The annoying thing is that “I’ll go to work tomorrow” and “I’m going to go to work tomorrow” have subtly different meanings to English speakers, but good luck trying to come up with a rule to explain the difference to someone learning the language.

The spoken language has more vowel sounds than the alphabet has vowels, even when Danish has added three extra (æ, ø and å).

That’s one thing I think English at least did right. Other languages added extra letters and/or diacritics to try to capture all the variations on vowel sounds. But, in most languages there are far more vowel sounds than there are vowels. So, don’t make things unnecessarily complicated by adding extra letters. The one language that seems to do it basically right is Spanish, where there are only about 5 vowel sounds and they use the accent character not to show that a letter is pronounced differently, but just to cue you in on which syllable is accented when it might not be the one you expect. (With a few minor annoying variations, like el and él).

English’s future tense

There are various future tenses.

Future Simple / Simple Future: Will + [base form] – I’ll eat that later; or Going + [infinitive] – I’m going to eat that later.

Future Continuous: Will be + [present participle] – I’ll be eating that later.

Future Perfect: Will have + [past participle] – I’ll have eaten that later.

Future Perfect Continuous: Will have been + [present participle] – I’ll have been eating that later.

There’s also using the present continuous to talk about the future – I’m eating that tomorrow.

Also, the simple present – I eat that tomorrow.

English is flexible, but it’s also weird. There are a lot of distinctions that matter to native English speakers but that are really hard to put into rules. Like “will” vs. “going to”. They have slightly different meanings, but good luck coming up with an easy to understand rule about when to use each version.

What are some of the issues with Danish?

Do you know if that’s unique to Estonian, or also true of Finnish? AFAIK, Finnish (and Estonian) are a weird language branch in that most of Europe is Indo-European. Even distinct languages like Italian and German are more related to each-other than Finnish.

What does willpower have to do with it?

Phonetically, put: /pʊt/ vs. putt: /pʌt/

ʊ is the sound from words like “book”, “hook”, “pull” or "should.

ʌ is the sound from words like “gut”, “double”, “butter”, “luck”, etc.

I think English allows you more different ways of doing things than most other languages. The future tense being “going to X” and one of the past tenses being “used to X” means that new English learners don’t need to spend as much time studying yet another verb tense.

OTOH, the spelling and pronunciation is such a massive hurdle compared to a simple language like Spanish.

That’s part of it, but I think a bigger part is all the countries that colonized the British Isles. English has elements of Germanic languages like German, Dutch, Old Norse, etc. It has elements of Latin languages from Latin itself to French. The British Empire definitely resulted in words being brought back from the various colonies, but the English they spoke then was fairly similar to what we know today. It was already this weird, bastardized Germanic / French language.

All languages have quirks, but English is awful.

I only realized that the more I studied other languages, making me reflect on English.

Like, English doesn’t have a future tense. It seems like a pretty basic thing, but in English you say “I’m going to X”. Why do you use the verb ‘to go’ there? Why is that the way English creates a future tense? If you’re headed to the store now: I’m going to the store. If it’s happening later: I’m going to go to the store. WTF is this bullshit? “going to go”? Just stop and think for a second about “going” and “go” in that phrase.

And the verb “to do”, why is that part of questions in English? Statement: You have a dog. Question: Do you have a dog? What does “to do” have to do with any of that? Why is “doing” the verb that somehow is used to turn a statement into a question?

And then there’s “to use”. Using is to take, hold, deploy, consume… so why is it sometimes part of the past tense. Sure, you can say “I walked to school”, but if you want to talk about habits or routines: “I used to walk to school”. Why is “to use” even involved there at all?

That’s not even accounting for spelling and pronunciation which is just ridiculous in English.

We have a letter ‘k’ that reliably makes a certain sound, and a letter ‘s’ that reliably makes another sound. But, a huge variety of words use “c” which can make a ‘k’ sound like cat, or an ‘s’ sound like city. The letter ‘c’ has no sound of its own, it’s just a randomizer machine for one of the other useful sounds. The letter ‘g’ has one sound that no other letter makes, in words like “grip” and “great”. There’s another letter “j” that makes a different sound, like in “jet” and the name “Jim”. But, for some reason, sometimes the “g” makes a “j” sound, so “Jim” and “gym” have the same sound but completely different spellings, leading to bullshit like the confusion over how to pronounce “gif”.

English has roughly 20 vowel sounds, depending on the accent, but the vowel letters are ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’, and sometimes ‘y’. So, you’d think that at least those 5/6 are sorted and the other 20 come from combinations, right? Nope. In British English, for some reason “can” and “can’t” get a different vowel sound for the ‘a’, despite “can’t” being a contraction for “can not”, which literally contains “can”. The letter “u” can sound different between “put” and “putt”, even though you’re just tacking a ‘t’ to the end of that combination of letters. If you tack an ‘s’ on the end it doesn’t change, but if you tack an ‘e’ on the end… whoa, an entirely new sound different from both “put” and “putt”.

I’m glad the world is slowly converging on one language that allows everyone to communicate with everyone else, but it sucks that the language that came out on top is English.

I love that article. There are also ones about dates and times. The more you deal with dates and times, the more you realize how messed up they are.

It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.

As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.

Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.

My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.

The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.

The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.

That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.

Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.

There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.

They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.

I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.

It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.

*you’re

Take “Hi”, 2 letters, which means exactly the same as “How are you doing?”, 14 letters.

It’s similar, but not exactly the same by any stretch. But, yeah, it’s not a perfect method. But, there probably isn’t a perfect method. How would you decide what “1 unit of information” is?

It’s great that two organizations that more or less act in the public interest won an academy award.

20 days in Mariupol is the work of the Associated Press and PBS’s Frontline. This has to be one of the first times that a major documentary winner wasn’t attached to a for-profit studio.

I mean, it’s definitely true.

Engineering has its share of math, it can get fairly complex (in the case of electrical engineering, it’s literally complex), but being engineering it’s often based in practical things. But, pure physics has weird-ass math invented just to deal with the messed up calculations required by quantum mechanics.

If you hate weird-ass math, you’ll hate pure physics as lot more than any engineering discipline.

Engineering has the kind of math that can be plugged into spreadsheets and CFD simulations. It’s the kind of math that might be really complicated, but you can get answers out of it, and those answers can be compared to reality. Physics has the “symbol manipulation” kind of math where you don’t even deal with numbers, other than the occasional 2 or 3 when when something is squared or cubed.