Apple Intelligence beta lands in iOS 18.1, macOS 15.1 previews Apple Intelligence, Cupertino's promised suite of generative AI services, has debuted in beta versions of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. iOS 18.1 is available to download for users with a developer account, as is iPadOS 18.1. The iOS release will only run on the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, and the iPadOS …
I don't know why everyone suddenly decided to break that rule for "emoji" but it's wrong.
I suspect the rule is broken because emoji has now become fully assimilated into the Borg Collective that is the english language.
To quote Dr Johnson:
English is no better than a cribhouse whore. Inviting other languages into dark alleys, hitting them over the head and rifling their pockets for new vocabulary.
Being a normal word, it gets the normal rules. Nobody says stadia or referenda anymore when pluralising, its now stadiums and referendums. Although I'm not sure if either plural would be correct - and I'm too lazy to check. Of course english remains as inconsistent as ever, so we still don't say sheeps.
Whereas I suspect kanji and sushi are still seen as foreign words. Thinking about it, I never even considered if sushi was plural - although I probably would have said a piece of sushi if wanting to use the singular.
Another similar foods example would be "the panini". That's a plural form in italian, so I presume it's supposed to be one panino, two panini. But most people would say a panini or two paninis.
Our American cousins also seem to say one Lego or multiple Legos.
We don't have an Academie Anglais - so we're doomed to contine down this path until all nouns have been verbed and pluralisation has no rules.
English is no worse than any other language in its use of loan words.
Stadium is fourth declension so I think, because I looked it up once, the plural in Latin is actually just stadium. I often use referenda and even formulae myself out of habit, but I baulk at the pseudo-scientific use of the plural for data, as if they ever use a singular form!
Zucchini, the Italian and used in the US for the French word courgette used in Britain, is even more common. And it's been noted that the espresso never used to exist in Italy because caffè is always an espresso. It is now because so many people ask for them.
Sheep, like cattle is the collective, which is why it doesn't have a plural. Then there are chicken: another conflation of the collective with the individual, but this time with young males, IIRC…
All this to show that languages can be extremely irregular even illogical and still work fine.
Emoji was only adopted because it looks like it might be related to emotion. Plurals in English almost always use an "s", so "emojis" is correct in English, just like Londres is correct in French. And I'm sure Japanese is full of English loan words that it's adapted as necessary.
With all this extra data needed to support the new feature?
The reason I ask is because I have had several people I know have develop cancer right where they kept their phones.
An example is a friend underwent surgery to cut out the cancer in his breast, just where he kept the phone in his pocket, he does not do that any more and it has not come back.
If you know someone that recently was diagnosed with cancer, ask them where they kept their phone.
Maybe I am full of it and don’t know anything, but I don’t see where the constant increasing of transmissions from our phones for data traffic can be good for us.
Just for peace of mind, mine comes out of my pocket and is placed at least a few inches away from me when I sit. Less close exposure to radiation the better.
And no, they were not all Apple phones.
Correlation does not equal causation.
The radiation given off by mobile phones is non-ionising which means it should not cause damage to DNA.
Breast cancer in men is not unheard of or even particuarly rare.
So it's less likely that a phone caused your friends illnesses than it was a cooincidence.
However, phones do emit radiation of a sort and if nothing else are filled with a fair few chemical concoctions which are unlilely to be good for you so moving your phone around and not having too close to your skin for long periods are reasonable things to do.
Dimmer,
As Olaf says, breast cancer is actually pretty common in men - although not as common as in women.
Also phones don't put out ionising radiation. Radio waves transfer small amounts of heat into tissue - though we don't know a mechanism for that causing cancer. Various studies into whether mobiles caused brain tumours looked at the numbers of diagnosed brain tumours before and after the introduction of mobiles and found no rise. Which isn't proof of course, but is a very good suggestion that they're harmless. We've been using the things heavily since the mid-90s - there should be noticeable effects by now.
Also many people carry phones in their trouser pockets. So an increase in skin cancers of the thigh and backside ought to be detectable by now, if there was a risk.
Also there ought to be detectable levels of increasing differences of cancer rates in men and nwomen, since most women keep theirs in handbags - and most men in pockets.
There's little evidence for, and much evidence against. I'm not saying there isn't a minor risk, because that would be very hard to detect. Huge rises in life expectancy have cause huge rises in the number of people living long enough to get cancer.
Dimmer,
This is the same approach that was taken to look at MMR vaccine safety.
The "scientist" who started the panic, Andrew Wakefield, was struck off as a doctor in the UK - but that didn't kill the panic. But how do you prove something isn't dangerous?
Also despite his various frauds he might also have been right. He was part of an academic team who supported the conclusions of the paper, that the MMR vaccine could lead to an increased risk of autism. It's just that the hearing when he was struck off proved that he'd faked some of his results. So they disavowed him and retracted the paper. I don't know if he was just a fraudster, or genuinely believed it. But he was a manipulative bastard who did medical experiments on children (without their parents' consent) at vaccination parties. The problem is that autism symptoms start to show in babies at about the time they get these vaccinations - so it's an obvious link to make.
So wakefield manipulated the parents of kids with autism diagnoses (who probably felt guilty about getting their kids vaccinated now - because he told them it was the cause) into holding vaccination parties for their friends. Where Wakefield would charge them for his own separate vaccines, from before MMR was rolled into a single dose vaccine for the three diseases). So he had a financial interest in his research being right. And he used the parties to do tests on the kids there - to get data for his paper that his co-writers knew nothing about.
Mum taught at a school for kids with multiple disabilities at the time, so knew some of the parents in question.
So there was a big Swedish meta-study done. It looked at all the countries that had gone from single vaccines to MMR at different times over a decade. It looked at the rising diagnoses of autism - it was either increasing in prevalence or just being diagnosed more (or even possibly a bit of both). But no country had a spike in diagnoses after starting to use MMR. All had similar increases over the period - whether they had or not.
Hence MMR is still the standard vaccine.
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