Smuel's good morning extravaganza

Ah. Missed it by THAT much.

Good morning.

 

Bruce Dickinson has joined the chat

Good morning.

 

Are we actually still here? Kinda neat really. Hi, Smuel!

Good morning.
Aldin, wistfully remembering

 

If you really really stretch the definition of "we", then yeah!

How have you been? Also, are you still in contact with any of "us"?

I hope Toblix wouldn't mind that I kinda stole his idea for this thread. And on that note, good morning.

 

I guess it was a drive-by tease. Regardless, I assume Aldin will be visiting again in another 23 years to read this.

So, Aldin, how have things been with you since 2025? I'm thinking of taking a vacation on the moon this year - they say it's nearly good as Mars, but only one tenth the price. And I certainly don't have the ELON$ to afford cryo-sleep class. Not without several more AmazonGPT gigs than I currently get. My kids want to move me into an upload farm soon, but I think the old neurons still have a few more years to go, so I'm hanging on to physicality for now.

May His Holiness Trump Live Forever, Blessed Be His NFTs.

Good morning.

 

Recently, in a social setting, someone mentioned a new movie called "The Brutalist". Not knowing anything about it, I assumed it was a typical Hollywood blockbuster, along the lines of "The Eradicator", or perhaps it was a film about a serial killer slash mob torturer who brutally dismembers his victims. So I decided to comically miss the point, while also demonstrating my erudite knowledge, and so I asked "Oh is that the film about Corbusier?".

But people just looked at me and were like "No, Laslo Toth".

Yeah, turns out the film really is about architecture. Ho hum.

Good morning.

 

Just seen a poster for something called "My Master Builder".

I assume it's about Lego, hur hur hur.

Good morning.

 

Anyone saw Nosferatu (the remake by Eggers)?

Good morning dudes.

 

I don't go to the cinema, I only watch things on Netflix or primitive TV channels. So no, because it's not on those yet. Though I'm planning to, when it is.

Good morning.

 

Saw also Poor Things. Damn me if Poor Things is one of the most horrible film I've ever seen. Even the presence of Defoe couldn't help saving the situation....

Good evening.

 

You poor thing.

Good morning.

 

I had a dream that I was watching something on TV, and after the program ended there was a trailer for a live action Thundercats movie. And I woke up thinking "Ugh, they aren't really making a live action Thundercats movie, are they?"

Turns out they are not. Phew.

Good morning.

 

Well, honestly I don't know what is thundercat, maybe if they would make a live action movie it could help me....

Good morning.

 

So, I don't know if you guys remember the hot chocolate wars of 2023, but after a hiatus of 8 months or so my company has started going back to that same office building, and there is now something weird about the hot chocolate. It still comes in the same tins, but the powder sticks together in clumps more, and also - it never runs out.

I don't mean that a fresh tin appears when an existing tin gets low, I mean that the tins themselves are always about 3/4 full. I think that what the building management are doing is that they've bought a huge bag of industrial hot chocolate powder, and are taking it around to top up the tins every morning.

Does this count as a victory for me? It does mean that it never runs out, but my issue now is that the chocolate smells and tastes slightly different. So I'm not sure how I feel about it. Also, I have yet to catch them in the act of topping up, so at this stage it is just a theory.

I shall of course keep you updated as I uncover more.

Good morning.

 

I have another crazy theory to share with y'all, possibly my most outlandish yet. Hold onto your toupees, this one not only makes several tenuous leaps, but also involves race, so if I never post again you can safely assume I got cancelled. Here we go...

You know how some people need glasses to see properly - without glasses their vision is blurry. They can still see, but detail is lost. My theory is that a similar effect is in play with hearing. Some people's hearing is "blurry" for want of a better word. They can still hear in a broad sense, but fine details may not get through, or low volume sounds may be missed. However, since there is no equivalent of glasses for hearing, there isn't much we can do about it, so we don't regularly test people for hearing acuity, and everyone walks around not knowing whether or not they are slightly deficient in auditory processing.

Actually, that's not my theory. Well, I mean, it is my theory, but in terms of this post it's just laying the groundwork.

My theory is that Asians have this hearing deficiency worse than other races. I first thought of this because I noticed that my own hearing was better than most of the Asian people that I knew. For example, we'd be sitting indoors, and it would start raining, which I would hear almost immediately, and then the rain sound would get louder and louder, and about 30 seconds later, the Asian I was with would look towards the window and say "Oh, has it started raining?" Of course, this doesn't count as any kind of data. Maybe I am such an engrossing conversational partner that they weren't paying attention to anything else. All I can say is that I noticed this phenomenon with more than one Asian, and not with anyone else.

What else do we know about Asians? They often need glasses. This one isn't even controversial. If you look up vision statistics, Asians are more likely to be short sighted. Why could this be? Well, one possible explanation is that Asian civilization is the oldest, so Asian people have spent the longest time "far from nature" where losing some aspects of long distance vision or hearing precision wouldn't limit your reproductive success.

Therefore, my theory... and yes, the previous theory was not the main theory either... my theory is that Asian people have worse eyesight and worse hearing because their civilization is the oldest. If we wanted to make a prediction based on this theory, which we could use to test it, then I might suggest seeing whether black people have the best eyesight and hearing. However, I'm not going to research this, because I don't actually want to get cancelled - I'm just saying that it's a possibility.

Instead, let me tell you my theory.

Oh, sorry, did I not mention? We haven't actually gotten to the main theory yet, the above was still just establishing the background. Here is the actual theory I want to present today:

Asian languages tend to be tonal languages, because Asians have worse hearing, and tones are the easiest thing to hear.

This theory is consistent with the apparent fact that Old Chinese didn't have tones, and only gained them over time. In other words, the language became more tonal as their civilization progressed. Also, it is thought that the tones replaced original consonants. Consonants being mostly subtle differences in simultaneous bursts of high frequencies, and therefore requiring better hearing to process, while tones are a pure loud note. So that all fits.

What does not fit is the Wikipedia page on tonal languages, which implies they are all over Africa too. However, bear in mind that the same page classifies Swedish as a tonal language, as well as the Liverpool dialect of English. Since this is obvious nonsense, I think we can conclude that the linguistical definition of a "tonal language" is broader than the one I'm using here.

You know what I mean, right? Tonal languages as in "every word can be pronounced with four different tones and they are four different words" like Chinese, not tonal languages as in "I think that the Welsh accent is beautifully melodic."

Anyway, this is my latest theory. If I wanted to express it more formally with made up numbers, I'd say something like "Population hearing acuity accounts for 60% of the selection pressure on languages to evolve tonal features".

Another selection pressure could be general noise levels. If you spend a lot of time in big cities, your language would evolve towards something you can easily hear over background noise. Tones are the easiest thing to distinguish there too. China having the oldest civilization and also the most tonal language (fight me, Shona speakers) would fit this too.

This also implies that as the human race continues to evolve, our language will get more and more tonal, until we are communicating in a series of musical notes, like an 70's pretend robot. Beep boop beep. Or a 90's dial up modem. Skrrrwwwwwwwwww eeeeeeeee di di di di di skrwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

Hey man, it's just a theory.

Good morning.

 

Aluminum hats for everyone

Also, a good morning.

 

Have you ever been taking a medicine capsule, and you put it in the palm of your hand, and then clap your hand over your mouth to propel the pill into it... and miss?

Haha, that must have been an embarrassing moment for you.

Ahem.

Good morning.

 

Just to be clear, I didn't miss my mouth with my hand, I am not yet that decrepit, I just missed my mouth with the pill.

Good mor.... oh, actually, it's not a good morning. It is a terrible morning, for I have grave news to report. Here it is:

I have lost the hot chocolate wars.

(Previously, on Smuel's Hot Chocolate Wars... tins of hot chocolate were mysteriously never running out, meanwhile our intrepid hero Smuel detected slight differences in the texture of the tin contents, but tentatively declared victory as the tins now never ran out, thus leading to a never-ending supply of hot chocolate. And now, the exciting conclusion of our story...)

Yeah, so while I haven't managed to catch them in the act, the building management are definitely topping up the tins with a third party source of hot chocolate powder. Whatever brand they're now using is noticeably different, being coarser and speckled with white. Not only that, it barely tastes like chocolate at all. I'd estimate the cocoa solids content is effectively zero. I have no idea what it is, but imagine that you went to prepare some instant coffee and found it was actually ground up chicory root. That's how betrayed I feel. I can't even bear the smell of the stuff. Or as the kids say, I can't even.

So even in the face of an ostensibly bountiful quantity of hot chocolate, I have stopped drinking it altogether. I can only imagine the twisted grins on the faces of the building management right now, as they have achieved their nefarious goal. You win, cruel faceless people. You can go ahead and pry my mug from my cold hot-chocolate-less hands.

Good morning.

 

I may have worked it out. I think they're refilling the tins with instant hot chocolate instead of hot chocolate. i.e. the tin's packaging says that you have to add it to hot milk, implying that the contents is sweetened chocolate, but they're filling the tins with the stuff that you add to hot water, so the contents is mostly dehydrated milk powder, with a slight chocolate flavour. I guess to the kind of non-hot-chocolate-drinking philistines who populate the building management team there is no appreciable difference.

Anyway, if you think you have it bad in your life, with your marriages or kids or whatever you're all doing now, just remember it could be worse - you could have been tricked into stirring milk powder into hot milk, like an idiot who trusts the labels on tins.

Good morning.

 

If you guys want me to stop treating this forum as my personal blog, then you should post more. Just saying.

Anyway, today's bizarre Smuel theory topic is the evolution of language. Why are languages different from each other? If you look this up, you'll get descriptions of linguistic drift, and phonemes, and so on. But the unstated assumption in all those articles is that languages will change. None of them really address the question of why languages change in the first place. So here is my theory as to why:

Language changes because teenagers want to sound cool.

Imagine a group of humans, speaking a language which we will call Language A. The humans have some children, who start to learn Language A from their parents. But as those children grow up to become teenagers, they will start to come up with new ways of saying things in order to differentiate themselves from the boring older generations. Or as today's teens might put it "kids drop their own slang to flex on the sus boomers and stay on fleek, no cap". Let's call this Language B. It's basically Language A, but with some minor variations.

However, a few years later those same teenagers start having children of their own, and those new children will grow up hearing Language B spoken by their parents, until they reach their own teenagerhood and differentiate themselves with their own far-out lingo to break free from the square vibes of the older generation, man. They'll develop Language C, which is Language B with some new elements.

Fast forward 23 more generations, and you end up with Language Z, which is 25 levels removed from Language A, and may not even be mutually intelligible with it any more. All because teenagers want to sound cool.

This theory maps to the evidence quite well. The biggest piece in support of it is that cool people say less. When I was a teenager I saw an advert for a cold remedy, part of which extolled the fact that it was "Max Strength". The voice-over didn't pronounce the G in the word "strength", so it sounded like "strenth", and I remember being fascinated by this since I thought it was a new cooler way of saying "strength". I can easily see that I might have been influenced to pronounce the word that way, had it been my friends who were saying it.

If you want evidence that isn't based on a single anecdote from my childhood, just listen to any group of people talk. The coolest person will be the one using the most abbreviations and leaving the ends off words. For example, in British English, the lame people say "Good morning" while the cool people say "Awwiiigh" The coolest British accent is Cockney, which is famous for not pronouncing the T's in the phrase "bottle of water". And everyone knows that Americans are cooler than Brits, not least because Americans are halfway through the process of dropping T's as well, pronouncing the same phrase more like "baddle of waddr".

The long term effect of this is seen in the history of most languages. When you trace the changes, the words are usually getting shorter and losing sounds as time passes. It is most apparent in French, where the preserved original spellings of words show you what sounds used to be there, but modern pronunciation leaves most of them off. Something similar happened in Chinese, where virtually all the consonants at the ends of syllables have gone, and those that remain are subtle variations on an almost-vowel-like N or NG.

Another element in favour of my theory is that the speed of evolution is proportional to the size of the population speaking the language. You might think that a larger population's language would be more stable, while the languages of smaller groups would diverge faster, but the reverse is true. This makes sense once you consider that the main driver for change requires a sizeable group of teenagers. If you are in an isolated community, there might only be a handful of people your age, and the chances of one of them being cool is small. But if you have a whole country full of teenagers trying to sound distinctive, then any newly derived terms can spread at the speed of teenagers gossiping, which is hella fast, yo. After all, teenagers want to be as cool as the coolest person they've ever heard of, not just the coolest person they know.

Nice theory, bro, but like, so what?

If you ask the internet whether language is still evolving, you get all kinds of smug articles explaining that it's an ongoing process, and that yes, text-speak is a valid form of communication, you old bigot. However, these articles are missing something important.

Earlier I said that Language A produces Language B, which produces Language C, and so on all the way up to Language Z which is many times removed from the original. This is what happened in the past, because once the people speaking Language A had all disappeared, there was no means to preserve it.

These days we are in a different situation. Films and TV shows are created for mass consumption, so they all use standard English because they want everyone in the audience to be able to understand them. You might get one or two characters speaking with an accent, but they will still use the same language as the others. So Peter Parker - a teenage superhero - speaks the same way as Tony Stark - a superhero from the previous generation. Neither of them use any slang appropriate for their generations, because the audience for their films encompasses multiple generations who need to be able to understand what all the characters say.

Effectively, we have taken English from around 1960, when television and motion pictures with sound really took off, and frozen it as the universal Language A. Teenagers in the 70s may have still created Language B, which was 1960s English with hip and groovy alterations, but the key thing is that when teenagers in the 1980s created their own gnarly slang, it was based off Language A, not off Language B, because those teenagers were fully aware of Languages A and B and definitely didn't want to sound like bogus 1970's hippies.

This means that if we fast forward 20 generations from now to future Language Z, we would still be able to understand it, because it will be Language A with generation Z's slang added, so still only one level removed from what we all speak today.

In essence I'm saying that slang used to be the template for the next version of the language, driving its evolution, but now slang is only ever temporary, since modern media keeps the base language stable. Kids today still think that 1981 He-Man is cool, even though in theory he should sound like an old-fashioned grandpa to them. Meanwhile He-Man would be able to watch 2025's Lilo & Stitch and understand everything said in it, even though it's a film for his grandkids.

So my prediction is that in 400 years English will still basically be the same. Meanwhile every other linguist says that current English will sound as strange to those future people as Shakespeare does to us today. I guess you should all come back in 400 years and find out who is right.

Good morning.