We have a government admittedly selling human organs for profit, the one thing that every medical ethicist in the world has always agreed would be the prima facie standard of "morally and ethically repugnant"

- [Citation needed]
- Not every ethicist surely. Here's one extremely prominent bioethicist who makes the opposite case.
- Doesn't apply to death row organs, but does apply to the sale of organs in general - why should everyone, from doctors and hospitals to the recipient to the economy, benefit from organ donation, but not the one fricking person who actually makes the sacrifice?

Sally Dataentryspecialist has a computer that she can type up Word documents on. Jimmy Executive has a laptop that's just good enough to browse porn and play DVDs.

Get with the program. It's Sally the Dataentryspecialist. Jimmy the Executive. Were you asleep all of last year's election campaign?

--Gargle the Grammar Nazi

Lol. I'll decode that delightfully - though gratuitously - dense first para as best as my lay mind can. I think you're saying a) that aspiration or lack of doesn't separate words in english (so? we're talking about how to indicate sounds that english speakers *can* make, which are from a language where it matters which of two sounds *is* made) b) that the h in english doesn't necessarily or sufficiently indicate aspiration (so? in both ghandi and gandhi the h clearly DOES serve to aspirate, just different sounds) c) that because there isn't a separate name ghandi there is no need to mark the contrast (eh? The quantity we're seeking to satisfice here is proper pronunciation of name, not confusion reduction. We're talking about a famous person for chrissake) d) the a stuff, which might in principle correspond to something about long and short a's (cmon, what American didn't instinctively throw around long a's when dealing with foreign words? :) )

fifth graders etc: I think we've radically different intuitions about how the a's would come out in this experiment, so perhaps the bet is still a good one. Do you really expect to see father-a in Ghandi and ant-a in Gandhi? Huh.

My point with Ghan-di was about sounds really. That set of sounds is just odd to me. I don't think the aspirated gh sound goes with the long father-a in Hindi at all, almost certainly not to begin words. That needn't be a problem for your view of course, but I do want to clarify/suggest that it's the oddness of that word, not just the fact that it isn't in fact a word.

'Pedantry' is name calling? Jeez, what a hothouse flower you are! :)

I don't see the hypocrisy charge; I don't think it sticks. We are not - and certainly not merely to avoid charges of pedantry - to avoid distinctions all together. It is excessive or overly sophistical distinction that we are to eschew. And which ones might these be, you ask? Well, obviously there is no clear cut rule set in stone for such things, and we are to cultivate such intellectual virtues as allow us, on a case by case basis, to judge whether a particular distinction is relevant.

Here's how I judge it: a) There are typically patterns that guide how words in a language/script are spelled in another. 'H signifies aspiration' is as uniformly applied a rule re Hindi/English writing as you're likely to find. b) I'll bet you a moderate sum even a class of fifth graders would pronounce Ghandi and Gandhi differently in predictable ways, that in particular the latter comes much closer to how both Indians and decently educated westerners pronounce the word. c) the spelling of a man's name is such a thing as he quite typically gets to decide. d) The alternate spelling, assuming it corresponds to 'ghan-di' is not even a common Indian name.

Now if you disagree (and reasonable people can disagree with each of a - d), contest actual frickin arguments! Instead, you, in response, brought up "transliteration" and how it differs from "transcription". Except inasmuch as you're arguing that name-spelling should abide by "transliterational" or "transcriptative" principle to conform to the pragmatics of hindi-english orthography, that display of technical vocabulary seems like no more or less than an empty show of erudition, a nitpicky display of casuistic quibbling. Just naming two concepts doesn't show that points a-d are mistaken or insufficient. Hence, I called it pedantry, though perhaps academic showing off is more apposite. IOW, do the actual argumentative heavy work. If you think a spelling - in a language that uses 'h' to signify aspiration - that aspirates the wrong phoneme of a word is perfectly kosher, make the case. If you think the words you introduced add something to that case, great, show how.

All this, while it may be perfectly correct for all I know, strikes me as pedantry of the worst sort. Most people, native hindi speakers or not, aspirate the g when they encounter the name Ghandi. Most people, whether they are hindi speakers or not, aspirate the d when they encounter Gandhi. The latter is an excellent approximation of how a hindi speaker would in fact say the word - I'd know, I'm one of them. The latter is how Gandhi himself wrote his name in english. It is how his descendants write their name still. If what they're doing is "transcription" instead of "transliteration" (or is it the other way around?), fine, I'm delighted to concede the point. One spelling is still misleading where the other isn't.

No it's not. In Hindi, most sounds come in aspirated and unaspirated forms. In transliteration, the h marks aspiration for obvious reasons. "Ghandi" suggests that the 'g' in Gandhi is aspirated. In reality, it is the 'd' that is aspirated.

On a tangent, but

Far smarter people than you and I disagree with you. Far smarter people than you and I agree with you. That doesn't indicate who is right; but it does mean that calling the other side 'ludicrous' indicates you are probably approaching the issue irrationally.

So very smart people on either side of an issue can't believe ludicrous things? Obviously not, so your ludicrous standard essentially serves to expunge a perfectly good word from the english language, as you'd have only the smartest person on the planet use it against his opponents, for his purposes.

Pragmatics. When a person says an opinion is ludicrous, he isn't offering a proof in S5 that said opinion is mistaken. He's offering for discussion his view that the opinion in question is grotesquely wrong, even silly. If you disagree, you ought to express why a thoughtful person would hold a different position - as you did, quite well, eloquently even. Meanwhile, calling someone irrational just because he thinks a position is silly is flat-out wrong. Particularly since your argument to that effect is so bad - smart people emphatically do believe wrong - and yes, ludicrous - things.

"Unless Chu has another breakthrough he's going to unleash before... Tuesday I would say it's a pretty accurate title. I doubt he'll make another breakthrough in 24 hours."

Yeah right.

(The following takes place between 8 AM and 9 AM)
Steven Chu: tell me where the blueprints for the fusion drive are!
Arab type: No.
SC: But I must have the design to announce at the inauguration!
Arab type: your problem
SC: Then I'll torture your children in front of your eyes by satellite
Lackey1: but the uplink is encrypted!
Lackey2: I will hack the password by zooming into this security camera footage conveniently to hand
Lackey3: Look! The Ayrab escaped in the confusion!
Steven Chu: Damn. Set up a perimeter!

"there's a linear relationship between them (and normally you think of G as the coupling constant and say m_i = m_g)"

Sorry, just forgot to mention. The statement above is a lot less trivial than it might seem. It means that the constant of proportionality is the same for all pairs of masses!

Fudge factor G: to say that m_inertial = G m_gravitational is to say that there's a linear relationship between them (and normally you think of G as the coupling constant and say m_i = m_g). A priori, there's no reason there had to be any sort of relationship between them, much less a polynomial or a linear one. Take for instance electric charge, where the analogue of m_gravitational is q_electric, which can be anything whatsoever, independent of m_inertial. It's the fact that there's a relationship at all - and that it's such a simple one - that is so bizarre, and which has led scientists from Galileo on to test the equality, made Newton confess he hadn't the foggiest why it might be true, and led Einstein to his Equivalence principle.

Jobs hears people cry out for the return of the 12-inch Macbook Pro form factor, and we get the MacBook Air, so slim and badly-realized that it lacks essential ports on the back (even though it's big enough to fit them).

And Jobs saw it was good?

Sigh...that's the sad thing about failed jokes...

The economy has tanked since Vista shipped.

You think Vista caused that? I don't see any evidence, but somehow it seems plausible.

As an Irish person I'm glad that something is being done about bullying. I was bullied at school a lot and when not being beaten was subject to horrendous psychological bullying.

It's Irish Evil, I tell ya! http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000816.html