[RD] Daily Graphs and Charts

[JohannaK]

I mean I am from Barcelona, I have known two languages since birth and most people here have, and I cant remember knowing anyone who stutters or stammers in an actually impairing way.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

BI or multilingual education has a lot of advantages, as learning a language also means exposition to other cultures but if the children are young they have an increased chance for speech disorders (like stuttering).

Never heard of that before.

 

[Samez]

A friend of mine works as speech therapist specialized on working with trilingually educated children (French, German, English). I don't have any proof for her claim as she is currently in Norway, but as her business runs quite well i don't have a reason to distrust her. As mentioned above there are also a lot of advantages from multilingual education which probably still outweigh the disadvantage of an increased disorder risk.

 

[JohannaK]

Having studying SLA and some linguistics at uni for a couple years, I am pretty confident in saying that your friend relies on at best outdated scholarship.

 

[Synobun]

A friend of mine works as speech therapist specialized on working with trilingually educated children (French, German, English). I don't have any proof for her claim as she is currently in Norway, but as her business runs quite well i don't have a reason to distrust her. As mentioned above there are also a lot of advantages from multilingual education which probably still outweigh the disadvantage of an increased disorder risk.

I could see a situation where unguided multi-language use could exacerbate a preexisting speech impediment or neurological condition. To cause an impediment seems suspect. I wasn't far-off from your friend's repertoire (Flemish, French, and English) so it is odd that I was told essentially the opposite of what your friend is working with. We're both only throwing anecdotes at each other here, though, so take that as you will.

 

[Hrothbern]

There has been a research project on bilingual stuttering that shows up a lot on internet, perhaps that helped creating the myth

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2597689/

 

[Kyriakos]

I could see a situation where unguided multi-language use could exacerbate a preexisting speech impediment or neurological condition. To cause an impediment seems suspect. I wasn't far-off from your friend's repertoire (Flemish, French, and English) so it is odd that I was told essentially the opposite of what your friend is working with. We're both only throwing anecdotes at each other here, though, so take that as you will.

I mostly agree, yet i would add that given specific mental-make up of a person (kid in this case) the second language can trigger stuttering quite realistically. I agree with you that this isn't a causation, but a potentiality to act as trigger, which -at any rate- other things also possess and thus the second language itself is not universally tied imo to stuttering issues. (btw, i did develop a stutter at mid elementary, and it did manifest in second language too, at times even more heavily; it is a psychological issue anyway).

 

[JohannaK]

On the other hand, this article says, in the conclusions to section 3d. Cultural Factors:

[...] Also the effect of bilingualism awaits considerably more research in order to establish basic evidence of risk. Given the size of the population involved, such efforts should be listed as one of the field’s priorities.

Basically, a single study is not evience enough to be safe on such broad conclusions. Nevermind that the other study does not say that bilinguals stutter more, but that they recover more slowly from it.

 

[Arwon]

Census results out today, showing a huge rise in Mandarin speakers and continued decline in Italian and Greek.

Mandarin didn't even surpass Cantonese until after 2006 and now there's almost a million Chinese language speakers out of a population of 24 million.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Less than 100K greek speakers? ^_^

 

[Arakhor]

There's only 11 million of you in the homeland as it is!

 

[Arwon]

These are top 5 in 2016. Greek is 6th at 237k down from 264k in 2001. Older people dying I suppose, as with Italian. Those two languages were 1 and 2 among non-English speaking households in 2001.

 

[Kyriakos]

There's only 11 million of you in the homeland as it is!

Fair odds for any greek ^_^

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

 

[Arakhor]

The last joke was blatantly telegraphed, but I still laughed.

 

[JohannaK]

Fully representative cross-section of the Unitedstatesian people... terrifying indeed!

 

[Kyriakos]

Well, the Manson thing is more stupid than funny (moreso in an -albeit silly- comparison with ancient athenian assemblies), cause if you are a con or in jail you lose your rights to be elected to political office. I think that this is true in all countries, including the US

 

[12tn2]

Habitable zones

 

[Hrothbern]

View attachment 473412 Habitable zones

Yeah, the habitable zone of the sun moves.
We are meanwhile on the edge of that zone, soon to leave it, and over time the sun will evaporate earth and later the sun will be a red giant and engulfe the earth.

But no need for doom thinking here
We can move the earth to higher orbits and follow the habitable zone
and before the sun becomes a red giant we can relocate the earth to another solar system with a sun that lives longer because it is smaller.

Moving the earth by the same "collision-gravitational pull" technique used to shoot our interstellar satellites into deep space with Jupiter.
For the earth we can use meteors for that https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwarming.climatechange
the nicety of this method is that we can finetune to the optimal location in the habitable zone also taking in account climate changes.

Travelling as a nomad planet to another solar system will take a long time, but because it will take tens of billions of years before our molten core cools down we only have to dig in.

"The main factor slowing down the cooling is radioactive decay of long living atoms, namely Uranium-238, Uranium-235, Thorium-232, and Potassium-40, with half-lives of roughly 4.47 billion years, 704 million years, 14.1 billion years, and 1.28 billion years, respectively. From the half-lives of these isotopes and a comparison with the age of Earth, you can see that internal heat production via radioactive decay will likely persist at near current levels for quite some time to come. Verhoogen gives 5000 K as the core temperature now, and a 250 K cooling since the formation of the Solar System, 4.5 billion years ago. If it really does cool at that rate (55 degrees per billion years), it would take something like 91 billion years to cool to 0 Kelvin"

 

[Cutlass]