Completely right about knowing v doing but even the knowing gets skewed. The real problem that too much sucrose and fructose (whether added to not) is insulin overproduction.
I get annoyed when some people talk about an apple is better than a cookie because an apple has "natural" sugar as if sugar cane is synthetic. I will return to this example.
Humans only metabolize carbohydrates, protein, fat, and alcohol. In general all carbs breakdown to glucose. Complex carbs take longer to do this, so the metabolizing of it actually burns more calories, but there's also other biochemical and endocrine factors that vary by age, health, activity level, etc.
It's still true that complex carbs, usually having more micro nutrients and being slower to metabolize are better for us. Nonetheless, they all become glucose at some point (except nonsoluble fiber).
To return to the apple cookie example, though. If the cookie is made with oats, butter, and nuts, it may actually be much slower than the apple in provoking an insulin response. And if one eats the equivalent calories, the cookie provides oil and protein.
The author seems to think the gylcemic index is something inherent in a food rather than a measure of a metabolic process.
Toast with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon produces is better than just toast.
Even people who "know" don't seem to know it's not the sugar. It's the insulin.
> It's still true that complex carbs, usually having more micro nutrients and being slower to metabolize are better for us.
So your friends are correct, even if their reasoning is wrong.
> If the cookie is made with oats, butter, and nuts, it may actually be much slower than the apple in provoking an insulin response.
This claim requires evidence. My understanding is that the slower digestion preventing the insulin spike is due to the apple's sugar being embedded in the fiber.
Also, even if this claim is correct, then your friends are "only" right about practically all cookies.
> Toast with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon produces is better than just toast.
On the advice of my Dr 15 years ago I started taking 3 grams of niacin a day. Within 6 months my hdl more than doubled from the upper 20s to low 60s and my triglycerides dropped from > 600 to < 150 and have stayed that way since.
The problem isn't the Oxford comma. The problem is lazy--or possibly rapid, if one is generous--writing and editing (if any). If the use or absence of a comma causes ambiguity, it's probably best to rewrite the sentence.
I believe it was Orwell who wrote a friend: "I am sorry this letter is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter."
1. There is no infinitive in either phrase, though it is true that "writing" is a non-finite form. As you note, it is a gerund.
2. While you are correct to say that a gerund is a noun, you're wrong to say that it isn't a verb. You can clearly see that it retains the complements of the verb. A gerund is a verb cast into the syntactic form of a noun just as a participle is a verb cast into the syntactic form of an adjective.
3. A transitive verb is one that takes a direct object. An intransitive verb is any other verb.
4. "Them" is a direct object of "write" in "writing them", but an indirect object, marked by the preposition to, in "writing to them".
5. Just to be really clear, it is only possible to supply a direct object to the gerund "writing" because it is a verb that (in British usage) takes a direct object. There is no such concept as the object of a noun.
> 2. While you are correct to say that a gerund is a noun, you're wrong to say that it isn't a verb. You can clearly see that it retains the complements of the verb. A gerund is a verb cast into the syntactic form of a noun just as a participle is a verb cast into the syntactic form of an adjective.
Conceded also. This is going terribly. Have I been hustled? Are you a ringer?
> 3. A transitive verb is one that takes a direct object. An intransitive verb is any other verb.
> 4. "Them" is a direct object of "write" in "writing them", but an indirect object, marked by the preposition to, in "writing to them".
Sure, though I didn't say otherwise. I admit I wouldn't have said #3 part B so absolutely; I wonder if there are edge cases.
> I admit I wouldn't have said #3 part B so absolutely; I wonder if there are edge cases.
Sort of. There isn't a semantic difference between direct and indirect objects (there are some tendencies). Latin verbs with a prefix very commonly take indirect objects where you would expect a direct one. It's pretty normal (for us) to just think of that situation as the verb taking its object in a weird case; I have no idea how the Romans thought about it.†
As a matter of technical terminology, those are just the definitions of transitive and intransitive verbs. How you apply the concept of "direct object" may vary from language to language. In English a direct object is one that is an otherwise unmarked object of a verb (assuming we're happy with our ability to identify those) and an indirect object is one marked by a preposition. In Latin a direct object is one that appears in the accusative case, and an indirect object is one in the dative case. In Mandarin Chinese direct objects are unmarked and most typically appear after the verb, while indirect objects are marked with a preposition and appear before the verb... but if you want to rearrange the elements of a sentence, there is a preposition of this kind that serves no other purpose than to allow a direct object to be positioned before the verb.
† This is a hazier situation than occurs with deponent verbs, where the evidence is very strong that the verbs "really are" active in Latin despite requiring grammatically passive forms.
Thanks. If you like, share how you know grammar and syntax so well (I was joking about the GPT and of course nobody is required to disclose anything). I know a good bit; I am unused to being outgunned; and I'd like to learn more.
I have some undergraduate training in linguistics, though I wouldn't attribute much grammar knowledge to that. It does come in when you see me complaining that there's no semantic distinction between direct and indirect objects.
I've always been interested in language, so I am likely to pick things up and remember them.
You get fun facts about Latin and Mandarin because those are the languages I have studied. If you want to have examples available of how different languages work and how different categories might or might not be realized in different languages, there's not really a substitute for learning different languages.†
Studying Latin in particular is likely to familiarize you with a lot of English grammatical terminology, much of which was developed for the purpose of discussing Latin grammar. Latin's grammatical structures can be very explicit compared to English or Chinese (where the grammatical structure is of course still present, but it's more difficult to point at something concrete in the sentence and say "_this_ element of the sentence reflects _this_ grammatical feature!")
† Another example of what you might consider edge cases in the space of transitive/intransitive verbs or direct/indirect objects: in Latin, dono is a "ditransitive" verb, which is to say that it may take two direct objects, defined appropriately for Latin as objects which appear in the accusative case. This is pretty unusual. The two direct objects of dono (source of the English verb donate) are a gift and a recipient.
Latin has a much more common giving-related verb, do, which means "give". It is obviously possible to supply a gift and a recipient to do, but for this verb the gift is a direct object and the recipient is an indirect object. (In fact, this verb is the source of the dative case's name!)
So far these are just fun facts about Latin. But if you draw analogies to English, you find something interesting: once we define English direct objects as unmarked and indirect objects as marked by a preposition, we find that most English verbs accepting an indirect object may be regularly transformed into ditransitive verbs. "He bought a dress for his wife" and "he bought his wife a dress" are exactly equivalent statements. Here, some additional structure is provided by the ironclad English requirement that the first object in "ditransitive form" must correspond to the indirect object in "transitive form", and it's common to just call the first of the ditransitive objects an indirect object.
This might lead us to think that "ditransitive" doesn't really make sense as a separate class of verbs in English, but that's not quite true either; there are certain verbs, like bet, which can accept multiple direct objects none of which may appear as indirect objects instead. ("Bet [you] [four dollars] they won't.")
I believe that either object of an English verb in ditransitive form may be promoted to the subject of a passive form of the verb. That would be good evidence that it is really a direct object, except that in English the prepositionally-marked indirect objects of verbs may also be promoted to the subject of a passive form of the verb ("The baby wants to be sung to").
Linux Format quit shipping CDs with the magazine, oh, about a year ago, maybe. I think some of it is also "shrinkage" (the term in retail in the U.S. for shoplifting + breakage, etc). I liked the CDs for many reasons, one of which was once you open a browser...off you go. However, there are still people in the world who may want to learn but have rate-limited, firewalled, or dodgy Internet. It's like cashless systems that cut out millions of people. [1]
I don't see why it would be a problem with items mailed, except it would add another step for the publisher or distributor. But along those lines it irks me when I subscribe to a print publication that includes digital and after I login the only benefit I get it to read more stuff on the same tracker-loaded, privacy-invading enshitified site.
[1] During COVID I protested vigorously at my church about going virtual for many reasons. One of which was elderly or impoverished members who could not (because of either access or ability) easily access whichever platform was being used. There are so many variations of "works on my system" in the world.
Too long ago (~2004) I read a good article about something like deep-linking with micro-payments. That's the best I can remember. The idea was to use hypertext extensively as references within on-line writing and have some kind of system like $.001 for every time a link was used.
That doesn't feel entirely adequate as an explanation. Anyway, it was before blockchain or some other mechanism to implement it, but I thought it was an interesting direction to pursue.
Personally I have found dark modes with color schemes like, say, Dracula are visually pleasing immediately but over time become tedious and I notice a pattern of decreased mood that doesn't happen with light modes. So, I use software that adjust screen light based on the time of day rather than dark modes.
The author posed it as a question. It's not about want as much as able. No matter how much I wanted (at 58) to understand the inner working of a LLM, it's beyond me, just like becoming a fighter pilot.
However, even though I don't program, nothing in his list prior to AI is beyond me yet, if I wanted to learn it. I am happy being a 25 years Linux power user who climbed the Emacs learning curve to use org-mode and then gradually added email,rss, irc, web, and gopher modalities to it.
I get annoyed when some people talk about an apple is better than a cookie because an apple has "natural" sugar as if sugar cane is synthetic. I will return to this example.
Humans only metabolize carbohydrates, protein, fat, and alcohol. In general all carbs breakdown to glucose. Complex carbs take longer to do this, so the metabolizing of it actually burns more calories, but there's also other biochemical and endocrine factors that vary by age, health, activity level, etc.
It's still true that complex carbs, usually having more micro nutrients and being slower to metabolize are better for us. Nonetheless, they all become glucose at some point (except nonsoluble fiber).
To return to the apple cookie example, though. If the cookie is made with oats, butter, and nuts, it may actually be much slower than the apple in provoking an insulin response. And if one eats the equivalent calories, the cookie provides oil and protein.
The author seems to think the gylcemic index is something inherent in a food rather than a measure of a metabolic process.
Toast with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon produces is better than just toast.
Even people who "know" don't seem to know it's not the sugar. It's the insulin.