Is it common for editors to add to a writer's text? My naive assumption was that they often cut and re-structure and maybe suggest re-wording, but I'm surprised to see an editor actively add content that wasn't there at all
Editors do participate in revisions quite a lot and for them to suggest additions is probably common. To take a writer's work posthumously, change it so drastically that you've reversed the meaning of paragraphs ("I lost at the track" -> "I won at the track"), and then publish it as that author's work without their involvement, I think that's beyond the pale.
The main point is that the process should be collaborative. Both parties are in agreement that the changes improve the result. And, I, for one, had no desire to do the author's work for them.
People are rightfully pointing out how ridiculous some of the overt substantive changes in that end poem are, but I was pretty amazed by how even the quite minor changes totally alter the feel of the thing too.
"Sit on a couch and look at a wall"
to
"Laying on the couch and looking at the wall"
loses a lot somehow in a hard-to-pin-down way. It's almost an impressively efficient butchering
"Sit" is from Middle English sitten, from Old English sittan, from Proto-West Germanic sittjan, from Proto-Germanic sitjaną, from Proto-Indo-European *sed- (“sit”).
"Lay" is from Middle English lay, from Old French lai, from Latin laicus, from Ancient Greek λαϊκός (laïkós).
In English, "sit" feels immediate and active where "lay" is passive and indirect. The distinction is both important and rooted in history.
It is incredibly stupid that we still have editors trying to force English poetry into Latinate forms almost a millenium after the battle of Hastings and all the consequent Anglo/Norman jockeying for position.
Can't comment about the roots of the words, but I agree with your assessment of those words.
This is actually one of my favorite games to play with friends, taking a word and talking about it's connotations, or contrasting it with another similar word. Nothing super academic, just our own thoughts and feelings and examples of use.
Whenever there's a pair of synonyms where one is fancier than the other it's almost always because one is French in origin (i.e. used by the Norman upper class) and the other German (i.e. used by the Anglo-Saxon peasantry). Think "purchase" vs. "buy".
My favourite example is "fact" vs "factitious". The word "factitious" actually means bogus, make, made up. Whereas "fact" means quite the opposite. However they both come from the same latin word "facere" which means to do or to make.
"lay" as in "layman" or "lay preacher" does have the derivation you give.
As a verb, "lay it down" has Germanic roots, e.g. "liegen". The Greek cognate seems to be "lexos", "bed". (All this from Skeat's etymological dictionary.)
"Laying on the couch" is loaded with the kind of psychoanalytical implications that Bukowski hated. Which is a major reason why this feels so wrong. He would lie on the floor and listen to the radio.
In a way that proves the point as well though - not only are there inconsistent rules there are also seemingly under-determined rules where you can use one of many options (but only sometimes!)
Especially if enough Amazon internal tools rely on it - would be funny if there were a repeat of the FB debacle where Amazon employees somehow couldn't communicate/get back into their offices because of the problem they were trying to fix
Is there a correlation between wealth and loneliness? I could definitely imagine it being effect for the poorest in society but I wouldn't be surprised if, once you've reached a threshold of being able to keep your head above water, money and loneliness had very little relationship if at all
Unless I'm mistaken (very possible), the existing cubic Newton method they discuss already has this convergence guarantee, but introduces a lot of extra expensive work at each step. The specific contribution of the paper is finding clever regularization tricks to keep this guarantee while sidestepping the extra hassle the cubic method needs
>Scientific progress is amazing today, far faster today than at any point in history
What're you basing this on/how're you defining the growth rate here? Not rhetorical, would be interested to see your data since it seems quite a common argument to hold that it's slowing in lots of areas
> What're you basing this on/how're you defining the growth rate here? Not rhetorical, would be interested to see your data since it seems quite a common argument to hold that it's slowing in lots of areas
One kind of metric to look at are published papers, patents filed, money invested into science, total citations. All of them are increasing a lot. But these are terrible and unconvincing, you could see the numbers go up if we were spinning our wheels.
The value of science and engineering should really be measured in terms of how much easier they make our lives. If you look at that, it's hard to find a metric that doesn't show that scientific progress is healthy and increasing. Moore's law is still going. The cost of solar per Watt is down like 100x in 30 years. The cost of batteries is down 50x in 30 years. The cost of sequencing a genome is down 10,000x in 20 years. Productivity per worker doubled in 30 years. 30 years ago digital cameras were super low resolution, now they're amazing. 20 years ago computer vision could barely detect a person walking in front of car, it was state of the art research; it's now so reliable the new infrastructure bill makes it mandatory for new cars.
I picked examples from all sorts of areas of the economy and human life for a reason: none of these are down to one discovery. They required countless advances from material science, to basic physics, even the mathematics, engineering, etc.
Everything is far cheaper to make today and people are far more productive compared to 30 years ago, and it's just incomparable compared to 60 years ago.
But I get it. It doesn't feel that way. That's not a science problem. That's a politics problem. The gains from all of these improvements at a societal level are mostly going to the ultra-rich sadly, because people vote against their own best interests routinely.
You're confusing engineering and technology with fundamental research.
Digital cameras and batteries aren't in the same league as game changing concepts like quantum theory and relativity.
Game changers don't just mean you can make stuff cheaper, they mean you can imagine completely new kinds of stuff that were literally unthinkable before the game changed.
Before you can improve batteries you have to invent the concept of a battery. Which means having some basic understanding of electricity. Before you can improve computer vision you have to invent the concept of a computer. Which requires inventing a theory of computability.
And so on.
The point is there really hasn't been a lot happening at the game changer level for a long time now. Refinement is fine, but it's unwise to confuse it with fundamentals.
> You're confusing engineering and technology with fundamental research.
This pretty much gives away that you aren't a scientist. The vast majority of fundamental research opens up new ground in highly specialized areas. It slowly trickles out as improvements that you don't seem like "game changing concepts" but they required game changing concepts at a low level to get things done. That's scientific progress and that's the game changer.
> Game changers don't just mean you can make stuff cheaper, they mean you can imagine completely new kinds of stuff that were literally unthinkable before the game changed.
And I don't think you've ever dealt with transitioning science from the lab to industry. The game changer is the cost and availability. There are plenty of amazing things that don't matter in real life because they aren't practical. They aren't game changers.
> Before you can improve batteries you have to invent the concept of a battery. Which means having some basic understanding of electricity. Before you can improve computer vision you have to invent the concept of a computer. Which requires inventing a theory of computability.
You definitely don't need computability to invent a computer. And you've got the discovery of the battery exactly backward. First Volta made a battery by trying to replace frog parts with paper and brine. Then we could go back and understand electricity; that was Volta's real lasting contribution. Before we had batteries electricity wasn't understood at all.
> The point is there really hasn't been a lot happening at the game changer level for a long time now. Refinement is fine, but it's unwise to confuse it with fundamentals.
This is nonsense. Who are you to decide what is or isn't fundamental? Why are scientists and engineers supposed to bow to your aesthetic sense?
No. All that matters is results. And the result is, 3x productivity increase in 50 years. And all of those other things I showed you, hundreds of x improvements in all sorts of practical engineering areas that make daily life far better. What matters are all of the incremental gains because they enable technological revolutions.
>man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
According to the immortal Douglas Adams they just have more pressing concerns.
How much of that is revenue from actual crypto-related business vs. just appreciation of crypto the company owns? Feels like the impressiveness of this trend really depends on that
