On the contrary; the lack of (legally enforceable) rules is one of the major reasons that English has become the world's main language for most technical uses.

Some years back, I read a good explanation of this by a French researcher, who explained why he published all his papers in English rather than French, and why his group in France used English as their "working" language. His explanation was that, in French, l'Académie Française is the government body in Paris that has the power to set and enforce the standards for the French language. The problem is that in his specialty, as in any technical specialty, it's important that the specialty develop a body of precise technical terms that is clearly understood by the others in the specialty. The major way of doing this is normally to take terms in the general language, and restrict their meaning in the technical jargon. Secondarily, words may be borrowed from other language, or new terms just made up. However, in French the Académie has the legal power to override them, declare their papers to be nonstandard French, block their publication, etc. This potentially makes it difficult for the specialists to develop a precise, unambiguous terminology that they all understand. Government bureaucrats who don't understand the specialty have veto power of their technical terminology.

The English language, however, has no such legal body in any country. This gives English-using researchers, theoreticians, engineers, etc. to discuss issues amongst themselves, and develop their technical jargon as their subject requires. New discoveries can lead to changes in terminology without the permission of the bureaucrats. So, for effective communication among specialists in a technical field, English gives them the freedom to develop jargon that fits their needs, and revise their terminology as the need arises.

If English (most likely of the American variety ;-) were to establish an enforceable set of rules, it would end this technical usefulness, and would eventually push for a shift to a different language without such restrictions.

The followups to this explanation included a number of comments from people with lots of other native language, who all basically agreed with the writer, and said that their field did the same thing.

(OTOH, I had a math prof in college who learned Rumanian, because about half the people in his specialty were in Romania, and published their preliminary papers locally in their native language. They published their main papers in English, but he wanted to follow their local discussions. He already read French and Italian, so it wasn't difficult to pick up a new "degenerate Latin" language. There are a number of other subject areas that have similar situations. Others here can probably comment on other fields with a similar mix of English and one or more local languages.)

The bad news is that, even if the court allows the case to proceed, and they win, the NSA will simply ignore the court's decision and continue their work. They're above (or beside or in a parallel universe to) the legal system.

The only real way to fight them is to find ways to expose their activities to the rest of the world. There are some technical problems with doing this effectively, such as jailing or assassination of outside investigators.

(Is there a documented, verifiable case of any "secret" government organization being limited by the courts, in the US or any other country? Yes, I've read claims that it has happened. But note that term "verifiable". Someone writing an article claiming that it has happened isn't exactly verification. ;-)

Actually, there's at least one known population of humans that expect to benefit from rising sea level: the people of Scandinavia. That part of the world is still bobbing up from the loss of the ice sheets 18,000 years ago. Historically, the shorelines have been falling by about a meter per century. This causes ongoing problems, mostly due to ports turning into dry land. A few years back, I was in Finland and visited a historic site called Mustasaari ("black island"). It's not an island at all; it's about 10 km from the water. In 1600, it was an active port, and around 1350 it probably was an island. By 1700, the town was abandoned, reverting to forest and farmland, and the newer town of Vaasa somewhat to the west had taken over as the local port. Sometimes the ports can migrate downslope, but often the shoreline change doesn't allow that, and the town just dies, as the people move to some other area that's friendlier to their boats. Every port town in the area has always had to face the fact that all their investments in port facitlities, buildings, roads, etc. will become worthless in a few generations.

So one source of humor in that area is based on how good "global warming" sounds. They'll not just be warmer, but their towns will stay put for longer, and you can pass your land and buildings on to your children. So far, the effect has been small, but supposedly measurable. The sea level will probably be nearly stable this century, though geologists predict that in another millenium or two, the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic Sea will be reduced to a set of smaller lake connected to the sea by a river.

Along most other shorelines, the story is rather different, of course.

(I've also read reports on the new species arriving on the Antarctic Peninsula. ;-)

"Wait! You're both right!" ;-)

Part of the problem is that "race" is used in both colloquial English and in technical speech with rather different definitions. It is used technically as an informal synonym of "subspecies", and is similar in meaning to "breeding population"; the rough meaning is a group that has small but significant (for recognition, habitat choice, etc.) genetic differences from other populations.

In general, colloquial English, it generally just means any recognizable group, often but not always with superficial but visible differences in appearance. But sometimes it's even less meaningful that that. In the US, one of the commonly-recognized "races" is "Hispanic", which of course is based on language and culture, and can refer to a person of any subspecies who speaks with a Spanish-sounding accent. This is a good illustration of how meaningless the term is in its general usage.

There has been a general effort by biologists to avoid the use of the term, and it's not really officially part of standard terminology. But "subspecies" isn't understood by the general population, and "race" is one syllable rather than three, so the informal usage continues, especially when talking to the general public.

In the case of medical discussions of problems with a genetic component, it's common to use "population" instead, but that has four syllables. ;-) It's mostly useful if the population can be given a name. Thus, Tay-Sachs disease seems to be from a mutation that appeared first in a small eastern-European Jewish population, which of course isn't a "race", but is a recognizable and namable sub-sub-population. Knowing this is medically useful in diagnosis, since it gives a good hint at which tests might be useful when the appropriate symptoms are seen.

Sickle-cell disease is an interesting case, because its population is semi-genetic: It developed in malaria-plagued areas of central Africa, and partly defends against that disease. The population isn't actually a subspecies, since it includes people who are genetically quite different from each other. But the mutation(s) involved spread from group to group because it gives some immunity to malaria (at the cost of many early deaths from sickle-cell disease). Again, knowing about patients' central-African ancestry is medically useful in diagnosis, since it hints at what tests to try first when the symptoms are seen. In the US, the term "African-American" is a racial classification that correlates well with this disease, so it's medically useful despite being biologically somewhat bogus.

The poison-ivy/oak/sumac/etc. problem is actually a lot more complicated, and much of the information about it is of poor scientific/medical quality. Interested readers might try googling for info about the Asian lacquer tree to find some of the most useful information. There is a wide variety of sensitivity to this toxin, and different human populations differ statistically in their reaction to it. There are sensitive and resistant people in all populations, and there are populations that are mostly at one or the other end of the spectrum. It's often medically classified as a "white" problem, but this is an extreme over-simplification. East Asians are often very resistant to it, but they generally know to give lacquered things a number of good washings before using them in ways that involve close physical contact, such as in tableware. Asian artists who work with this lacquer understand its toxicity fairly well, and know how to deal with it. But it's not a simple story, and there's a lot of mythology involved.

That might depend partly on your job. In medical circles, it's fairly well understood that some medical conditions affect certain groups of people more than others. If a doctor were to ignore, say, symptoms of sickle-cell disease in black people on the ground that it's "racist", that could easily be grounds for a malpractice charge, since most of its victims have central-African ancestors. Haemophilia primarily affects people with European royalty in their ancestry. Tay-Sachs disease mostly affects people with a Jewish backtround. And so on. If a medical corporation were to prevent their employees from discussing diseases that have a genetic component, we should hope that the employees publicise the problem and get it overturned.

Of course, a lot of medical organizations do have a religious component, and it wouldn't be too surprising to find that management wants such things classified as "God's will". But if fact that would be terrible medical practice, and should be brought out in the open if it's happening.

In the opposite direction, when young I was one of the few kids in my environment who seemed to be immune to poison ivy, a common problem weed in North America. Eventually I learned the reason: Sensitivity to its toxin is primarily a "white person" problem, because Europe is the only part of the world with no native plants that contain the toxin. Although I look totally European, I'm partly Ojibwa, and I apparently inherited the resistance from my father's father's mother. I'm not complaining, of course, but I would be a little bothered if this "racial" sensitivity were a forbidden topic of discussion in medical circles. I've had friends with very serious reactions to the toxin, and suppressing information about the racial nature of the sensitivity wouldn't have any public health benefits. (And knowing that some people are permanently immune to it is helpful if you'd like to eradicate the plant in an area frequented by white people. ;-)

There are similar problems with decorative plants like poison sumac and Brazilian pepper, which contain the same toxin, and are widely grown as decorative shrubs or trees in South America and Japan, where most people are immune to the toxin. Again, mentioning the racial differences in sensitivity can aid in diagnosing and preventing problems; it can also be useful information if you're looking for people to remove the plants from an area. Florida has a serious problem with an infestation of Brazilian pepper, and (white) people trying to remove - or worse, burn - the plants have had major medical problems as a result. Floridians would be especially dumb to prevent discussion of the genetic component to this sensitivity.

No it wasn't; it's Sunday now.

Well, I can appreciate the reasons for this argument, but I also routinely do the opposite: I have many servers installed on my own "workstation" machines, which of course came with GUIs.

Of course, by "server" you were presumably referring to hardware, while for many of us software types, a "servers" is a piece of software that can run wherever we're able to compile it. So technically, we don't install GUIs on our servers; we install GUIs and other servers on our machines. They're really independent chunks of software, and they can easily cohabit on a single machine these days.

One basic reasoning behind all this, of course, is for testing purposes. After all, no one in their right mind installs untested web software on a client-facing server (machine). We install it on our workstations, where we have all the software (including browsers that require a GUI) to do thorough testing, and we test the hell out of it before inflicting it on unsuspecting Web visitors.

(Actually, who am I kidding? I install small edits on "live" web servers all the time. This is rarely a problem, it turns out. But YMMV. I did this numerous times in the past week, because the server admins - in their wisdom - were installing upgrades on the server without first testing them on hidden machines. You wouldn't believe all the web site's stuff that this broke. I found it better to actively watch the web stuff that I was responsible for, and when it broke, try some quick fixes - or apologetic top-of-page messages - for the duration. And I'm still on good terms with those admins, who appreciated my occasional emails about what was currently broken. ;-)

I wonder if this is true. We seem to be seeing claims that different people eating exactly the same food will sometimes lose or gain weight. Strictly controlled studies seem to be in their infancy, but the implication seems to imply the opposite: Some people's digestive systems (gut bacteria and all) effectively turn more of the input into digested "food", leading to weight gain and decrease in fecal output, while others digest less of the input and produce more output. The former store the excess as fat; the latter stay thin or lose weight. There's an implication that "efficient" digestion leads to weight gain and decreased fecal output, while inefficiency produces weight loss and increased fecal output. (Mass is generally conserved, right? ;-)

I suspect that it's actually more complex than that. But most of the comments here do seem to be aimed at blaming people for (presumably intentional) weight gain or loss. For us to say anything with scientific validity, we really should dispense with attempting to place blame, and rather try to document the details of just how the whole process works. Once we have better understanding of the scientific details, maybe we'll be able to give people medical advice that actually helps them reach and stay at whatever weight they'd prefer.

In this case, the summary's snide comment about spurious correlation is probably right on. What is generally believed about weight gain/loss is mostly based on mythology (or marketing ;-), not science, and has been proven wrong so often that it's odd that people even pay attention to claims on the topic any more.

Heh. Funny, but probably not at all accurate. If it turns out that gut bacteria really do explain a major part of a person's weight, effective treatment is unlike to be as simple as "eat shit". Rather, the specific species responsible for various factors related to weight gain/loss will be identified and cultured. Then various controlled combinations of the effective species will be combined in capsules ("pills") and sold at part of the treatment. These might be expensive, at least at first while they're covered by patents.

Treating such pills as "shit" is about as accurate as saying that, since animals wastes are a common food source for the plants we eat, eating vegetables or fruit is the same as eating shit. Not exactly, since the plants (and the composting microorganisms) do significant chemical reorganization "(metabolism") between the shit and the consumed plant organs.

One of the more fun examples is the common commercial mushroom, Agaricus bisporus, whose preferred culture medium is decaying feces of the common grazing animals ("bull shit"). This is fairly well known, of course, and jokes are made about the connection. But nobody seriously considers eating such mushrooms the same as eating shit. Some people are even a bit lax about cleaning them, understanding that by the time they're harvested, the growth medium looks (and smells) more like good, rich topsoil that like cattle manure, because that's effectively what it is.

Turning gut bacteria into medical weight-problem treatment tools will be a bit more complicated than just letting the source material compost; it'll entail separating out the micro-organisms, figuring out what effect each has on its human host, and growing the useful ones in cultures. This will take a while, and the end results won't look (or act) much like a "shit sandwich".

But people do make scatological jokes about mushrooms, and they will do so for medical packages of cultured gut bacteria.

Heh. I came here partly to see how long it'd take before someone invoked the bogus restricted definition of "nauseous". Sure didn't take long. ;-)

I've seen a suggestion that we need a list of the common words that trigger this sort of language peevery, for the benefit of those of us who'd like to "misuse" the words at every opportunity. Anyone know of such a collection? Or should I start making one?

We do have a number of lists of the similarly bogus grammatical "errors", generally expressed in such a way as to violate the bogus rules. E.g.: A preposition is a bad thing to end a sentence with. Or my favorite: Don't use commas, which aren't needed. But I haven't seen such lists of bogus definitions.

Nah; a better comparison would be like making a backup dump. Then, if the original hardware (body) dies, you can just configure a new one and restore all its data from the backup.

Maybe that's what a "soul" really is, a backup made continuously in some celestial data vault.

Of course they will, since they'll generally know their creator(s) personally, and they'll be in routine communication.

A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us. The result is that many of us just dismiss them as making it all up (probably for profit), and they're not really communicating with any such beings at all. If they are, why can't they show us the evidence?

Any real AIs wouldn't have this problem, since their creators would be out and about, showing off their creations for all the world to see (and also for profit).

Funny, but also maybe relevant. Boston is one of many cities that resulted from the slow expansion and merger of a group of small towns that were essentially separate communities before the days of modern transportation. It has lots of "centers" that used to be separated by forest and farmland, but are now a continuous urban area.

It's not hard to find other cities that developed this way. Other cities grew from a specific original center, usually a port area, and were never a "merger of equals". I wonder if the study distinguished these two major cases, and has anything to say about what (if any) structural differences we might find between them.