christopher.andrew.carr

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• Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
  I'm guessing you've read the Bas-Lag novels; you should bloody-well read The Book of the New Sun....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Glasshouse
  "And so I ended up with a novel narrated in the first person present tense by the ultimate unreliable narrator..." I always get the impression that you've never read a bit of Gene Wolfe. Can that really be the case?...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Iron Sunrise
  "'Accelerando' is going the same way..." I suspect Accelerando may have a bit more staying power than you think. It's just damn entertaining....
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  I think there's a difference between real news breaking, and prattling "expert" blowhards filling air. Predictably, everything having to do with the US on this blog gets comments like: "US is stupid; fuck them all!; Americans are idiots!" It gets...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  "Can anybody put in words, just how far out of their minds Americans are to do what they are just doing in Boston?" Does seem really crazy to lock a city of that size down. With the benefit of hindsight,...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  No names yet. The individuals involved in the murder of the MIT campus officer, a carjacking, and the firefight and bombings in Watertown, are by all accounts now the same individuals who were wanted in the Boston Marathon bombings. As...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  At this point, it's confirmed that these are definitely the Marathon suspects. One of them is dead, the other is at large....
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  FWIW, in case anyone is perusing this thread presently and not following news outlets: A police officer was shot dead on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. Some time after that, possibly after a chase, at least two individuals engaged...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  "Honourable runner-up: an FBI entrapment operation gone horribly wrong, because if you go looking for idiots who can be incited to terrorism and incite them, sooner or later one of them will get over-enthusiastic and won't wait for you to...
• Commented on No. Words.
  I've only become familiar relatively recently. But starting about 6 months ago, upon reading the first hundred pages or so of Consider Phlebas, I was compelled to read all the Culture stuff in order. While not the greatest novel in...
• Commented on How I feel this morning
  If one's RSS reader front end of choice is inclined to take advantage of Feedly's Normandy, then no problemo....
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  "...coupled to a complete lack of empathy and interest in the needs of others..." I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're not saying the the US comprises 300+ million sociopaths. Comments here get a little...
• Commented on I suck at New Year Resolutions
  Having read that, I now feel like a lazy bum. Thanks, man. ;-) Enjoy your rest....
• Commented on STROSS IN COMPUTER-FREE VACATION SHOCKER
  Howdy Ms. Leicht. Look forward to your posts....
• Commented on 2512
  "I though Google had largely abandoned the basic language structure approach and used word phrases based on statistical matching?" I believe that's largely correct. It's my understanding that fancier machine translation approaches don't scale so well in terms of speed....
• Commented on 2512
  Certainly it's very politicized. And the Japanese probably go even further than the Koreans in thinking themselves a special snowflake, linguistically and otherwise. It's been said that languages are dialects with an army. Points taken, but they don't change the...
• Commented on 2512
  Regarding "race," I've no doubt that that constructed saliency will be obliterated eventually. The deep monkey ingroup-outgroup stuff that gives rise to it will be more difficult to destroy. Good culture goes a long damn ways......
• Commented on 2512
  But the folk linguistics here is just adorable. ;-)...
• Commented on 2512
  "But languages are getting relatively static, for all the extinction events. Gutenberg and Webster caused huge normalizations in spelling (hmm, you'd use an "s" in normalization, though -- gotta fix that one). Significant changes in formal grammar get harder and...
• Commented on 2512
  "Yeah, I used to buy into the "Korean is so unique" thing too, and I'm trying to learn Korean, which is a freaking hard language, incidentally, especially for someone as linguistically handicapped as myself (I'm an American white dude who...
• Commented on 2512
  "...but each language is unique, as shown by translation into three fairly closely related languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) that are far from English." Japanese is not closely related -- genetically speaking, though there's lots of lexical borrowing -- to...