UmbralRaptor changed the topic of #kspacademia to: https://gist.github.com/pdn4kd/164b9b85435d87afbec0c3a7e69d3e6d | Dogs are cats. Spiders are cat interferometers. | Космизм сегодня! | Document well, for tomorrow you may get mauled by a ネコバス. | <UmbralRaptor> egg|nomz|egg: generally if your eyes are dewing over, that's not the weather. | <ferram4> I shall beat my problems to death with an engineer. | We can haz pdf
<SnoopJeDi>
it's weird how little accelerator-on-chip stuff there is in speculative fiction come to think of it
<raptop>
Hrm, the last speculative fiction story I can remember involving accelerators had people going back in time and sabotoging the SSC to prevent an invasion by aliens from other dimensions
<SnoopJeDi>
👀
<SnoopJeDi>
which story was this?
<raptop>
urgh, can't remember. It would be a novel published somewhere around 1995 or 1996, I think?
<SnoopJeDi>
probably enough to search on
<raptop>
But yeah, accelerators of a certain capability can make wormholes (sort of), first contact happens (with 2 different sets of aliens, one friendly and one hostile)
<SnoopJeDi>
I would like to state for the record that "supercollider aliens wormhole time travel" is in fact a very noisy search; I had not accounted for nutters and bad popsci
<egg|laptop|egg>
whitequark: how does pluralization work for negative numbers in ru, is it on the absolute value?
<whitequark>
i've never thought about it
<whitequark>
рь
<whitequark>
*hm
<whitequark>
yeah
<egg|laptop|egg>
OK
<whitequark>
grammatically "минус" is just like a prefix
<egg|laptop|egg>
seems CLDR semi-implicitly assumes it is on the absolute value in all languages, I have yet to find a countereggsample but this vaguely surprised me
<whitequark>
aren't negative numbers generally younger than languages?
<whitequark>
as in
<whitequark>
they weren't used for long enough to be treated specially
<egg|laptop|egg>
well, depending on how they are worded they could do grammatically different things
<egg|laptop|egg>
I could imagine a language wherein -1 is read as одна whatever
<egg|laptop|egg>
whitequark: consider how in French n! is read as "factorielle n" whereas in English it is "n factorial"
<whitequark>
wait
<whitequark>
whether it's один or одна depends on the countable noun
<egg|laptop|egg>
okay that was a bad eggsample
<egg|laptop|egg>
but I mean, it could be read postfix
<egg|laptop|egg>
or it could be read in some other way that changes the grammatical class of the whole
<whitequark>
hrm
<whitequark>
yeah i see
<egg|laptop|egg>
whitequark: after all it is not more grammatically obvious that (-1) cat(s) should be pluralized on the 1 anymore than (cos 1) cat(s) should be
<whitequark>
uhhh
<whitequark>
i don't think "(cos 1) cats" has a valid russian syntax tree
<whitequark>
like, i don't think you can write it out in words in a way that makes sense
<whitequark>
this is because "cat(s)" has the role of a measurement unit here and you don't normally take trig functions of those
<egg|laptop|egg>
what about sqrt(2) km?
<whitequark>
корень из двух километров?
<whitequark>
completely ambiguous and sounds horrible
<egg|laptop|egg>
:D :D :D
<whitequark>
i imagine any actual use would write it symbolically