It is impressive, but you can buy items (with the in-app currency you get from finishing lections) that allow you to skip single days (or even whole weekends, IIRC).
That's correct - though you still need to log in to buy a Streak Freeze after it's used up, so you can't skip more than 48 hours. You can't "buy" multiple Streak Freezes in advance.
The Weekend Amulet is only offered after completing the lesson on Friday, as far as I can tell - you can't just buy them in the store, and they expire after the weekend is over whether you used it or not.
I got a bit over a 500 streak but stopped after that.
I felt that spaced-repetition on the words was more effective than whatever DuoLingo was doing, and DuoLingo's lesson for the language I was learning was not well maintained.
The gamification techniques DuoLingo's used made it much easier to maintain the streak. Albeit, it was really easy to just do DuoLingo "to get it done" rather than focusing on it as part of study.
Consider a man being helped along the street by his friends. He's stumbling, often falling over, unable to keep going in a straight line. A police officer walks up and asks them what's wrong.
Scenario 1: his friends say "He's drunk off his ass."
Scenario 2: his friends say "He has imbibed intoxicating beverages to excess."
To many native English speakers, if you presented those two as skits, they'd find the second one much funnier. And the reason would be the use of "high-class" vocabulary in a decidedly low-class situation (a drunk stumbling along the street).
Now consider the English word hydrogen. And then consider the German word Wasserstoff. Native English speakers sometimes find the German word funny -- it sounds just like "water stuff"! But they don't reflect on the fact that "hydrogen" means essentially the same thing when you look at the Greek roots.
This happens because words with Germanic roots are often "low-class" in modern English, while words with obvious Greek and Latin roots are high-class. And that... is because modern English developed after the (Romance-language-speaking) Normans took over England from the (Germanic-language-speaking) Anglo-Saxons. The vocabulary of the Normans, since they were the ruling class, is prestigious in modern English, while the vocabulary of their Anglo-Saxon subjects isn't.
Your etymology to Eichhörnchen is a folk etymology. It's a diminuitive of the Old High German "eihhorno", which in turn derives from Proto-Germanic " * aikwernô". The root of "Hörnchen" is thus _not_ "Horn", but Proto-Indo-European " * wer-", which just means "squirrel." Its other meaning is "to heed, to notice." I guess people thought squirrels to be excessively observant creatures. Latin "viverra" (ferret) is also related, and Czech "veverka" (squirrel.)
Also, "Eich" has nothing to do with "Oak." Instead, it derives from PIE " * aig-" which means "to move quickly."
EDIT: HN's pseudo-markdown formatting is a plague unto mankind. The hoops I had to jump through to prefix an asterisk to a word…
It's rather obvious that the archaic meaning has been largely lost and therefore that folk etymology informed the morpheme's convergence to "oak". The GP is still silly though, because e.g. the "fly thing" is an inappropriate loan translation - "flight gear" would be more appropriate (cp. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zeug), whereas a "plane (sheet) of air" isn't any more meaningful.
Absolutely. Folk etymology is actually a productive process; in the literature, you'll also read "reanalysis", as in, a word's components which are not understood are reanalysed as something familiar. Compare English "sparrowgrass" — asparagus, or bridegroom, where groom is originally "gome", meaning "man" in Old English, and not "groom" in the modern (i.e. Early-Modern-English) sense.
The translation of Zeug, and especially -zeug is contentious. Stuff, gear, tool, utility, means. There are many ways in which it is used in German: Flugzeug, something that flies (or that you use to fly with); but Schwimmzeug is not a boat. Instead it means the "stuff" you need to go swimming, like goggles and a swimsuit. Schlagzeug (Schlag: beat) is neither something you use to hit somebody with, nor all the things you need in order to go a-hitting. It's a drum kit.
I suppose you got your eichhornen from us Dutchies. The story goes that a Dutch trader went to the UK, saw a squirrel, and wondered what it was. He pointed at the squirrel, asking a local "what's that?", the local thought he was pointing at the acorn the squirrel was holding and replied "that's an acorn". And that's when the "eekhoorn" was born.
Despite your sibling comment being more convincing, I rather prefer this explanation :).
I've heard a similar tale about 'wisdom tooth'. The story goes that it's a translation of the Dutch 'verstandskies'. 'Kies' means tooth (molar?), and 'verstand' can mean 'far-standing', so referring to the position of the tooth.
However, because 'verstand' more commonly means 'mind', it was mistranslated.
Now, Germans also use the 'wisdom' version, and Belgians use 'wijsheidstand', where 'wijsheid' is another of wisdom, so probably this story is incorrect. Many of us Dutchies still choose to believe it, however, and so we just have to conclude that both the Germans and Belgians are just kind of silly for making the same mistake.
It's from Greek σωφρονιστήρ /sophonister/ through Latin (dens sapientiae). It's been "Wisdom tooth" all along. The story goes that these teeth appear approximately at the age where one becomes "wise."
Ha. Few of the people whose wisdom teeth came and went (painfully) are wise already. Increased life spans and all that…
Then again, sophos does not just mean wise in Greek, but also just clever, cunning, or prudent. ;-)
As someone who is only half a linguist, but who work closely with established researchers, this odd variant of "language exotism" is far too common, even in 2017. For others, it's far too English-centric (dismissals from well-established researchers such as "but it's simple to express this information-dense, single word in language X just by saying (insert long, not very representative English translation of language X word here)... etc)
> As far as I can tell, the network is trained on a specific geometry and must be re-trained if the geometry changes.
The model is trained on a "training set" of various 3D models, and tested on a "test set" of different 3D models. The network can generalize to other 3D models and does not need retraining (see e.g. last part of abstract).
I think what they mean is that they would need to retrain the model if the boundary conditions at the outer boundary of the "studio" (the simulation domain) changed.
It's the most obscure member of the Netpbm family. Almost no image viewer understands it, and no image editor can read or write it. Luckily there's the incredible CImg (http://www.cimg.eu/) lib.
PFM is stored in left to right, bottom to top order pixel. It has exactly one or three channels. One pixel is four bytes. There's an obscure "scale/endianness" parameter to tell you the byte order.
Why are you using it for the project?
Is it for interoperability with some other component? If so, what sort of thing is using such a format, I'm intrigued.
I needed a quick way to hack the output of 2D float data (pixel annotations to complement some image) into some legacy C without adding dependencies.
Thanks to CImg, I can read and display the PFM files in 10 lines of my own C++. I thought about just writing a width/height-annotated binary blob instead, but then realized that's really what PFM already is.
I have no idea if anything is really using PFM. I certainly have not found any "big" compatible programs.
"It was a tool for me," Metcalf said. "Like Mom's hot skillet; don't stick your hand on it. Like Dad's power saw; don't stick your finger in it. A gun; don't stand in front of it."
I honestly do not understand how these things are comparable. A skillet is a tool for making food. It does not hurt or kill unless used incorrectly. A power saw is a tool for shaping useful objects. It does not hurt or kill unless used incorrectly.
A gun is a tool for killing. Unless it is used incorrectly, it always destroys or hurts or kills.
Would you argue the same way about being allowed to carry mustard gas? Or smallpox? That the freedom to do so is worth more than the immense hurt it is guaranteed to bring on the world?
The U.S.' obsession with firearms is utterly beyond me (I am from Germany). Just my 2 cents.
The way I see it, there are two reasons a person might want a handgun. Before I begin, I'll mention that I'm in favor of heavy regulation but fall short of an actual ban in many cases.
Reason 1: "I like guns. They're fun."
And that's basically the entire argument. They have a hobby, and they don't want to see that taken away from them. Sometimes it makes sense to take things away from people and sometimes it doesn't. Obviously, gun enthusiasts argue that it doesn't make sense.
Reason 2: "But the bad guys already have guns."
This is actually where I am. I'd love to see new regulation and harsh penalties for violations, but it must start with criminals. Gun bans do effectively remove guns from a population and criminals would also be affected (see Australia, among other places), but I believe there would be an ugly transition period in America when the good citizens have all dutifully turned in their guns and the criminals hold on to their already illegally owned guns. I'd prefer a system that takes guns from criminals and heavily regulates (but allows) qualified citizens to own them.
And to address your other points, especially where it concerns rifles: I grew up with people who can only afford meat in their diet if they hunted it themselves. Not only is it fun, but it IS a tool. A hunting rifle costs only a few hundred dollars, but it can not only enhance social time with friends who hunt but it can also put food on the table. It's considerably less dangerous and more useful than smallpox or mustard gas, and it's not guaranteed to bring damage to people or their property.
"A gun is a tool for killing. Unless it is used incorrectly, it always destroys or hurts or kills."
Sorry, that's wrong to the point of absurdity. None of the guns I've owned have ever killed or hurt anyone, and I'm pretty sure I've always used them correctly.
"The U.S.' obsession with firearms is utterly beyond me"
The European obsession with government control is utterly beyond me. Governments with too much power have killed far more people than privately owned firearms ever have.
As much as you might be technically correct, there's no reason to antagonize the other guy, especially if the goal is to have him adopt your point of view. While he might have overstepped in his argument, phorese has a point in that guns are designed to deliver (usually destructive) kinetic energy at a distance.
Why might European governments be more restrictive? Are there any non-restrictive ones? Have there ever been? Where are they now? Might America be a different case, allowed to flourish under another set of rules?
I'm not saying you're wrong. You're not. Maybe I'm just encouraging civil discussion. Maybe I'm bored at work. Maybe both.
Sure thing. Him going off about "obsessions" and suggesting (none too subtly) that Europeans are somehow morally superior to Americans was totally non-antagonistic. Totally.
Did I ever tell you that Programmer McCave
Had twenty-three variables and named them all `a`
Well, the programmer did. And that wasn't a smart thing to do.
You see, when the programmer wants to add `a` to 2
The programmer doesn't get a number oh no no no
All twenty-three `a`s cause a buffer overflow
This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves'
As you can imagine, with so many `a`s.
And often the programmer wishes that, while coding,
The programmer hadn't ignored that sense of foreboding
And called one of them runCount, And one of them lastNum
And one of them allSales and another roundSum
And one of them lastId, and another userNames
And one subnetMask, or numStartedGames
Any old names would actually do
even if they were just `bar` or `foo`
And adding hyphens or humble underscores
The programmer could have come up with so many more!
Like read_app_config_from_this_file_name
But no, the programmer went and called them all the same
If only the programmer hadn't given into the hype
And used a language strongly typed
The programmer would have avoided this horrible fate
But didn't and so now it's too late.
