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Questions for native speakers of Spanish, French, German, Russian, Japanese, etc.
This is primarily a question for speakers of languages with grammatical distinctions between formal and informal speech, such as the pronoun-pairs tú/usted, tu/vous, ты/Вы, du/Sie or the dizzying system of Japanese honorifics.
Which forms do you use when addressing an animal? I don't mean a mythical talking animal like Osiris or Mickey Mouse, but a ( Read more... ) -
New math problem
Let C(n) be the number of ways to write n as the sum of consecutive non-negative integers. The terms from C(0) to C(10) are 1, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 3, 3. Find an ordinary generating function for C(n) in closed form, in terms of elementary functions if possible. Prove that the series 1/C(n) diverges. When about the series 1/(n C(n)). What is the ( Read more... ) -
Physics question
The strength of a gravitational or electromagnetic field is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to the source of the field. Do the weak and strong forces behave the same way?
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Useful tip if your "check engine" light is on
Don't go to a garage, which will charge you $80-150 to diagnose it. Instead, go to Autozone, which will read the on-board computer's diagnostic code. Then, go to a repair shop if it's something that actually matters. This will save you money if it's something dumb like needing to tighten the fuel cap.
ETA: It looks like AAMCO thought of my idea for ( Read more... ) -
problem of the day
Molly Mathematician has two closed rectangular boxes, Box A and Box B, which she notices have the same volume and the same surface area. Box A's longest edge is longer than Box B's longest edge. Which box's shortest edge is longer? The four plausible answers I can think of are:
- Box A's shortest edge is longer than Box B's.
- Box B's shortest edge is ( Read more... )
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Pascal's triangle fact
Interesting thing I just noticed while looking at Pascal's triangle: The number of twos in the prime factorization of comb(2n,n) (that is, the nth number in the central column of the triangle) is equal to the number of ones in the binary representation of n.
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(Untitled)
This is the coolest thing I've seen today. It performs the function of a diamond interchange, but with no left- or right-turns required to enter or exit the highway, and shorter time to cross the highway on the cross-road (since the traffic lights are green in unison). And there's an animation that omits the divided north-south highway under the ( Read more... ) -
Subtitles
Last night I watched The City of Lost Children (La cité des enfants perdus). As usual when I watch French movies, I watched it without dubbing and with French subtitles. (I do this because I don't understand spoken French well enough to watch without subtitles, particularly when characters' mouths are off-screen, but I still prefer to enjoy a movie ( Read more... ) -
a garden path in the wild
1. The horse raced past the barn fell.
2. The man who hunts ducks out on weekends.
3. Fat people eat accumulates.
4. The tycoon sold the offshore oil tracts for a lot money wanted to kill JR.
These are called garden path sentences---sentences that lead the reader or listener "up the garden path" to an incorrect syntactic analysis. For example, the ( Read more... )