Home distillation has been legal in New Zealand since 1996. I'm not from NZ, but from what I can tell from afar, it has not caused any significant problems. Stills are legal and can be bought in shops. There are commercially available countertop appliances which can produce half a litre of 80 proof vodka from a few litres of fermented sugar water.
North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.
>North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation.
I find it interesting that you have this notion. I was born in 1984. The history books in school were still implying that home distillation was dangerous. "Rot gut whiskey" "bath tub gin" are phrases that continue to come to mind when I think of the prohibition days.
No one I have ever met in all of the different levels of society here have had any strong disdain or distrust of home brewing or distillation. By the time of my upbringing, at least, the general population in the US was content with the alcohol laws. They are not aware of how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are. They are not aware of the post prohibition three tier system. They are consumers of alcohol not producers. That is what prohibition in the US did. "House wine" in the US is the wine a restaurant picks for cheap profits. "House wine" in the old days or in europe is wine you make at home. We, in general, lost that piece of culture with prohibition. It never disappeared in some parts of the country though. Appalachia moonshiners kept the tradition going in mind and spirit for the whole country.
If your statement was about other drugs, you would be spot on. Prohibition regarding alcohol was not accepted by almost every demographic strata. Prohibition of other drugs is a different story for cultural reasons.
> how easy home brewing, wine-making, and distilling are
They're not technically complex, but you need space and time for them, and producing a beer you would actually want to drink and bottling it isn't trivial.
I know one guy who moonshines for family-and-friends consumption, not sale, and I'll pass. It's not that much cheaper than just buying it (note: my state alcohol taxes are not that high) and it's a lot more work. I might make a batch of wine -> brandy from fruits that grew on a tree in my back yard if I had plums, just to say I did, but I'm not interested in making a big batch of corn liquor.
Fascinating to see Canada and the US and the opposite extremes of that. Also interesting to see Indonesia, who had a massive genocide within living memory, as second most trusting. Most of all I'd love to see this study replicated in different years to get a sense of how quickly these attitudes can change.
There's a poem carved into the stonework of Washington Union Station, part of the art installation The Progress of Railroading from c. 1909:
the old mechanic arts / controlling new forces / build new highways / for goods and men / override the ocean / and make the very ether / carry human thought
the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose
> I'm amazed they (or others) haven't rolled their own wireless audio standard by now.
They have. Apple has AirPlay and MFi which includes their own proprietary set of codecs and protocols for media streaming over a link similar to but not actually Bluetooth. Quite a few devices support it, such as my hearing aids.
Also, while the new Bluetooth LE Audio shares the Bluetooth name, it's a completely new protocol for most intents and purposes; for example audio can be streamed one-way without pairing first, and it's surprisingly low latency (20 ms or so).
Some style guides recommend the diaeresis over doubled vowels when they are pronounced separately. The idea is I believe from French: maïs, Noël, etc.
I was taught to do it that way in public school here in Canada in the 90s; it is the textbook proper way to spell words like coördination. I was also taught that no one actually spells it that way and that co-ordination and coordination are both fine and far more common.
> The idea is I believe from French: maïs, Noël, etc.
Apropos of nothing, except that it will allow me to vent a bit, it also changes the rule for the pronunciation of the last consonant of French words.
Normally the lack of a trailing "e" would mean the last consonant is not-sounded but the diaeresis changes it: maïs/"my-isz", Noël/"noh-ell", etc.
And yes Moët (the champagne) is pronounced "moh-ett" in France and by French speakers.
It's incredibly annoying having someone subtly but in a slightly superior manner "correct" your pronunciation by repeating the mispronunciation right after you've pronounced it correctly - "sure, I'll order some some MOHAY". Outside I'm smiling and nodding pretending not to notice, inside I'm screaming "IT'S MOH-fcking-ETT MTHERF*KER - MOH-ETT."
> it also changes the rule for the pronunciation of the last consonant of French words.
This was a very well explained distinction, with the exception of you using "Noël" as one of the examples, since "Noel" would still have a sounded "L". It would be weird to a French speaker but would most likely end up being pronounced somewhat like the English "null".
> And yes Moët (the champagne) is pronounced "moh-ett" in France and by French speakers.
My favorite Moët mispronunciation is one that it took me several months to understand: Russians pronounce it as if it was spelled in Cyrillic, so they say "mah- yacht".
There is a famous MORGENSHTERN song which I only understood was about champagne when I saw the music video for the first time.
> This was a very well explained distinction, with the exception of you using "Noël" as one of the examples
Do you have reason to believe it's true, or are you commenting to say that it would have been a well-explained distinction if it were true?
I tried to verify it, and found nothing but evidence that implicitly or explicitly contradicted it.
(The best I could find in favor were the English wikipedia page on the house of Perrier-Jouët, which lists a pronunciation with /t/ -- the French page lists no pronunciation at all -- and the 19th-century book Comment on prononce le français, which confirms that maïs is pronounced with a final /s/, but lists it without comment alongside several other words that feature the same irregular pronunciation of "-s", none of which include a diaeresis. I'm compelled to infer that the realization of /s/ in maïs has nothing to do with the diaeresis.
The way I was taught this in French school is that the diaeresis causes the letter to be pronounced separately, so in maïs the "¨" forces you to say "a" and "i" separately (ah- ee) instead of together ("eh" as in "mais" which is an existing French word).
It only affects the diphthong AFAIK, so I agree with you that it's not the reason for why the "s" is pronounced out loud.
The final "s" is usually silent in French and I'm not aware of any rule for what defines the exceptions.
The outcome for the final "-s" is somewhat influenced by the origin of the word, as you would pronounce "bis" differently depending on whether you mean "beige" or half-whole-wheat bread, vs. if you mean "repeated" (from latin).
There are a bunch of such weird exceptions, like "vis" (screw, or past tense of "to see") or "bus" (bus, or drank) which both can be pronounced either depending on their meaning, or "os" which is different depending on plural vs. singular.
For the ending "-s" there is also some regional variation. Where I was born, you would normally pronounce the final "s" in words like "plus" or "moins", and I was very surprised as a teenager to meet people from other French regions who made fun of it.
> The final "s" is usually silent in French and I'm not aware of any rule for what defines the exceptions.
I don't think there is a rule. The 19th-century book said this:
>> L's s'est maintenu ou définitivement rétabli depuis plus ou moins longtemps dans maïs, jadis, fi(l)s et lis (y compris fleur de lis le plus souvent, malgré l'Académie); dans metis, cassis, vis (substantif) et tournevis. La prononciation de ces mots sans s est tout à fait surannée; on ne peut plus la conserver que pour les nécessités de la rime, et encore!
The reference to /s/ being maintained or reestablished, and the pronunciation without /s/ being out of date, suggests to me that the rule was that final /s/ was lost (in Parisian French, I guess...), and that there was a specific effort to put it back into some words. But that's speculation on my part.
It seems clear that bus "bus" and maïs "maize" have a final /s/ because they are foreign words. It's less clear to me why they're given those spellings as opposed to something more like busse.
For the champagne, we see this heading the French wikipedia page:
> Moët & Chandon (prononciation /moɛt‿e ʃɑ̃ˈdɔ̃/) est une maison de Champagne fondée en 1743
But that doesn't imply that there is a /t/ pronounced in "Moët" when not followed by a vowel; that's just normal French liaison. The explicit liaison marker in the phonetic spelling strongly implies that there isn't a /t/ in citation pronunciation.
This is all wiki information though - do you have a better source?
> An increasingly popular modulation scheme is Binary Pseudo Random Phase Coding (BPRPC), whereby the phase of the transmitted signal is switched between 0 and 180 under the control of a binary pseudo random sequence
I know this sounds insane but I've been dwelling on it. Language models are digital Ouija boards. I like the metaphor because it offers multiple conflicting interpretations. How does a Ouija board work? The words appear. Where do they come from? It can be explained in physical terms. Or in metaphysical terms. Collective summing of psychomotor activity. Conduits to a non-corporeal facet of existence. Many caution against the Ouija board as a path to self-inflicted madness, others caution against the Ouija board as a vehicle to bring poorly understood inhuman forces into the world.
There's 2 completely different ways to understand how a Ouija board works. Occult, and Scientific.
Scientific: It's a combined response from everyone's collective unconscious blend of everyone participating. In other words, its a probabilistic result of an "answer" to the question everyone hears.
Occult: If an entity is present, it's basically the unshielded response of that entity by collectively moving everyone's body the same way, as a form of a mild channel. Since Ouija doesn't specific to make a circle and request presence of a specific entity, there's a good chance of some being hostile. Or, you all get nothing at all, and basically garbage as part of the divination/communication.
But comparing Ouija to LLMs? The LLM, with the same weights, with the same hyperparameters, and same questions will give the same answers. That is deterministic, at least in that narrow sense. An Ouija board is not deterministic, and cannot be tested in any meaningful scientific sense.
Everything dies in winter. And then is reborn. Everyone who lives in a cold climate knows deep in their bones that cold and winter are death.
Though if we're going to get stereotypical about national characteristics (a dangerous game) then what might be more specifically Japanese is the particularly heightened understanding of this cycle. Or at least, its expression in art, when in the west we might flinch away.
I'm currently reading Spring Snow, so probably some of Yukio Mishima is drifting into my thoughts here. (Explaining puns ruins them but there it is again: Yuki o. Snow.)
North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.
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