.

Is there any proof either in the US or otherwise that shows “trickle down economics”, is effective?

With econ / poli-sci

How much influence does the American president actually have over gas prices? It always seemed weird to me that people blame potus.

I think someone before said to me it doesn't have vowels. Also, each letter represents a word? I was hoping there would be an answer that would elaborate on and/or confirm any of this.