Posts by Paul Slater 73 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2007
Markov chain redditbot? I wrote a Markov program in REXX back in the early 90's that would produce passing semblances of meeting minutes. I also adapted it to create English-sounding nonsense passwords based on letter probabilities. Basically, I invented predictive text before Nokia, Apple and Google. Lightweights the lot of them
"compounds are not ambiguous as they are in English..."
This is not entirely true. Adjectives have an order in English so that we we would expect (for instance) a big bouncing baby to be a child that is of a good healthy size rather than one that is able to bounce quite high.
http://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/
"I wonder of one person having more than one zero-hour contract is regarded as several people in 'employment'?"
Yes it is:
"Employment increased by 1.08m between January to March 2008 and June to August 2014, but only 26,000 were full-time employee roles." http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/12/one-40-jobs-created-recession-full-time-employee-tuc-employment
"much though they don't speak English in China, India, Poland or Russia "...
Almost a third of the Polish population speak English, 10% of the Indian population - around 125 million - and 7.5m and 10m from Russia and China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
One thing that is not always taken into consideration is the fact that a lot of Aspies (myself included) have a huge sound sensitivity issue. If too many people are talking at once either in a meeting or even just in the office, I feel an almost overwhelming urge to tell them all to stop shouting and to talk one at a time. It's not only very difficult to separate separate sound streams, it also makes it almost impossible to hold phone conversations. I've often left the room if I'm just sat at my desk and there is too much talking.
Recently a radio was introduced into the office and the battle over which station and what volume was quite possibly the most stressful episode I've ever had to deal with in a ~30 year IT career. It's settled down now, so if it stays on 6 music at volume 5 or below I can just about work, but its introduction has been instrumental in me moving on to another job for another company.
I really can't see any benefit from this at all for people who don't touch type. I've been looking at the keyboard as I type for over 25 years and I'm not about to learn touch-typing any time soon, so all these instant suggestions are lost on me until I've finished the search phrase. At best, they save me one key press (the enter key).
Why are "recycling centres" euphemistically named? My local one has separate collections for batteries, paper, cardboard, large electrical items (TVs etc.), small electrical items, white goods, garden waste, wood, yellow pages and catalogues, waste oil, lightbulbs, tins, glass bottles, plastic bottles... etc etc.
Sure, if it doesn't fit one of those categories then it goes into the great big skip, but recycling centre is hardly a euphemism.
Finnish is one of only two European languages that is not descended from the ancient Proto Indo-European tongue which ultimately produced Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, German, Celtic and English, amongst others. So it's hardly surprising that the numbers sound odd.
1 to 10 in Finnish: yksi kaksi kolme neljä viisi kuusi seitsemän kahdeksan yhdeksän kymmenen
