Posts by Bob Munro
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Ill repeat the conclusions for the scaremongers
NO EVIDENCE OF ANY ACCELERATION IN SEA LEVELS ( for the last 100 years)You don't say it - but by the use of upper case I conclude that you are implying that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a false premise. Is that your point?
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I guess it was just a reaction to dealing with the injuries and their consequences that led him to it. I seem to remember he recognised it as pretty eccentric himself but I guess you can see only a finite number of people incapacitated by brain injury before you start taking your own precautions.
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You're also at risk not wearing a helmet in a car, and a lot more people die from head injuries in cars than on pushbikes. Do you wear a helmet in your car?
I once met an A&E surgeon who wore a helmet in his car and refused to travel by car at certain times of the day on certain days. Mainly after 10.00pm Thursday through Saturday as I recall.
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Yeah I get the maths guys. Just wondering why that headed over to physics.
What’s physics got to do with it?
A large part of physics involves the study of how things move - planets around a sun, water down a pipe or electrons in a solid, for example. Here we’re looking out how linguistic utterances flow around a population of speakers. Particularly relevant to the formation of New Zealand English is the fact that initially many different variants of, for example, vowel sounds, were in use by different speakers, but ultimately, very similar variants were used by almost the whole population. According to the empirical study mentioned above, this happened very quickly - over 50 years, or roughly two generations of speakers.
Our contribution has been to take specific models of language use and see if they can explain this rapid pace of change in the population of 100,000 to 1,000,000 speakers living on the islands between 1850 and 1900. The mathematical methods used have much in common with the physics of gases, liquids and solid where you have large numbers of particles and try and predict the behaviour of the system as a whole given the (statistical) tendencies of its constituents. -
There's some eye watering formulas and calculations in the actual report.
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Yes. It's only when Austruckingfallians try to mimic our accent that you hear it.
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A study is underway on why we talk like we do.
A question that has long baffled linguists is how New Zealanders came to speak in such a distinctive dialect of English so soon after the arrival of British migrants in the 1840s and 50s....
...Edinburgh University physicist Richard Blythe said the hundreds of migrants to New Zealand arrived with different dialects, but people were speaking in just one within 50 years.
The first generation of immigrants did little to change their speech, but their children started to adapt in a way that was still not totally understood.
"At the time this dialect arose there would have been between 100,000 and one million people living in New Zealand. With that big a number, it would be impossible for all the inhabitants to meet each other."
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There was poetry in the post Graham, that's all that matters.
Got Linda Ronstadt and Anne Savoy doing 'Adieu False Heart' on at our place. Off now for a walk by the beach. getting ready to farewell the godwits before they take off for Siberia.
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The link to the bridge doesn't seem to be working Graham. Here's a stop-gap measure