> Populations of the weeds have been found that are impervious to nine different classes of herbicides. The plant can grow more than two inches a day to reach eight feet in height and dominate entire fields. Originally from the desert Southwest, it boasts a sturdy root system and can withstand droughts.
Well, I'm sold. Where do I buy Palmer amaranth? What about water hemp - is it edible?
Another issue I ran into recently is that `Symbol.for(str)` will cause the entirety of `str` to be allocated forever in Chromium, but not in Firefox. (It's inevitable that `Symbol.for()` will have some memory impact, as a global allocation, but it's possible to mitigate it somewhat.)
IMO it's too bad that the effort to create a Node-alike driven by Spidermonkey instead of V8 never got anywhere.
> To tap into the core layers of language, Starostin’s team starts with an established list of core, universal concepts from the human experience. It includes meanings like “rock,” “fire,” “cloud,” "two,” “hand,” and “human,” amongst 110 total concepts.
In English, "rock" and "human" are loans and "cloud" is an innovative form.
> For Proto-Japonic, we introduce two distinctly different versions of the wordlist, since there are some significant unresolved problems in its reconstruction where adhering to one or the other solution influences the results of testing – namely, the reconstruction of Proto-Japonic by Sergei Starostin (1991), later adopted for the Altaic etymological dictionary (Starostin et al., 2003), posits an initial *d- for Proto-Japonic, whereas a more conservative approach prefers the phonetic interpretation of the same phoneme as *y- (Martin, 1987, gives no preference to either approach; both Vovin, 2005, and Robbeets, 2005, explicitly reject *d-; see Supplementary Material for details). Ultimately, we have to perform two sets of calculations because of these differences in interpretation of Proto-Japonic phonology.
There's no legitimate reason to follow Starostin here - that reconstruction is based on back-projection of an obviously secondary fortition specific to Yonaguni.
IMO "macrofamily" isn't a well-defined enough concept not to be disputed by definition. Sino-Tibetan and Afroasiatic are very large and very old, but not as controversial as Altaic; Austro-Tai and Dene-Yeniseian are classic "macrofamilies" in that they're positing old relations between different established language families, but they're increasingly accepted, at least as promising lines of research.
Lexical comparison isn't the standard for demonstrating language relatedness, though. Regular sound correspondences, morphological evidence, and commonalities in irregularities (e.g. English I/me ~ French je/moi or English good/better ~ German gut/besser) are ideal. Quantitative methods range from extremely preliminary to nonsense.
This might be unfair of me, but IMO research from the Greenberg school (the Starostins, Bengtson, Ruhlen, etc.) or the automatic phylogeny school (List, the ASJP, etc.) can pretty much be ignored.
> I thought all plants (by definition?) need photosynthesis to stay alive in non-dormant states.
There are parasitic plants that don't photosynthesize at all, like the Monotropoideae and Rafflesiaceae.
Among photosynthesizing plants, rhubarb can be "forced" (grown in complete darkness to reduce bitterness and get an earlier harvest), and potatoes can sprout if left in the pantry for too long.
Well, I'm sold. Where do I buy Palmer amaranth? What about water hemp - is it edible?