Comments by "" (@mina86) on "TED-Ed" channel.

  1. +Geilson Neville And now the zombies are only 12 minutes away from you!
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  2. +Roedy Green You cannot claim that ‘any correlation with actual gods is pure coincidence’. There is no way you can disprove that if gods (or God) exist they put the ideas into humans heads or just took form of a human who started spreading the stories.
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  3. 0:38 -- except during the period where every country switches between DST and standard time, at which moment no one knows what time is anywhere…
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  4. * Fish and insects feel pain. * Not all religions assign gender to their gods/God. * Innocent people and animals suffer horrible things because there is no reason why they wouldn’t. You may think it’s not fair but there’s no law of physics stating that Universe is fair. * Since we are in a space-time, the future events are already there. * But no, you cannot predict the future (and so you have a free will) because of quantum fluctuations and second law of thermodynamics. </troll>
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  5. Earth is not a closed system therefore 2nd law does not apply to it. However, once you add the Sun to the mix, decrease in enthropy on Earth is overtaken by increase in the Sun. Also, ‘anything being made from nothing’ does not break the 2nd law, it’s perfectly consistent with that. Lastly, life did not form from nothing.
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  6. Anthony Pallitto Actually, atoms did not exist from the beginning. The temperature of the Universe after the Big Bang was too big to let protons or neutrons form and at that time. Furthermore, a lot of the atoms life, as we know it, us built from has been forged in stars and super nova explosions since even after the Universe was cool enough to allow for them to exist, all it had were Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium. Lastly, according to Big Rip scenario, atoms will not exist forever since eventually influence of Dark Energy will be so strong that it will start ripping atoms apart overcoming strong nuclear force.
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  7. nosuchthing8 Why?
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  8. It would be no worse that what's happening right now – spelling has little to do with pronunciation for everyone now, so making it represent pronunciation of a group of people would be an improvement even if not a very democratic one. US has already fixed “~our”s and “~re”s and there was no disaster.
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  9. Than again, had someone invent a “simple calculus” (which can do all the things regular one can but in a simpler fashion), everyone would start using it. Moreover, an average person does not use calculus. So, sorry, but no, your comparison does not stand. But don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating for English spelling reform – it's a rather futile task – I'm just expressing my opinion that world would be a “better” place if English spelling took pronunciation into consideration.
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  10. No, because the ratio of people advertising that they are not at home to the number of burglars is too high. It's like a thief saying “I will break into a home of someone in Manhattan.”
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  11. Uh... How about Polish? There are countless examples of loanwords in Polish which changed their spelling to match Polish phonetics and no one cares that it hides the origins. And the process can take just a couple of decades to occur. So maybe I'm missing what you mean by “meaning”.
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  12. I'm not sure if your argument is against or pro mine… I'm not proposing such an body and if anything rather something opposite – get someone to make the spelling more like the words are pronounced.
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  13. Yes, sorry, I was overly simplistic, which does not change the fact that one can read Polish without knowing the words whereas in English you have to know how to read given word to do so. And being practical, I disagree that it's neither good nor bad of how English spelling evolved – I consider it unfortunate for the purposes I've mentioned already: it makes things more complicated for average person.
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  14. “Sound is never the most important aspect of spelling an English word” -- she says that as if it was a good thing. The effect of course is that English spelling and English pronunciation are two separate languages.
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  15. To point out that your argument is invalid.
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  16. I think we have different definitions of “calculus” – I view it more like what Newton and Leibniz did, and not a mathematician c. 400 years earlier – so let's just put that aside. Meanwhile, having an opinion about where Sun is rising and understanding sunrise are somehow orthogonal. One can understand sunrise perfectly well and still prefer Earth to rotate the other way. The same as one can understand language perfectly well and still prefer it to be different.
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  17. Like you've said in the video, scribes in 14th century started adding the letter “b” back, so no, it's not average people who had the most say when it comes to spelling. And even though I agree that reading without understanding the words may have limited use (singers?), being able to spell a word that you've heard and don't know the meaning of to check in a dictionary has.
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  18. How many people know about connection between onion and one? One in a thousand? One in ten thousands? This makes me claim that if English spelling's purpose is to “represent sense and meaning” than it is failing at it miserably, because no one recognises that meaning. So why bother and not make it easier for everyone of making spelling represent pronunciation? “Language geeks” would still know the history, but the rest of the population would have it easier.
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