From: bill.sloman@ieee.org   
      
   On 31/01/2026 7:00 am, Nioclás Pól Caileán de Ghloucester wrote:   
   > Bill Sloman  wrote:   
   > |------------------------------------------------------------------------|   
   > |"Languages aren't learned any faster if you learn them young"           |   
   > |------------------------------------------------------------------------|   
   >   
   > It is much easier for a child to learn a language than it is for an   
   > old person.   
      
   Only because a child doesn't have anything else to. The downside of   
   learning your first language as a child is that you have to work out   
   what language is.   
      
   Noam Chomsky thinks that evolution has provided every human with a   
   built-in language learning mechanism, but people with a better idea of   
   of how evolution works are aware that it would have to have been built   
   on some pre-existing processing mechanisms, and nobody has any useful   
   ideas about what that might have been. Music processing has had some   
   attention, but hasn't offered any useful insights that I've heard of.   
      
   People differ a lot in their capacity to learn second languages.   
   Dutch is pretty much identical to German, and if you are fluent in one   
   most people can get to be fluent in the other in six months. English   
   isn't wildly different from either, but the benchmark there is eighteen   
   months (as I did at 50 years of age - I did have minimal German then).   
   Basque is about a different from any other European language as you can   
   get, but apparently most people can learn even that just as fast.   
      
   > Bill Sloman  wrote:   
   > |------------------------------------------------------------------------|   
   > |"The same paper described a ripple carry counter                        |   
   > |where the carry propagation wasn't fast enough to match the maximum     |   
   > |count rate claimed. No mention at all of a synchronous counter.         |   
   > |                                                                        |   
   > |It was a particularly horrible example, quite the worst I've ever seen."|   
   > |------------------------------------------------------------------------|   
   >   
   > What paper is that paper? Why is it published?   
      
   The comment is   
      
   Sloman A.W. “Comment on ‘Modular digital box-car for applications in   
   pulsed laser spectroscopy” Review of Scientific Instruments,  67 3763-4   
   (1996)   
      
   If you go to the comment you will get a reference to the paper I was   
   commenting on. I was once told that my comment was more interesting than   
   paper I was commenting, which wasn't much of a compliment.   
      
   --   
   Bill Sloman, Sydney   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)