I had Valor chocolate a few times when I was in Spain but was not blown away. I don't think I tried Huesitos. Kit-Kats are crap.

but chocolate mixed with nuts? Ew! — javi2541997

You've been living under a rock if you're shocked and surprised by the concept of chocolate mixed with nuts! It's the classic chocolate combination. Ever heard of M&Ms?

You should be able to get a Daim bar at IKEA by the way.

It occurs to me that rather than short-sightedness, Sicilians are much more famous for a culture of vendetta, which involves conflicts that last for decades, where revenge is planned and enacted in spans of many years. Whatever their lack of tenses, it doesn't seem to hinder their conception of past and future.

This stuff is so dumb, I'm back to being cantankerous again.

I suppose folk linguistics, as exhibited by @I like sushi, is actually pretty interesting as an anthropological phenomenon.

The question I have is this: is my cantankerousness about folk linguistics justified? Does folk linguistics in fact contain nuggets of wisdom and could it actually support scientific linguistics somehow? This would mean that it can't just be rejected as horseshit, which is my first instinct. Note that I'm not saying, e.g., that Germans really are literal-minded because the language is more literal than others.

Incidentally, I'm not convinced that German is more literal than other languages. Does anyone have examples?

I think that because it was reported in the field by a linguist. Sicilians do not use future tense and are widely regarded as being short-sighted/fun-loving. — I like sushi

Your original claim was that one determined the other:

If you lack use of tenses (like Sicilians) then you are less likely to plan ahead — I like sushi

Did your mysterious linguist present evidence for the link, or just the lack of tenses? Nobody has argued with the latter.

And whether or not Sicilians are “widely regarded” (by whom?) as short-sighted is irrelevant. Is this more than just the stereotype it appears to be? Maybe what some mainland or Northern Italians habitually say about Sicilians? At most it sounds like a cultural trait that has nothing to do with the language.

German clearly impacts Germans too. There language is particularly literal and every european I spoke to living in Berlin remarked about how literal Germans were as the most significant cultural difference. — I like sushi

People say this kind of thing all the time. It’s just folklore. Or as @Hanover puts it, horseshit.

The fluent speaker of a language is an expert user of that language, but not necessarily an expert otherwise. An average German can’t be trusted any more than an average Mongolian to assess the extent of linguistic determinism among Germans, so what Berliners happened to tell you is irrelevant.

EDIT: I misread your comment. You actually mentioned what Europeans said, rather than Berliners. Well, that’s equally irrelevant.

Well, you asked for it. In the second sentence of the OP you claimed without backing it up that a difference between languages implies that one is better than the other--without even explaining what this means. On the face of it it's a silly thought, and you don't go any deeper to explain it.

I doubt those are even legitimate questions, in terms of linguistics.

I have a very strong, and perhaps very eccentric, hatred of ignorant chatter about language, partly because everyone who can speak seems to think they have the right to throw around their opinions about it without doing the most basic research. As I say, unless I see some linguistics here (or even philosophy of language, communication theory, or social sciences) I'm moving this to the lounge. Well, I'll be tempted to do so anyway.

I hope someone with knowledge of linguistics (seems to be only @hypericin so far) contributes to this discussion, because so far it belongs in the Lounge.

I mean...

I think English is particularly unique in that it developed in certain directions due to Latin, Ancient Greek, French and influences from colonies too.

This range could be viewed as positive or negative thing. Which is it? I would say mostly positive at one point in history, but as time has passed it may have become a little unwieldy perhaps? — I like sushi

What does any of this mean?

WARIFY — universeness

Good one.

I sometime explain away my obnoxious behaviour by saying I’m just being scraptious. I think it’s a combination of scrappy and captious.

I also use “falafel” to mean faff/hassle.

Cool. Note that there's a reading group section here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/categories/16/reading-groups

I had to go on Google Maps when I saw Hobart mentioned here, since I knew nothing about it. It strikes me as a secret paradise, but that's partly a consequence of knowing almost nothing about Tasmania and thinking about it only once a year.

Weatherwise, not super warm in summer but warmer than Scotland (my benchmark), and not very cold in winter.

Born: London, England
Raised: The shires of Dumfries and Ayr, Scotland
Have lived in: Scotland, England, France, Spain, and now Russia but not for much longer!

Those are the facts. Identity is somewhat independent of them.

Strict typing ensures that these mistakes are picked up in development. — Michael

I've only recently started back with statically typed languages after a couple of decades of freedom, and it's been good. It does encourage good coding and it does allow you to fix stuff more easily.

It's a work in progress so not yet open source but parts of it are public anyway so check it out if you're interested: https://github.com/wtframework

I'm particularly proud of the SQL statement builder (https://github.com/wtframework/sql). My intention is to allow for the full spec. Just need to finish off some CREATE and ALTER stuff (mostly to do with partitions). — Michael

I just saw this bit. Great stuff, but the SQL stuff is a bit yikes to me.

Cool name.

I'm also in the process of building a PHP framework, inspired by Laravel but much smaller and faster. — Michael

Hey, everyone is building a framework these days. :grin:

my colleague is suggesting htmx for future projects so that's what I've been doing recently and what inspired me to make this. — Michael

I'm on board. I'd attempt to go down that route exclusively if I could choose all my tech myself (and use a compiled language on the server).

Funny to see how the frameworks come and go. Below is a chart plotting interest in frameworks over time.

When I started getting back into this stuff a month or so ago, I was intending on learning React and brushing up on Django, but I somehow got distracted into doing things with Crystal, Elm, Elixir, and other things more or less obscure. There are many choices now, and Python is so slow.

I see you're using Typescript. I've stayed away from it so far, but I'm appreciating the static typing in the server-side languages like Crystal, so I really see the benefit. Plus it's doubtful I'll be able to stay away from JavaScript frameworks as much as I want to, so I guess I'd better start using it.

By the way, amongst the front-end frameworks, I've found Svelte to be the most enjoyable to work with.

That explains it then! :grin:

Yeah I like the approach a lot.

Very cool. That use of attributes reminds me of HTMX.

Finally somebody's put some monster erotica in this thread.

Well, I was intrigued, so I found the cover:

a diffuse cold grey light with no character at all — Vera Mont

I tend to call that "Scottish weather" but I guess it's not unique to us.

Mind you, some parts of rural Ontario are none too shabby, either. There is a little observatory north of Wiarton, where some great summer skies are to be seen ... if you don't mind being eaten alive by mosquitoes.
We live on the east side of a highway, facing the sunset over fields - not bad - with thickly wooded low hills behind us. Not much for sunrises, but I saw a moonrise once (c1999) that almost had me calling out the fire department, it looked so much like the start of a forest fire. — Vera Mont

Both rural Ontario and the moonrise sound great. I think I might want to live in the country one day myself. If it was one of those massive orange moonrises that catches you unawares and takes your breath away, yeah, I love those. But I've seldom seen it precisely as it was rising above the horizon; usually there are things in the way.

Before, I was a little preoccupied with sunrise; this one takes place in the north-west of England - lots of hills and water, and no city lights. I wish I could go there to see what the light is actually like, but will have to settle for pictures. — Vera Mont

I can confirm. My best stargazing experience was in the Lake District, floating face-up in Derwent Water some time after midnight in the summer of 99.

Reminds me of the wanderings of my own youth, although they did not take place in Edmonton. Whether or not the experiences mean anything depends on how you fit them into some kind of story. I suppose you've begun to do that here.

Then Stanford (SEP) will give depth on anything that grabs you. — unenlightened

The SEP is excellent. Another good one, which is more approachable than the SEP, is the IEP: http://www.iep.utm.edu/

Otherwise, I enjoyed Russell's History of Western Philosophy, even though he is very much not to be trusted concerning Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

Apart from that, I find I learn the most when I'm especially intrested in a particular issue, a particular idea, or in a particular philosopher.

Welcome to the forum :smile:

Larches are my favourite tree and they're magnificent in October. Almost bare now. — Vera Mont

Van Gogh was especially attracted to cypresses and olives, presumably because of their visual drama. I've thought about how and when we form these attachments to a particular tree. In my mother's case, she grew up by a river fringed with willows and spent many happy hours in their shade, before WWII altered her life and her world. I saw my first larch at 14, when we bought a little property in rural Ontario. I was captivated by their gentleness compared to the pines and spruces they resemble, their silence and their changes of colour over the season. — Vera Mont

elms — javi2541997

cherry trees — javi2541997

I'm using all this as an excuse to write about trees I like...

My favourite kind of tree is the pine. It's partly to do with the beautiful coastal pine forests of the Mediterranean, which I experienced at about ten years old on holiday in Catalonia and never forgot. Later I found similar forests along the cote d'azur, in Turkey, and other spots around the Mediterranean. In my thirties I started hiking and discovered what's left of the Caledonian forests in the Highlands of my native Scotland, and then had some special moments sheltering under umbrella pines in Rome. More recently, I had a couple of big sprawling pine trees in my garden in Spain, which harboured a small ecosystem of beasts and birds.

I also like holm oaks, maybe because I only discovered them in 2016. I had not known that evergreen oak trees existed, then in January that year I went for a hike in the mountains behind Nice and walked for hours through forests of oak trees that, to my surprise, still had their leaves. Also very common in Spain, mostly non-existent in more Northern regions.

Beech trees I like because my childhood was spent roaming beech woods. Beech forests are particularly beautiful and I think of them as quintessentially Northern European--the perfect setting for Celtic myths and other such spookiness--but europeanbeechforests.org tells me they're also very common in Italy, the Balkans, and other parts of Southern and Eastern Europe.

Other top trees: horse-chestnut, birch, and cedar (both the Cedrus of Eurasia and the western cedars of British Columbia).

Both November and December provide us with very gorgeous sunsets in the afternoons of our cities, neighbourhoods, parks, etc. — javi2541997

I think I'm more of a sunrise man :grin: But I love that VvG painting, which I hadn't seen before.

A pervasive refusal to try to learn. — fdrake

My favourite definition too. But I see it more as a lack of curiosity about the ideas and opinions of others, rather than, as you seem to describe it, a refusal to use one's learning ability to become more successful, i.e., to "excise their errors and expand their strengths across many domains they are in fact able to." Although I guess it can amount to the same thing, mutatis mutandis.

:up:

But I stand by it. Not Sagan and Coogan but Sagan and Partridge.

To be fair, Sagan and Partridge are not so different.

I've got one too: what's the significance of putting Alan Partridge alongside Einstein?

A lame question, but I'm fairly new to the forum: How do I make those arrow+name graphics that mean "view original post"? — J

Reply using the reply button at the bottom of every post, as shown below.



It only appears when you hover over the post, i.e., when you put your mouse pointer in that area of the page.

On mobile you have to click the ellipsis to see the reply button. On mobile the ellipsis is at the bottom of every post.

For quoting, see this guide:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13892/forum-tips-and-tricks-how-to-quote

No worries. I have the book and have read it a couple of times. I like it, but I don't know if I'll be joining in this discussion. I'll be reading along though.

I'm not angry or anything, but I really hate being misquoted. Shown below is how it went: a quotation from Russell followed by my summary of his view with regard to the directness of perception:

The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. — Russell

If there are any directly perceived objects at all for Russell, they are sense data, not tables. — Jamal

Carry on :smile:

Well, I've been composing a reply but now I realize I don't want to get into this topic at the moment.

My parting shot is just to say that I think the following bit from the Russell quotation is indeed stating what you've implied it is not, namely that we are "not directly perceiving objects":

The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known.

If there are any directly perceived objects at all for Russell, they are sense data, not tables.

This talk of “not directly perceiving objects” makes me wonder, not for the first time, who Austin believed he was arguing against. — J

Stuff like this, perhaps:

We are all in the habit of judging as to the ‘real’ shapes of things, and we do this so unreflectingly that we come to think we actually see the real shapes. But, in fact, as we all have to learn if we try to draw, a given thing looks different in shape from every different point of view. If our table is ‘really’ rectangular, it will look, from almost all points of view, as if it had two acute angles and two obtuse angles. If opposite sides are parallel, they will look as if they converged to a point away from the spectator; if they are of equal length, they will look as if the nearer side were longer. All these things are not commonly noticed in looking at a table, because experience has taught us to construct the ‘real’ shape from the apparent shape, and the ‘real’ shape is what interests us as practical men. But the ‘real’ shape is not what we see; it is something inferred from what we see. And what we see is constantly changing in shape as we move about the room; so that here again the senses seem not to give us the truth about the table itself, but only about the appearance of the table.

Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. Hence, two very difficult questions at once arise; namely, (1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what sort of object can it be? — Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

Probably Ayer as well.

(I agree with you about Kant. I think of him as a direct realist.)

They [the "Germans"] worked to try to assimilate everybody into a single identity, but with limited success. One group they had absolutely no success with was Jews. Jews were an obstacle to their goals. In each case where Jews were persecuted, you have to sort through the events to discover why their separateness ended up making them victims this time around. — frank

You're fond of taking the high ground and lecturing people about what they have to do to know the stuff that you know, but your posts show very little evidence of having a clue about anything, to be frank.

You did say any thoughts on the state of web applications and websites are welcome. — baker

Yes, it's cool, I just wanted a bit more detail, that's all. No worries :up:

Perhaps a separate thread is in order. — baker

Could be interesting.

When you're attempting to contribute to a discussion it's better to go into more detail than "just read this book". If you're actually interested in this discussion, maybe you'll tell us about it when you've finished.

Thanks for alerting us all to its existence though.