The very many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XXII

[Carras Dad]

Why do I find video game music to be better than the music my generation listens to, i.e. love songs and "gangsta swag"?

because you, unlike everyone else, are special.

 

[strijder20]

Many people raised in two languages do just that - presumably the other one is French? - but it's unusual for it to happen with a language that you've learned from school-age, unless you're actually using that language at the time: I think in French when I'm speaking French, and German when I'm speaking German, and read those foreign languages I do understand without mentally 'translating'.

No, it's English, and I've been raised solely in Dutch. Noone is speaking English with me either. I've only started learning English at school 3 years ago.
I only use English when reading these forums (+- 30 min. a day) or playing computer games (+-30 min. a day). It's really annoying when I'm starting to translate from English to Dutch and therefore use 'wrong' expressions by litterally translating
At the moment I'm trying to force myself into thinking in Dutch again but it requires a lot of effort.

Yes. I've had dreams in French from time to time.

Are you from Canada?

 

[Borachio]

No. Indeed. But I did try very hard to learn French for about 10 years. And I can still manage to speak it very badly in my dreams. It's just a matter of how much attention you give to any subject, I think - that you're liable to dream about it.

 

[Synobun]

In order of being taught, my mother tongue is Flemish, then French, then English. I exclusively think and dream in English and to be honest, I've all but forgotten the first two languages just because I like English that much more. In hindsight, that's a poor decision since businesses love a guy who's trilingual (and at one point, attempting to be quadlingual but that was quickly stomped on by parents).

 

[hobbsyoyo]

No. Indeed. But I did try very hard to learn French for about 10 years. And I can still manage to speak it very badly in my dreams. It's just a matter of how much attention you give to any subject, I think - that you're liable to dream about it.

When I dream in Spanish, I dream myself being much more fluent than I actually am. It's weird.

 

[Farm Boy]

The pacing of your dream accommodates your ability to come up with the language.

 

[Radio Noer]

So, once again I have a physics project I'm looking for opinions on. This time I have to protect 2 eggs from a 5 kg sled moving at about 3 m/s using noodles and straws, so here's what I have so far.

Spoiler :

The black is my main frame (except the farthest right line, that was just an arbitrary cutoff because I didn't want to draw the other side). The light blue will be straws bent into a pyramidal shape, yellow represents a column of elbow macaroni noodles (chosen for their hollowness and relative crushability), and red is spaghetti noodles, the slightly longer dashes representing two noodles glue together.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Has anybody else, when skimming the thread titles in the OT, accidentally merged two of the titles together and made themselves confused?

I mean sort of like the interesting thread juxtapositions, you read the first half of one title and then accidentally jump down to the next for the second half and produce weird stuff as (this is what just happened to me) "State of the Union 2013: 4th Annual CFC Animated Babe Thread"

Ive done it a few other times and wondered if it was just me

 

[Farm Boy]

I think I would click on that thread.

 

[Michkov]

Tends to happen to me from time to time, as I open the threads in new tabs. When I get to the tabs I sometimes wonder how I got into that thread.
Having my browser on fullscreen with hidden tabs isn't helping either.

 

[nc-1701]

Any difference between a "disk" and a "disc" when refering to shapes? (Especially in the sense of a mathematical object.) If not (as preliminary Googling suggests) then what is the preferred spelling?

 

[Borachio]

Nope.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc

Disk is earlier. That's about it. I think. Looks pretty much arbitrary to me. If it was a work/study thing, I'd just use whichever the people asking me to do stuff asked me to.

 

[Farm Boy]

So, once again I have a physics project I'm looking for opinions on. This time I have to protect 2 eggs from a 5 kg sled moving at about 3 m/s using noodles and straws, so here's what I have so far.

Spoiler :

The black is my main frame (except the farthest right line, that was just an arbitrary cutoff because I didn't want to draw the other side). The light blue will be straws bent into a pyramidal shape, yellow represents a column of elbow macaroni noodles (chosen for their hollowness and relative crushability), and red is spaghetti noodles, the slightly longer dashes representing two noodles glue together.

Are there limits on the noodles you can use? Are you just keeping the sled from hitting them? Assuming limitless noodles, brute forcing the situation is admittedly inelegant, but probably effective.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Why do modern computer games and CGI films cost a lot to develop, when everything is done on a computer?

It was a question I was asked and I don't know the answer.

 

[Borachio]

Because it's a lot of work, and eats up a lot of man-hours, is my best guess.

They used to say that computers would save animators a lot of time and labour, but it turns out it's pretty much the same amount of work.

Of course, doing something like LoTR battle scenes must be a lot cheaper to do in CGI than it would be to employ several million 100,000s of actors to do the work.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

But there's nothing physically being made.

 

[timtofly]

Why do modern computer games and CGI films cost a lot to develop, when everything is done on a computer?

It was a question I was asked and I don't know the answer.

To cover the cost of the computers involved?

 

[Traitorfish]

But there's nothing physically being made.

Hardware, software, man-hours, it all adds up. Just because the final product is a series of ones and zeroes rather than a physical object doesn't alter the fact that it embodies a tremendous amount of time and resources.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I'm not sure if that answer will work.

 

[Borachio]

Why not? Is it something to do with this group of people you know?

They do sound very interesting.