"And if you prefer one or the other, I can adapt. Humans are good at that. ;-) "

No, they're not. Or did you miss the part where some of the smartest people on the planet crashed millions of dollars into another planet? People are TERRIBLE at these kinds of things. One conversion? Fine. Ten conversions? No problem. Hundreds, thousands or millions of conversions? The probability of error tends to 100%.

It would definitely be more efficient if everyone used one common language (especially for cross cultural endeavours such as business and engineering). In fact, that kinda happens by default and that language tends to be English.

However, there are practicalities in play. First up, there aren't just two languages, there are hundreds, and there is a broad split in the number of speakers of each language. Whereas in metric v imperal, the US is the ONLY country in the developed world that hangs onto imperial.

Second, learning a new language is an order of magnitude more work than changing to using metric.

I'm speaking from experience here; in the course of my life, I've studied Irish, French, German, Spanish and Japanese, and I am in no way close to fluent in any of them

On the other hand, when I left Ireland, it was officially metric but imperial was still common (distances were in KM, speed limits in miles, people used imperial weights for humans, metric for food). When I moved to NZ, everything is metric, and honestly, relearning happens without effort. Once you immerse yourself, you eventually just start thinking in the new system.


Finally, metric is just a better system for everything. There isn't a single scenario where imperial is a more useful measurement.

Come on America, join us. It's awesome and you don't really want to use "English" units, do you? Did you fight a war to get rid of them? What would George Washington say!? It's unamerican, I tells ya!

You are gonna hate me now, but I grew up reading Dean Koontz and Stephen King years before the librarian at my middle suggested Lovecraft, so 12? My first Stephen King was Night Shift, with the eye in the middle of a mummified hand; Jerusalem's Lot ruined my ability to sleep. For some strange reason Lovecraft comforted me but King disturbed me lol -- My first Lovecraft reading was The Festival.

Anyway, it's my mom's fault, i jus read whatever she had lying around the house, which also included Mary Higgins Clark, Robert Ludlum, Danielle Steel, Michael Crichton, and who even knows what else.

Totally agree in having absorbed the material rather than fully understood. I mean shit, how does a 4th grader even under The Rising Sun? It's just shocking and strange. Like d3coding a new language.

I also read a lot of young adult thriller suspense books, notably Alfred Hitchcock's young readers books and short story collections. Ray Bradbury collections, random Asimov Foundation books, and old copies of Analog, that my dad would buy from local library sales. (Thas how poor people shop for books hahaha) He was the old school scifi guy, but not at all into horror.

I suppose I don't mind hacks. Reading the letters of Oscar Wilde changed my opinions on EVERYTHING. If Wilde belongs to the criminal class or what Danny Devito's character Frank terms the "Fringe" class, there must be some saving grace even in the intellectual crime of the hack writer.

So "mind meld" doesn't mean what we think it means?

Why does our language have to evolve through mistakes and typos? Wonky technology plus laziness equals new language? Seems like nothing more than ignorance and a bad attitude towards getting something correct.

Velocity5 sounds like one of the "people" who wrote the helpful suggestions to mankind found on the Georgia Guidestones.....

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

I have a suggestion there for ya, sparky?? Perhaps what you perceive as some career or discipline that benefits mankind would be perceived as detrimental to the planet for someone else....What if your concept of reality is based on perceptive dysfunction distilled in you through an engineered psycho-cybernetic mind-fuck in order to create a member of the machine who sees only practical application and duty to the whole as beneficial?

The world needs insects. They carry out dutifully, tasks necessary to the functioning of systems....
She also needs artisans, musicians, and quantum theorists, eh? There's a balance to consider here Chim-Chim....Thank God for people working in refineries and perky chicks poppin' flips, so I may continue my tenure here on "PLANET PRACTICAL" with some relief from the CORN-COB-UP-ASS types determined to make it uncomfortable and boring.
Rather be here than in the Terminator world, Slim!

Dialects gets created and die out all the time. It's just a matter of time and geographic location of a population. And if the isolation is long and severe enough you get new language. While it's interesting to document the different dialects and languages being spoken all throughout the world, trying to save them would be a tad too much in my opinion.

It's like trying to save leaves from decomposing. They get regenerated every summer. The old ones need to die out to give room for the new ones.

Auger8: That's ridiculous and so out of touch it probably borders on racism itself. Yes, some immigrants have the option to learn the language of the country that they're emigrating to quite well before going there; well enough to communicate with the bureaucracy. Others are fleeing for their lives.

Seriously, people emigrate for all kinds of reasons; some to seek variety, some to seek jobs, and some because are going to be stoned to death in their own country for their sexuality or political beliefs. Some are too old to learn a new language easily, some don't have access to decent education in their own country, and some just don't give a shit. I would like for all of them to learn as quickly as possible the language of the country they come to, but I'm not going to say to all of them, in a blanket statement: "YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO PLAY A MEANINGFUL ROLE IN YOUR CHILD'S EDUCATION AND FUTURE BECAUSE FOR WHATEVER REASON YOU HAVEN'T HAD THE OPPORTUNITY/WILL/RESOURCES/WHATEVER TO LEARN OUR LANGUAGE."

Music gives our brains the tool it needs to cross divided territory. Learning concepts that would otherwise be segregated. I see this when kids and adults use the music experience to learn new languages and experience (for them) hard to understand math problems.

Nope. Never heard that. Although I have probably heard it in British movies and TV over the years and not understood what I was hearing.

Now I'll be primed for the next time it comes up!

Thanks for the lesson. I love learning new languages. Ha.

In reply to this comment by alien_concept:
Haha BB. He says "Do you want half and half, and all?" Not sure if you use and all, it just means too :

If you want to be takei make sure you clean up your santorum. I think Tennessee may be in the process of evolving a whole new language.

Sometimes jazz can be the musical equivalent of incoherent rambling.. then sometimes, you get high and put on some Miles.. and you're listening to a whole new language, and it is very beautiful.

Watched the whole thing. Pretty interesting stuff, my favourite part was the autistic guy who knew 20 languages and counting. Just makes me think how different this world would be if we all had that honed ability but without the sacrifice of near every other function or a huge investment of time (he was easily picking up words of a new language within 10mins). I guess that applies to many of the things accomplished by some autistic people, what if we all head photographic memory at ease and other such amazing feats of the mind...

I also found it alarming how quickly I found it enticing to perform "The forbidden experiment" of isolating a child from birth with no outside influence for learning speech, to see how it would develop. It is of course impossibly cruel but the intrigue just makes you stop for a moment.

Yes it's silly TV, but there are a hundred shows like this in Japan (where this show comes from). As silly as it looks, these shows help people learn a new language, something America is notoriously bad at. I wish we had programming options to learn a language in the States, instead of the slew of reality-based TV.

wait a tic...

this segment of rachel's bashes on:

dana perino (bush admin press secretary)
rush limbaugh (republican gasbag)
sen. mitch mcconnell - kentucky (r)
sen. bob corker - tennessee (r)
sen. john mccain - arizona (r)

with absolutely no mention of *any* democrat, specifically this:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/18/aig.bonuses.congress/index.html

"Senate Banking committee Chairman Christopher Dodd told CNN Wednesday that he was responsible for language added to the federal stimulus bill to make sure that already-existing contracts for bonuses at companies receiving federal bailout money were honored.

"Dodd acknowledged his role in the change after a Treasury Department official told CNN the administration pushed for the language.

"Both Dodd and the official, who asked not to be named, said it was because administration officials were afraid the government would face numerous lawsuits without the new language.

"Dodd, a Democrat, told CNN's Dana Bash and Wolf Blitzer that Obama administration officials pushed for the language to an amendment designed to limit bonuses and "golden parachutes" at those companies."

and then rachel throws in a somewhat disingenuous correlation between median household income growth from the '70s through to 2000, and then falling to negative growth over the last eight years, as she would have us believe, because of wall street deregulation?? isn't such a decline far more likely because of the tech bubble bursting at the end of the last decade, or a recession beginning in march 2001, or 9/11 and a subsequently ham-handed 'war on terror'?

i'm as outraged as the next american over this fiasco... but is what rachel's doing here really 'news'?

it seems dishonest, at least to me, so i guess the 'lies' tag is fitting

Well said, Diogenes. Except that you and jwray seem to have forgotten, as has the rest of North America, the people that were here first.

What label would you apply to them jwray? Or are you simply assuming that all of the 'indigenous' people have been successfully assimilated?

Hint: they have not been. Go take a ride down highway 1. Yeah, they have by force learned the new language, but they have not forgotten their own language or culture.

Open your minds and realize that these labels you keep throwing around are as meaningless as the hair on your knuckles.


I get where you're coming from dude. Yes, the term LatinAmerican is pretty silly. But no more so than Hispanic, or Mexican, or Spanish, is to describe the group of people you're referring to. And if it ever comes up in local conversation, those folks that abandoned Canada for the swamps of Louisiana - we're just fine with Cajun. NOT Creole. (Labels die hard, don't they? )

Let's say you were an Anarchist and I asked you why government is bad; to prove government is bad you send me a wiki link about the Nazis. That doesn't prove the idea is bad, it simply proves that version of the idea is bad.

In reply to this comment by The_Dragon:
Why is new world order a bad thing you ask?
Here is your answer.

THE MESSAGE OF THE GEORGIA GUIDESTONES (New World Order Rules)

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.
10.Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature.

Limiting the population of the earth to 500 million will require the extermination of nine-tenths of the world's people. The American Stonehenge's reference to establishing a world court foreshadows the current move to create an International Criminal Court and a world government. The Guidestones' emphasis on preserving nature anticipates the environmental movement of the 1990s, and the reference to "seeking harmony with the infinite" reflects the current effort to replace Judeo-Christian beliefs with a new spirituality.