If you don't provide lunches for the children then their parents need to pay for them anyway. Just tax more if you don't already have a budget, this isn't a case where there would be radically different spending patterns without government intervention.
Which maintenance tasks, why does it require us to be unconscious, why can't we apply constant energy towards them? Lots of interesting questions to answer
Like memory consolidation and physical restoration. My lay understanding is that we are unconscious because we turn our sensors off during deep sleep, and direct energy away from the prefrontal cortex, where reasoning and consciousness reside, to the limbic system, which processes memories and feelings, so that learning can take place.
Within UK dialect there would be some significant differences in many of these words, even ignoring the meddle/mettle examples - farrow/pharaoh is easily distinguishable, too.
I would say, though, that to people _outside_ the dialect, there may be many more words that are indistinguishable. Listening to Scots speakers requires a lot more effort for me because to my ears, many of the differences in the words are extremely subtle.
I agree it's heavily accent dependent and I suspect the original compiler wasn't that aware of non-mainstream US accents.
It's interesting that many of these are only the same (initially at least) if you've been sloppy/ignorant in your pronunciation and then those become baked in ways of saying something.
We're due to get a lot more of these given how often you hear influencers guessing at what to me seem fairly mainstream pronunciations!
These are often a way that TTS systems slip up most obviously. A lockdown project I tinkered with several years back was a small (traditional) LM that had been fed with tagged examples and could thus predict fairly well the best sense for a particular case. It made a huge difference to perceived quality. Now of course, many TTS cope with this fairly well but you still hear the off slip up!
"farrow"/"pharaoh" is more than easily distnguishable - to me, the first vowel in these are nowhere even close to the same - I use "a" from "apple" for "farrow" and "ai" from "air" for pharoah, along with a contrast in vowel lengths, again like "apple" and "air".
EDIT: interesting grammar note - as a native speaker, I can't even decide if that should be "first vowel in these is" or "first vowels in these are" or what I actually wrote above which is what seems more natural to me, although immediately stood out to me as grammatically inconsistent when I re-read it after posting...
> as a native speaker, I can't even decide if that should be "first vowel in these is" or "first vowels in these are" or what I actually wrote above which is what seems more natural to me, although immediately stood out to me as grammatically inconsistent when I re-read it after posting...
I would say that the former (“first vowel in these is”) is ‘more correct’, but it sounds weird because it contains the plural “these” immediately before the singular “is”. What you actually wrote is inconsistent strictly speaking, but it feels better because the verb agrees with the immediately preceding word. (This kind of thing is rather common in languages with agreement.)
I definitely pronounce "bold" and "bowled" differently, the former is one vowel and in the latter I'd say it's two vowels, gliding to a more closed and pursed mouth before the "ld" cluster.
I've never heard of "bolled" before, but just from looking at it, I'd imagine I'd pronounce it with a longer "l" alveolar compared before gliding to the "d". I think I have an old fashioned way of saying "polled" compared to how I hear others saying it.
I might be strange in my pronunciation though, I'd also distinguish between "call" and "caul" in the same way as "bald" and "bowled".
Yeah for sure, i think if i use homonyms close to each other i might even try to emphasize the difference. For /ˈparɪʃ/ and /ˈpɛrɪʃ/ its definitely an accent thing.
Maybe some of these aren't just a matter of accent, but the individual. I say "borough" like "bore-oh" but I feel like plenty of people in my area would say "burr-oh" and I wouldn't bat an eye.
Lots of countries don't wash their commercially grown eggs (and have a much lower % from factory farms), which greatly improves shelf life in shops etc.
Yes. It was quite a culture shock to see eggs stacked up in the middle of the aisle in Mexican grocery stores. I also find that, in general, Mexican store-bought eggs taste better and have a much darker-yellow yolk.
For example subtitles are terrible on most major streaming services, either don't exist, or are only available in one language. Sometimes they don't even have the original audio track, only a dubbed one! Piracy ensures that multi-language families can happily watch a movie together.
I don't disagree, but finding content in Italian through official or side channels is always hard. Which is sad, because it's one of the ways I make sure my kids get enough Italian exposure (we emigrated)
Folding is clearly a form of information transfer though (and proteins are deeply involved in folding other proteins, even outside of the prion case). As stated in the screenshot it is fine "information here means the sequence of amino acid residues..." but that's a much narrower definition than is commonly communicated.
Proteins also do change the amino acid sequences of other proteins - they cleave them! The results of the cleavage are then important for cell biology, and although it seems plausible that the the results could have traditional "protein" style functions, e.g. as an enzyme, I not sure this is ever actually the case. But the end result is still that the rule has to be understood very narrowly.
I take these points to be correct, but they seem tangential to what is (at least according to the article) the main issue at stake: can proteins modify the information passed on to descendants? If this were the case, there would be a mechanism whereby Lamarckian evolution could, at least in theory, occur.
In that regard, I feel this is particularly relevant:
"During an organism’s life, environmental conditions cause certain genes to get switched on or off. This often occurs through a process known as methylation, in which the cell adds a methyl group to a cytosine base in a DNA sequence. As a result, the cell no longer transcribes the gene.
"These effects occur most frequently in somatic cells — the cells that make up the body of the organism. If epigenetic marks occur in sex cells [however], they are wiped clean prior to egg and sperm formation. Then, once the sperm and eggs have fully formed, methylation patterns are re-established in each type of cell, meaning that the acquired genetic regulation is reset to baseline in the offspring."
Biology is messy and imperfect, and generally not suited to dogmatic and other normative claims - but that is also covered in the article, which mentions how Crick was on the lookout for exceptions.
I would guess that, in the ordinary cases of cell division, the replication of methylation is, on balance, desirable, and that it probably requires an additional mechanism beyond minimal DNA base-sequence replication. In that case, its near-absence specifically within gamete production seems likely to be significant.
The cases where methylation persists through generations should not be ignored, and neither should the existence of a mechanism that apparently exists to prevent (or at least constrain) it (or a mechanism to
"This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is pointless, what I just stated is still true."
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