Languages have a lot of quirks and edge cases, how about 'gist'?

You should also:
- watch Nice guys finish first by Richard Dawkins, then
- read "Evolution of cooperation" by Robert Axelrod (the organizer of the tournament), then
- read "Certainties and doubts" by Anatol Rapoport (the submitter of tit for tat).

Hi, can I read some of her stories?

One of my pet projects is an initiative to write stories for children. I wonder what subjects she writes about, who the protagonists are, etc.

Can you provide more recommendations of this kind? I've recently moved here and I would love to expose myself to all the cool things Seattle has to offer.

Thank you!

I don't see a reason for perceiving the term in a negative way.

You and I are humans, and we also know that some humans are assholes. When I call you a human, it doesn't mean that I lump you into the same category as "asshole".

"Atheist" is just a word that means "without god". Whether you want it or not, the description fits. For everything else, there are other words.

No one forces you to attend any meetings, you are just a person with a reasonable point of view. That doesn't change the fact that "atheist" applies to you, does it?

One way to look at the problem is to take into account the knowledge a civilization can gather while exploring the world. As long as you keep discovering new things and laws - you're either in:
- a 'real universe'
- or in a simulation

Assuming that the 'real universe' does not boil down to some discrete elements, it means it will always have some undiscovered secrets, there will always be a way to 'zoom in' and find something new.

If, at some point in time you realize that you haven't discovered anything new for a long time, and you can formally prove that there is nothing else to discover- it means that you've reached the boundaries of a simulation.

A more elaborate version of the story is here: http://railean.net/index.php/2010/12/31/simulated-universe-argument-limitation

I recommend that you read "Replay" by Ken Grimwood, it is very interesting and it covers the scenarios you mention.

Hey, thanks for the elaborate reply. What you write makes sense and it is clear to me that you know what you're talking about.

The "language problem" is a very big deal to a large number of people here in Moldova, which is why I took some time to dig around various resources and build a picture by myself, instead of relying on what the media wants us to think.

Before I go further, I must point out that Russian is my first language (even though my family is not of a Russian descent and Russian wasn't my parents' first language), I then learned Romanian. I have no special feelings for either of these languages, they're just a way to encode and decode an idea when interacting with another person...

I once embarked on a quest to figure out the story behind the diacritics used in Romanian and understand why they sometimes write "î" and other times ”â”. That is how I stumbled upon Neacshu's letter and the fact that all religious texts at that time were in Cyrillic.

There are some ideas that I'd like to discuss with you. One of them is the "biased sample" aspect.

- If I were an alien who landed somewhere in Russia after an uber-nuclear war that wiped out pretty much everything on the planet... and if I stumbled upon some pieces of source code, I would look at something like ``import this; for item in range(10): print item``. I would then conclude that the people who lived in this area wrote their texts using this type of symbols. I would extrapolate from one data point, which is not very good; but if you have no other data samples - then "what the heck, why not?"

Then there's a "survivor's bias".

- The church is a powerful entity that can afford to store their records and update them, transfer them to new type of storage media, make backups, etc. Books were very very expensive back in the days, which is why the church tried very hard to preserve them. A mere mortal, on the other hand - was probably illiterate. If they knew how to write, would anyone go out on a limb to preserve their records, when they had more important problems to take care of?
This could explain why you only see Cyrillic script in the books.

A few other ideas:
- Neacshu was a fan of "security through obscurity", that's why the letter was written in Cyrillic :-)
- If somehow one would manage to stumble upon "gr8dude's letter to his sister" - they would observe that it is written in English with Latin script; even though both people involved in the interaction are a part of a culture that uses a different language and is pretty far away from England.

Another aspect to keep in mind is that when you read about this problem, say, here - http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortografia_limbii_rom%C3%A2ne, you find out that there are claims that Romanian was originally written with runes, and over the years it has shifted from to other forms. I never managed to find any evidence about it being written in runes, but there's an episode that can be traced back and verified.

The transition to Cyrillic was the result of a church-related matter, caused by the split of Christianity into Catholicism and Orthodoxism. To a modern person, such disputes are like arguing whether Terminator will defeat Robocop in a fight, or whether Spiderman is stronger than Batman... However, back in the day when the average person was uneducated and literacy was scarce, all this church business was of a great importance, for no one wanted to end up burning in hell, where there was gnashing of teeth and crying.

The turning point is somewhere in ~1400, when Alexandru cel Bun ordered all the books to be burned and replaced with ones that used Cyrillic script. I know it sounds crazy, burning all the books - a non-trivial mission. But... with books being so rare - it was a very easy job. Just iterate through all the churches, and you're done.

Pulling this off today would be much much more complex, I'm not letting anyone into my house to burn my books. Back then the picture was different. As the article says, the idea was suggested to the king by a church official - so there's no reason to believe the church would be uncooperative and try to hide some of the books.

Having said all of the above, I really can't tell for sure which writing form was there first, because there are different arguments and clues that are sometimes contradicting. If you've analyzed this problem, can you share some of your findings? I'd love to interact with you more and see if we can exchange some ideas.

p.s. I swear to dog, all the diacritics were rendered correctly when I hit the "preview" button :-)

Are you talking about the conceptually new BolgenOS and its aesthetically pleasing wallpapers?

> The only failing it has is that it uses letters similair to
> latin letters to mean completely different things, which
> leads to an inevitable amount of brain bonk when you
> are trying to learn it.
Yeah, this can be tricky.

To a beginner this feels like looking at code that has `#define True False` somewhere in the fine-print.

Da, davno takih ne videl... vymerli kak mamonty :-)

I didn't know Lenin was planning to do that. Can you share some background information on this subject? What was his rationale?

This sounds a bit weird to me, given the historical trends... Russia usually did things the other way around: as the empire expands, they run "convert --force KOI8" against any piece of text they can get their hands on. I am from a country that went through a period in which the alphabet was switched from Latin to Cyrillic. They also closed most of the schools that taught in the native language and made Russian an only option; all the administrative documentation is also switched to Russian.

To this day, some parts of the capital city have street names in Russian; in some cities this is the norm. This also has some serious side effects, such as the dilution of national identity. That's a long story.

I am very curious about Lenin's arguments. Why would he want to do that?

Thanks for the feedback. I thought so too, but I believe that is not the case - I have 2.3.7, Cyanogenmod 7.1.0.1.

My version of Google Talk is 1.3, can you tell me if yours is newer?

I use it extensively since I got an Android phone, but one problem with it is that it doesn't support video or audio calls.

People who use other clients see me in their list of contacts, but the video/audio call option is grayed out. That is strange, because the phone has a video camera, the Internet connection is reasonably fast, and Skype works well on it.

Is there some magic checkbox I have to tick to enable audio calls on the GTalk client for Android?

Nextel iDEN SIM cards use a different format for the storage of contacts, which is not compatible with the format described in GSM 11.11 (for regular 2G SIM cards), nor with the 3GPP spec for 3G USIM cards. If you read EF ADN (the abbreviated dialing numbers file), you will see just one entry, called "See iDEN phbk", while the actual phonebook is elsewhere and has a completely different structure.

If you want to migrate your iDEN phonebook to another SIM card, export them to a CSV file, or upload them to Google Contacts or Yahoo Contacts - you can rely on SIM Manager - it supports all card types and can exchange data between them.

My colleagues have reverse-engineered the format, and to the best of my knowledge - there is no other software that can read Nextel iDEN cards. I must point out that I find the iDEN phonebook format much more reasonable - it is a linear file (in smart card terminology, it is a file that is made from N records of a fixed length), each record contains all the data about a given contact.

In contrast, the phonebook of 3G USIM cards is scattered across multiple files (emails, secondary names, secondary numbers, etc), which have different lengths, thus they require additional files to correctly map records to a phonebook entry. This has a lot of side-effects, such as "sometimes not all phonebook entries can have an email" or "some mobile operators issue SIMs that don't have all the USIM phonebook files", or "depending on the phone's way of handling the phonebook, sometimes you may end up with orphaned entries that cannot be removed", etc.

I never used Nextel's services so I can't comment on their coverage or call quality, but I do know that the engineers who designed the phonebook format kept it simple. For a comparison - implementing support for 3G USIM phonebooks (with the specs available) took longer than implementing support for Nextel cards (with no documentation at all).

p.s. I hope no one will reply with a link to the spec, because we've tried our best to find it before deciding to do it the hard way (-:

What about all the stories about people who were not wearing a seat-belt, and who flew out of the car through the windshield?

I don't own a car, I've never been involved in such types of accidents - so I'm genuinely curious. Perhaps windshields are designed to break from the inside, but not the outside?