One of my biggest problems with the movies is that they made Elrond (and all of the other elves) so angry and stodgy, and completely ignored all of the joyful aspects of his character from the books. The elves, especially the Noldor, are a people defined by the way their joy for life is inextricably mixed with sorrow as they fight the long defeat, which is part of what makes them so compelling.

Linguists are still divided on this topic, called the "Critical Period" hypothesis - the question of whether there is a "Critical Period" during childhood when children naturally acquire language better than adults.

The data in favor cited in pop articles often comes from "feral children" like Genie, but as Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world mentioned, how much of this inability is due to natural brain development and how much is due to years of unimaginable trauma is hard to know.

Other research has cited brain plasticity differences and brain matter changes that occur during puberty that seems like it may be linked to language acquisition.

Again, however, the counterpoint of "It takes ten-ish years of pure immersion for children to learn a language, and how many adults actually do that" is pretty frequent.

I'm still undecided about what I think - maybe something in the middle, like "humans do lose some neuroplasticity during puberty that may inhibit language acquisition a bit, but adults acquiring native-like fluency is still possible with enough immersion".

A girl I was thinking about dating made lembas by making some slight modifications to shortbread cookies.

As for how it turned out, I married her.

They need to hurry up and tow that windmill outside of the environment.

Too late. I've already switched all four of my home PCs to Linux Mint.

I switched my four home computers to Linux Mint this week. Windows is just more trouble than it's worth nowadays.

This is so accurate it hurts. This also goes for review comments on papers.

It's on purpose to force you to use their shitty app.

I happened to notice that it was $420.70 when I first glanced at it this afternoon and then spent the next 5 minutes watching the price fluctuate with my finger on the "Print Screen" button.

The worst part of this comic is that philosophy bro is clearly not even very good at his field, since there's a much better Cartesian parallel to be made here (and I'm not even a philosopher).

"I think, therefore I am" is actually leaving out (imo) the most important part of Descartes's argument. He was trying to find literally anything that he could know without a doubt was true. The problem is, that's really hard, as our existence-troubled shopper has discovered. Descartes could doubt the existence of God, he could doubt the existence of goodness, of truth. All of these things might not actually exist. Descartes could even doubt his own existence.

In fact, literally the only thing Descartes could conclude without a doubt was true was the fact that he was doubting at all. So, since that's the only thing he could be sure of, that's what he built his argument for rationalism upon.

This perfectly mirrors the existential crisis the so-called philosopher comes upon, but instead of starting the shopper right where Descartes started, he instead just provides what must seem like almost a non sequitur in context, since if the man is currently doubting his existence, he can also doubt that he's thinking. What he cannot doubt, is that he is in fact doubting.

"I doubt. Therefore, I think. I think, therefore I am."

So "'s" is what's called a "clitic". It's a tiny little piece of meaning that can't stand by itself and has to "lean" on a neighboring thing to be grammatical.

The interesting thing is that their distribution is syntactic, not morphological. So, instead of attaching to a word, like affixes do, "'s" instead attaches to entire noun phrases. This includes all adjectives, prepositional phrases, and even subordinate clauses, as long as they're part of the possessor noun phrase.

So, "the dude's car"? Perfectly fine, and it even looks like an affix here. "The dude over there's car"? Perfectly fine. "The dude I went to school with but who forgot that he ate a capybara yesterday's car"? Perfectly grammatical in English thanks to the power of clitics.

Bonus fun fact: "'s" used to actually be a suffix, but somehow became separated over time, and it's a big deal in diachronic syntactic theory, because things are only ever supposed to evolve toward being a suffix, but "'s" is one of the few things that seems like it evolved the other way, which throws a wrench into how we usually view the process (called "grammaticalization").

In short, Anon's sentence is a perfectly cromulent use of the English language.

That point didn't need to be made in the first place because Steve already specifically noted that it was auctioned for charity in his video.

To me, this is just evidence that Linus didn't even watch the video.