Grrl Power #707 – A fickle modesty
Sydney is entirely too fit on this page. I got distracted trying to do a decent looking back, but she’s supposed to really be a bit more nerd soft, and like ~15 lbs overweight.
This page has one of those sci-fi show situations that we’re all supposed to politely ignore when it comes up, and it’s the selective universal translator. It happens all the time. Worf says qapla’, and the UT doesn’t change it to “success”? Well, fine, it’s an easy argument that Worf is in fact a native English speaker, so the UT isn’t watching for it, but are we supposed to believe that every Klingon captain and crew member they meet also speaks English, or that there’s some translation going on? If that’s the case, why does the UT translate everything they say, except qapla’?
Presumably Frix doesn’t natively speak modern English, so he’s using a universal translator, but then “human” and “flurbleblox” and “zipoo” all mean things in his native language. So why isn’t it translating them? When Frix says “human,” Sydney should hear “nose cheese” or whatever human means in his native language.
The solution is kind of built into the science behind a really good UT. You can’t just do a word for word translation of what’s being said. Language has context. Any good UT would have to have a massively sophisticated VI that is constantly monitoring for context. When an English speaker uses the word “you,” context determines if the “you” is singular or plural, but many languages have separate words for a singular “you” and a plural “you.” (Actually English does as well, but only if you count “y’all.”) This is a big part of the reason that translating text from one language to another then back again can result in a bunch of crazy results. Meaning is lost. A really good UT would not only have to have comprehensive dictionaries of all languages involved, including slang, but also be able to tag words and sentences with context metadata that wouldn’t be lost even if something was translated through 29 different languages.
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Sydney has a real aversion to people looking at her butt.
No wonder Sydney was able to keep her cool through all the battles with Sciona and the Squidbilly Aliens. She was wearing her genuine authentic Rainbow Dash panties; guaranteed to make you 20% cooler.
In Star Trek TOS (Episode: Metamorphosis) Kirk explained the basic “theory of operation” for a Universal Trenslator. It goes something like this:
The UT reads brain wave patterns, much llike an EKG but far more sensitive & sophisticated. In essence, certain patterns of thought generate certain patterns in the brain waves that the UT can read. Certain patterns of brain waves indicate certain patterns of thought that are motivated into certain patterns of speech. The UT read the common brain wave patterns in order to translate patterns of thought into patterns of speech & with a wide database of languages, can translate one spoken language into another.
It can even read the thought patterns of creatures that are composed entirely of energy (as the UT was able to translate The Companion’s thoughts). Indeed, the UT could even translate into the Cpmpanion’s mode of “speech” because it was nothing more than a projection of energy patterns. The Companion had no spoken language to translate.
Yeah, that sounds pretty far out there, but the theory IS viable. The biggest trouble is coordinating the readings of brainwaves into a language that the translator might not be familiar with…It would still be able to translate an unknown language into a language that is already known (& included in the database) but it cant translate speech INTO a language it does not know.
So how does it work over ship-to-ship communication?
It translates at the speed of plot.
Well it is a rather nice butt as we all can see in panel ten.
Modesty is a funny thing – also, Rainbow Dash panties? Really? Is that even a thing?
Of course it is!
I mean, so I’ve heard >.>
Adults have diapers (Depends), so why not also let adults have Underoos (underrwear/pajamas)?
Yes, they are. So is Aqua Man underwear for grown men. Everything is a thing.
It’d be easier to get away with that, given that Aquaman is pretty much permanently cool now.
I have SEEN both, and using the later as an example that other similar things also exist for adults.
Yeah but who on earth would want to have Sea Man on their underwear?
I agree sea man shouldn’t be wasted, God gets quite irate.
God DAMN, son! I just wanted to let you know I see what you did there, and I appreciate it thoroughly.
What surprises me is that Sydney chose Rainbow Dash. Wouldn’t Twilight Sparkle (the nerd)
or Pinkie Pie (that is Pinklamena Pie!) (the goofy one) be more in her taste?
Maybe she has a set, each with one of the Mane-6’s symbols on it.
Today’s undies just happen to be Rainbow Dash ones.
Tomorrow’s… Could be Twilight Sparkle ones.
That’s like saying, “…why Superman underpants, when Clark Kent would fit them better?” Or the like. You wear the undies for what you wanna be… or what is comfortable, at the very least, for those of us who have had fun bludgeoned out of us.
And the only person wearing Clark Kent underpants is Superman.
You are forgetting Lois Lane, she wears Kent pants (boy was it awkward that one time she grabbed Pa Kent’s pants :P )
Sydney also makes a rainbow with her orbs. Colorful glowing orbs of godlike power.
As we saw in the fight with the giga mosnters, she leaves a rainbow trail as she flies thanks to the orbs.
Rainbow Dash is the Badass one. And she is fan of badasery.
Rainbow Dash can fly, and is the fastest of the group. I suspect that plays into her choice, at least a little.
Rainbow Dash has also been adopted as an unofficial mascot by some of the US Airforce, so her choice might be due to Maxima and the other teammembers.
Heh… Maxima might have a matching pair…
What’s this?
Maybe it’s because she wants to be 20% cooler?
It sure as hell is. I mean I can never fully grasp why some people you just had sex with feel uncomfortable being naked afterwards unless they have some serious regrets. I also don’t get why some folks can bathe naked together but get bashful after they leave the water. Well I guess I get it if there are a lot of strangers around but not when it’s a private bath. On the same vein I can’t quite grasp the “sex only under the cover of darkness” folks… sure it’s sometimes fun to leave things to imagination but all the time? It’s almost as if folks are taught to be ashamed of sex and/or their own naked body.
Thinking about it… I have been repeatedly told by the folks from US they feel very uncomfortable when naked around other people because of cultural reasons. Even when it comes to nonsexual environment (i.e. baths and sauna) where it’s normal to be naked. Somehow this extends to after sex situations. Sort of your modesty guard is down while having sex but then goes back up to full effect once you are finished. Weird stuff.
Cultural cultural conditioning is a hell of a thing.
well… it’s double Cultural, so it’s extra strength
‘swhat happens when your country was founded by Puritanicals. We’re taught at a young age that nakedness=sex, and sex=immoral, and that’s reinforced throughout our lives by advertisements and media and others around us.
Not to mention the constant messaging that we’re ugly, hairy, fat, pale, dark, scrawny etc etc and here, buy this product to incrementally improve your horrifying self. I bet a high percentage of American adults can’t stand to look at themselves naked, and sure as hell don’t want anyone else to.
Are you a woman? :)
Google “meundies.”
Yes they are actually a real thing. Those specifically as a matter of fact
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/35/38/09/35380944615c15859f02e95880f590c1.jpg
Of course they are, and they are 20% cooler than any other underware, and I am sure Sidney knows it!
Well I have to admit, her swim trunks are just Dashing.
Tho my question is why did she she bring swimming trunks to a mission?
If you’re making a utility belt, you have to go for batman’s “crazy prepared” factor. Though why that bottom doesn’t come with a matching top, we can’t be sure.
Who says it doesn’t, and that she just didn’t put it back on yet?
You never know when you need to take a swim with sexy aliens.
Those are panties, not swim trunks.
Then why was she wearing them in the bath?
You may not have noticed, but Sydney is shy about her body. I’m sure the only reason the shirt didn’t go back on, was because Sydney got distracted when she found out that they hadn’t left yet.
Bigger question is when did she put them on after shenanigans or did she leave that part of her anatomy out of the shenanigans equation?
Keeping in mind that while my male mind is definitely interested in female clothing [or the lack therein], my understanding of female “logic” is open to challenge…
Sydney had to wear something after she said this was to be friendly, not “friendly” and most everything on the ship would fit her like a tent, but she has to keep most stuff dry, which pretty much limits her to a panties and bra bikini. But a bra is well known to accidentally [or “accidentally”] come off, particularly when a back rub is on the agenda. So her current costume is entirely “reasonable”.
Because these aren’t swimming trunks. These are the equivalent of boxer-briefs, but not panties. I believe they are called shortshorts. She’s just swimming in her underwear. She’s just self-conscious about her butt so she put them back on when she was done or maybe a lot of oral took place.
Those are panties not trunks
And they are actually a real thing
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/35/38/09/35380944615c15859f02e95880f590c1.jpg
I like the trunks, but I do admit to being surprised she is wearing them.
I mean if the tops went away you would assume the bottoms would too.
And yeah she really is super well defined for a nerd fat. Even if she were just super skinny nerd instead of slightly overweight nerd she has far too much definition.
It is a fantastically drawn back though. 5 stars. :D
Well, she HAS been getting more exercise as of late…
Yeah, she’s had a few weeks of intensive & frequent exercise; exercise so intensive that not even the mighty Batman could keep her motivated. It’s not really surprising what that (& a more well-educated nutritional diet) can do & how fast it can do it.
As a matter of fact, I’d be more surprised if Sydney wasn’t at least starting to get buff by now.
Fitness does not magically happen in one week of training.
Ah, but you’re missing the Super factor. Even though she’s not a “Super” in the traditional sense, she is super-powered, and apparently, leveling up the artifacts is resulting in a correspondingly leveled-up physique.
I believe that she has had more than one week of training at this point. Dave isn’t going to show every single day because that would be boring. I would guess that it’s been a month. And that’s plenty of time for definition especially since the fat is the first thing to go.
As a skinny nerd, I can tell you, you’d be surprised how quick definition can come and go if I start getting more active than usual, and then slack off again.
When there’s not much of you to begin with, it doesn’t take much for visible changes to appear.
It absolutely does when the training montage is invoked.
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/images/TkokZUOmS7Y0MQNrjK9.gif
I don’t think the muscle definition is too out of place. After all Sydney is co-owner of a comic book shop, which presumably means she has has to heft boxes full of comics around at least once in a while. Paper can be pretty heavy once you have enough of it in a box or stack.
yeah, but that hourglass is too much. If she had been working out for a few weeks to a month, then that much hourglass would still be too much. She has been doing general fitness, not body sculpting exercises. She wasn’t very fat to start though…
Nah, she’s only supposed to be 15lb overweight, and from panel 10 it looks like most of that is on her thighs.
Although ‘overweight’ by who’s definition matters, she doesn’t look overweight in most comics, and I think ‘heroin chic’ is going away anyway, isn’t it?
when did it say she was overweight? I’m trying to place this 15 lbs. I don’t remember that part… she always looked under sized… most vegetarians are usually at weight or below.
See DaveB’s commentary just below the comic.
DO’H , my bad did he just make that up, I don’t remember any comments in story that said she was heavy… oh well he is the creator.
I would have placed her on the low side of normal.
Re: Hourglass. You need a good hip/bust ratio to go with the tiny waist, or some fat in the hip area if you have a small bust, otherwise you look more tube shaped.
Also, Vegetarians and Vegans can get very overweight if they don’t know how to properly select and balance their meals.
She looked really fit in the wetsuit when testing the atmos orb, so I’d say the new exercise regimen is working out.
Tbh, I never took her as being overweight, in fact, she is the scrawny type of nerd in all the drawings. No muscle tone, but no particular amounts of fat either due to the blessings of youth.
It surprised me to see that he was thinking of her as overweight by 15lbs / 6.8kg. On such a small frame that would be a huge difference in how she looks. So no, I’ll personally go by the evidence in the comic itself, she was scrawny, after her exhausting exercise regimen she would be starting to put muscle on, which can be seen in her arms and thighs in this comic.
Btw, back in the day there was a program called Extreme Makeover, in some cases the person getting a makeover refused liposuction (sensibly) so they put them on an exercise regimen and strict diet, in such a case it only took a couple of months to lose the extra weight. You can’t compare daily exhausting exercise with normal weight loss exercise at a local gym, the contestants basically spent their entire day in the gym. So, Sydney starting to get some muscles would be fine assuming her exercise was only scaled back 25-33% from the one that collapsed her.
She had a little belly fat before, but meh if her shop was on hard times and she had recently been working out, and in combat situations it is not abnormal for some weight loss in either of those situations as well. Stress is hard on the body and often times people will skip meals in those times.
I have to agree that the muscle definition is okay – while DaveB may have originally conceived Sydney as heavyset, fact is the character has developed as skinny – and when skinny people go through intense workout regimens, they striate quickly – particularly in places they’re already muscular (which given her background, her back and abs are probably pretty muscular)
Maybe it is more like 13 year-old boy who doesn’t exercise much fit, which could still be within reason; hyperactivity + no exercise = looks fit without any real muscle strength, endurance or coordination.
Yeah, that was my thinking too.
As an unabashed poniphile, I must compliment DaveB on his tasting Sydle’s underroos, er..um
Taste in underroos!
Ha, derned Freud, his slip is showing.
Sydney, 15lb overweight? I’d always understood she was skinny and under-developed?
I am of a similar sentiment, though mine is “skinny and more ordinary-proportioned*.”
* Meaning without a figure and measurements you only see in supermodels, the way The Most Common Superpower trope goes.
So Sydney is a nerd and average-looking (for lack of a better term, and I don’t mean she’s ugly), especially compared to her actually super-powered teammates and the villains they face.
And the comic has DEFINITELY described her as underweight. As Harem puts it here, “A little beanpole”
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/340
While I agree with her being more on the low end of normal Harems comment could have meant that Sydney doesn’t have much bust or hip, compared to the people she hangs out with.
Then that would be ‘stringbean’
@DaveB:
“she’s supposed to really be a bit more nerd soft, and like ~15 lbs overweight.”
Reminds me of how Jewel Staite was asked to put on around that much for her role as Kaylee Frye in “Firefly”/”Serenity”. Mayhaps it’d be a good idea to model Sydney after her?
I must admit, even lacking the supermodel proportions of the people around her, Sydney DOES have a sexy back.
It’s good to see that someone is bringing sexy back.
I met Jewel at a con a number of years back, she is really tiny in regards to height and weight. Thinking of her does actually mentally put her about the same height and weight as Sydney so I really wouldn’t have said Miss Rainbow underoos was any overweight, she gives me the impression of being wiry.
I would agree with wiry. She’s also hyperactive and that type doesn’t tend to build huge quantities of fat either. And you’d have to think that her diet burns something off. Plus I mentioned before she’s probably been in training for at least two weeks and maybe a month and that can do wonders with a good diet. I mean look at what they do on The Biggest Loser and that takes 2-4 months. I think they have to slow it down for some of the massively overweight people simply so they don’t hurt them. But they are losing weight faster than their skin can shrink.
You know, listening to what you guys are saying (including Ben and Elfguy’s comments above):
Maybe DaveB intended to make Sydney slightly overweight or nerdily out of shape but-
that she turned out slender plus past characterizations and the like-
is an example of a mistake *gone right*?
What we have here is more consistent with past updates and does seem to match most people’s expectations/ideas about Sydney more.
What I’d give to have a fall save like that….
I keep almost falling like that, not sure if it means I have a great agility for not falling over or a bad agility to constantly trip and slip
Poor agility, high reflexes
Well, the Flight Orb does give Sydney a high modifier to her Saving Throw vs Falling…
I’d say it’s a nat 18 or so right?
A context sensitive translator would certainly not solve all translation related issues. There is a reason even thoroughly translated and proofread contracts have a phrase like “in doubt refer to the original version”.
Some phrases of languages just can not be translated without loosing a meaning or introducing a new meaning.
The best way for a Universal Translator to find “original context” in any spoken language, it would have to be capable of reading brainwave patterns. As certain thoughts are organized into context for use in speaking, brainwave patterns also organize into commonly-thought contextual patterns to speak with language. Similar thought patterns generate similar patterns in context. The UT uses a database of commonly-held contexts to translate the the context itself into speech, in a far more sensitive & sophisticated way than our modern-day medical device can.
For example, modern-day English speakers may say something like, “You should use a Kleenex to clean that up.” Even though “Kleenex” is a brand name but does NOT describe the item itself, the Translator is reading the context from the brainwaves as “facial tissue” & that’s how it would sound out from the translator.
As it can be guessed, deliberately speaking with ambiguous terms doesn’t work very well for the person who’s trying to obfuscate… This is why most Diplomats agree upon & use a specific spoken language that they learn. The United Nations, for example, uses English & French translations, so they can still lie to each other at whim & will…
Here’s the thing, though. I don’t think this is a Universal Translator. Because, y’see, Earth has had extraterrestrial contact for long enough that there is tourism. Plus, Dabbler has to actually think or look things up on the Internet, which she can through an internal computer. I think the “translator” is something in standard ships that has a slew of languages available. Dabbler just let Cora know that Sydney speaks Terran: English / American idiom, and it’s loaded into the system.
The interesting trick of these Translators is that you don’t get a weird audio effect, because Frix is speaking whatever language that’s common among the Woof (or some sort of Galactic Trade Language). So why doesn’t Sidney hear that *in addition to* the English translation?
I find “intent” is the key to a good advanced universal translator. I always imagined some words due to being used too often end up being mentally stored by the speaker like nouns rather than proper verbs or phrases; not unlike a name or a title such as the title of a book or anime being repeated in your language and not translated as you regard it as “the name” of the book or anime.
copy and pasted, Aesperian universal translator.
how the Aesperian, and many other more advanced technologically speaking, civilizations universal translators work, seeing as how they can even make those not using them understand what they are saying and understand not only spoken words but the communications of being that don’t even speak in the audible wavelengths or use none air vibration based communication.
Well it is rather simple.
See the nanites in our bodies produce a 12th space penetration field that locates and detects the dimensional imprint signatures of other beings when the psycholayer dimensional intent distortion occurs, as caused by their minds as they interact with the various parallel membranes at that quantum level. Using the “dreamscape” aspect of the psycholayer dimension it separates the combined intent distortions into their mental visually stored and semi-cultural abstract variations, then processes these into the relative forms of these concepts and translates them into the mind and related organs used for communication for the listener; so while its being shared in the mind auditory organs are still activated to in a sense “dub over” what the other is saying. For more fragile mental states a visual distortion is added so the “lips” or necessary body parts seem to move to match the perceived sounds the listener would need. In this way also beings using pheromone and light communications among other non-audibles will be translated via expectations to the listener. One may “hear” in other words a non-audible life form “speaking” in a deep voice, while another “hears” them in a high pitched voice based on their culturally and personal expectations.
Likewise some features available to a speaker can add the intent for a more commanding voice or non-threatening among others as the 12th space penetrator can act not only to interpret the intent of communication from the other party, but also project intent into their minds. It may not be as clear however and some metaphors, proper nouns, and specific terminology can easily be lost if the other party does not have a translator of their own as the “speakers” intent will override the comprehension of the listener if they don’t have a compatible translator.
Okay, yeah, that reads like a product description, my bad.
Summarized into laymen terms. It uses super fancy tech to read your mind and the mind of who you are speaking to, using associated words and images in your head to translate context and intent to the listener; which while not a 100% accurate translation will cover up metaphors and convey the meaning as accurately as possible.
with things such as proper nouns, nouns not found in the listener’s language, and noise representing words with no association for the listener being left un-translated.
I don’t know any translator that would make something useful out of “Woof woof! Arf! Bark!” If what Frix says is of the same level, the best option for an universal translator is to give up.
Yeah, but you can make it a good hot cup of tea, and the Brownian motion will perk it right up.
Yeah, I mentioned that previously.
For them to laugh at how silly the other’s language sounds
they’d have to hear both the translated and untranslated audio.
Is the translator a smart hearing aid?
Is it noise canceling live audio 100%? 80%?
Maybe each of them can faintly hear the raw audio.
Is it only in one ear???
Is the translator using sound at all or going straight into the brain?
A smart enough translator should understand when you want the actual word rather than a translation of that word. If Sydney says, “You should use a Kleenex to clean that up,” the translator might say to Frix, “Bark baark wuffle Kleenex rrr baaak gruf.”
That way, they could share otherwise incomprehensible words in their native sounds, a la that first thingie.
Maybe it’s an eyepiece. It picks up what he’s planning to say and displays to him the sounds to make (so he gets to choose what to translate himself) and it auto-translates what Sydney says (which he laughs at because it says, “Fuzzy animal noise. Fuzzy animal noise. Fuzzy animal noise” Which would still kind of be funny to see.
I imagine that a good UT would use a standardised meta-language as a in-between format.
Then it would only need two sets of translation rules for each language, To and From the meta language. It would drastically reduce the complexity.
Of course, if there’s a couple of ‘very prevalent’ languages, such as Galstandard West, East, Eight, Brown, or Peroxide, it may be an idea to build direct rules for these for the lower latency.
I don’t know. Sydney has been shown to be skinny. And she has been getting quite a bit of time working out. So some muscle development should be seen. She was strong enough to flip a man over her shoulder by his tongue after all. So she is not a complete loss.
And I approve of her panty choice. I hope she has all six. =^_~=
Cute Butt, Syd! ;)
Fortunatley for us, Sydney seems to have inadvertently forgotten her belief in the Fourth Wall, at least for now…
Cute butt, indeed! I could stand to see a bit more of her. :)
As long as we’re discussing automated translation,
I read somewhere that the CIA and some other alphabet agencies
needed to read Russian technical publications and in the 1960s
used optical disks (!!!) for a lookup table type machine translator.
The results weren’t exactly English but it sufficed.
Also…may or may not have been the same article….
An English to Russian to English test showed how difficult the problem was.
“Out of sight, out of mind” somehow became “Invisible insanity”.
Don’t know about the optical discs, but when I was in college, I worked on a project to build an atomic force microscope (AFM), with modifications to support the thesis work being planned. We had obtained a set of construction plans from another university that had similar modifications. Trouble was, the construction plans for the microscope were all in German – and no one there spoke much. I spent a lot of painstaking time with a Scientific German to English dictionary… It was very slow going, but eventually I had a set of plans with a lot of penciled-in English translation. Then I had to send them off in the mail to have someone somewhat familiar with an AFM review them for obvious errors, before construction started.
Interestingly enough, ‘You’ was actually specifically plural in early modern English. Also formal. The singular words were Thee, Thy, Thou, and Thine, which were all dropped for favour of making ‘You’ also singular because four different bloody words. And yes, there were people complaining about the use of “Singular You” much the same as people complain about They/Them being a singular pronoun.
Y’all is a new word that fills the now vacant gap in the English language.
FUN FACT: English has been used singular Them longer than singular You. And also when it was spelt with a Thorn þ instead of TH
Actually, thou is still in use in some dialects of English found in northern England. As far as I am aware – I don’t speak any of those dialects, nor live in that part of the country, thou is only used between friends – similr to the way tu is used in French, or du in German.
My understanding is that there was a period when it was standardly used in this way, but the shift to not using it at all happened around AD 1600. Which is why you find thou (and thee, thy and thie) in the King James translation of the Bible, and occasionally in Shakespeare’s writings.
Interesting to speculate whether tu and du (and the numerous other second person singular familiar pronouns found in European languages) will ultimately suffer the same fate.
And we certainly still have plural ‘you’: you men, you Americans, you Brits etc.
(And the Thee, Thy, Thou, and Thine singulars linger on in some places)
Y’all is more of a southern adaptation. In the northeast we used “you guys” and in some parts “yose guys”. Language tends to adapt and change over time. Even books written in the last century use words we hardly ever use today. I’m currently rereading Tolkein’s two hobbit books and some words and phrases he uses ,I’d noticed, seem old fashioned or out of use. Yes some of that was a method to set the tone but not all. Even old science-fiction sounfs out of date.
All I can say is you’ns talk funny.
It gets worse. I’ve heard reliable reports of “y’all” being used as a singular pronoun, with “all y’all” for the plural (at least when plurality wants to be emphasised).
I approve of Sydney’s “fickle” modesty; I share her sense of decorum and have, in fact, been reluctant in the past to change clothes in front of someone with whom I’ve just shared a sexual encounter.
And I’m a guy, which probably makes it even weirder.
Want to hear a funny dog joke?
“Hey knock knock”
“Who’s there?”
“Woof”
“Woof who?”
‘Woof woof! Arf! Bark!”
*Dies laughing*
It’s funny because of the political implications! XD
I’m thinking Syd’s more bothered about the type of panties than the fact that he’s looking at her ass.
Bit hypocritical of her honestly, seeing as Frix got into the bath naked and her eyes followed his “woofhood” all the way down……..
If she were bothered by them, she wouldn’t have bought them in the first place ;)
It’s just a general modesty thing and not anything specific to her choice of undergarment
She also wasn’t expecting that by the end of the day she would be several hundred light years away from home, battling space squids and playing “fetch” in a large bath with a 6 foot muscular goat horned furry dog boy.
Strictly speaking, “Y’all” is the singular ‘you;’ “all y’all” is the plural. The latter is so useful I use it now in conversation, and I’m from the Northeast.
As a native rural central Floridian who has spent lots of time in Georgia and the Carolinas as well I’ve never heard a Southerner us y’all in a singular manner. All y’all is generally used for emphasis when addressing a larger group. For example “Are all y’all really surprised Sydney has Rainbow Dash panties?”, when y’all itself would work, but all y’all gives the implication that the speaker is politely incredulous (Southern manners), looking for specific clarification, or wishes to emphasize what they’re stating.
I greatly approve of her choice of underwear. She just became 20% cooler in my opinion. XD
Especially when you realize that it has been soaking in the bath water & now it clings tenaciously to her buttocks…
Thanks
Ren and StimpyPowdered Toast Man for coining that phrase…I always figured it was just that most humans had enough knowledge of Klingon, at least by the twenty-fourth century (probably not so much the twenty-third), that the UT just didn’t bother.
What always drove me (and a lot of people) nuts was “Darmok.” Not just because it didn’t make sense for the UT to be so hung up on etymology, but because it didn’t have to be that way – why did they go to the same metaphors for the same concepts, even concepts as simple as “no” (“when the walls fell”), every time? If they had genuinely communicated in allusion, rather than just using a lot of fixed phrases, it might’ve made sense that the translator couldn’t keep up. Of course, then Picard wouldn’t have been able to break through as he did, but the need for something more sophisticated than learning their go-to metaphors might’ve made for a more interesting climax.
Well the whole episode was based on a thought experiment regarding the use of metaphors as a spoken language. Unfortunately the writers failed on a number of points when attempting to use this bit of thought experiment for the basis of a story.
There is no reasonable way for such a method of communication to develop.
How one would be able to learn such a language without the knowledge foundation it is built upon?
It is not just putting the cart before the horse but putting the horse into the cart. It just does not work. At its most basic language is a means of transmitting information between two individuals. So you would need to know the metaphors before you could be able to communicate but then you would need to be able to communicate to learn the metaphors needed to communicate. Circular logic loop leads to a failed premise.
I’ve thought about this, and I disagree.
One of the most important programming languages in use today is called C. As with many modern programming languages, human-readable C source code must be run through a program called a compiler to transform it into machine code that a computer can then execute.
Do you know what language the C compiler is written in?
It’s written in C.
Updates are made step-by-step by modifying the source code to fix bugs or add new features, then recompiling the compiler, creating a new compiler with the bugs fixed or the features available. Then, the source code can be modified again, making use of the new features. This code can then be compiled using the new compiler, and so on and do forth, over and over again.
As an example, the code in the C compiler that recognizes escape characters in string literals (e.g. \n for the newline character, \t for the tab character, \\ for an actual backslash) may have once looked vaguely like this:
if (ch == 'n') {return '\n';
} else if (ch == '\\') {
return '\\';
} else {
return -1;
}
There would be code above this to detect if a character is a backslash, and if so, set the variable ch to the character immediately after the backslash. The above snippet is what would immediately follow. The goal here is to transform the backslash and the following character together into a single character, and return that character’s ASCII code.
This snippet first checks if the character in ch an n, in which case it knows that it should return a newline character. Then it checks if ch is a second backslash, in which case the pair is to be parsed as a single backslash.
And it works fine- the \n and the double backslashes get parsed to the ASCII values of the newline and backslash characters. The compiler already knows that this is what it’s supposed to do with the \n and \\ sequences, so the lack of actual ASCII values in the source code isn’t a problem. In fact, this method of leaving actual ASCII values out of the source code is considered good coding practice, since it offers better cross-platform support. The above code will work just fine on a machine using some character encoding other than ASCII, which would not be the case if it did reference ASCII codes.
But there’s still a problem: This code doesn’t know what a tab character is, or what to do with \t! Let’s fix that.
if (ch == 'n') {return '\n';
} else if (ch == 't') {
return 9;
} else if (ch == '\\') {
return '\\';
} else {
return -1;
}
We can’t use \t here, because we don’t have a compiler that knows what \t means just yet. So, instead, we return 9, which is be the ASCII code of the tab character. The fact that some of the return statements return characters and others return numbers is fine; characters in C are really just numbers anyway.
So, we compile this code, and now we have a compiler that knows about \t. So, we can make another edit to the source:
if (ch == 'n') {return '\n';
} else if (ch == 't') {
return '\t';
} else if (ch == '\\') {
return '\\';
} else {
return -1;
}
And recompile, and it works fine. The compiler still knows how to deal with \t, and our source code has better support for different platforms, since there’s no longer any direct reference to ASCII codes.
I believe that a similar process could take place with a natural, spoken language, rather than a programming language. It would start when some speaker of a very simple, rudimentary proto-Darmok language wanted to express a concept that he didn’t have a word for, and rather than coining a new word, as an English speaker might, he just awkwardly says “that thing that Darmok and Jalad did in that one story where they met at Tanagra”. Other people catch on, this particular concept gets abbreviated to “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”, and “coining” new “words” by alluding to well-known stories becomes a regular thing. Eventually, the language consists almost entirely of allusions, and people start to see the few bits left over from proto-Darmok that aren’t as awkward outliers, and replace them with allusions, too.
The result? Proper, modern Darmok, completely unintelligible to anyone who hasn’t memorized the literature and mythology of an entire planet.
Though I still think Starfleet’s universal translators should’ve been able to make more sense of it than they did in the episode.
C is a language based on logic and, as you have described it, works similarly to natural language.
Now natural language, as processed by bags-of-mostly-water, compiles in a similar way to your C compiler. The limitation is that you have to build from the ground up for each new unit [hatchling/youngling] and since they are a blank slate you have to first start with correlating sound bytes with objects and basic concepts. You can’t just load the latest compile at one go and have an individual you can communicate with. It just does not work that way.
Darmok supposedly uses sound bites pointing to historical events and experiences that then imply an idiom.
Language in a society for the dissemination of information just can’t work that way unless all individuals have access to the same reference base of idioms – a hive mind on the subconscious level may be the key to such a culture developing but that is more fantasy than science.
This is after all TV Fiction with the Science being defenestrated by script writers who went through the American public school system.
An interesting mental exercise but a concept without foundation.
I think you’re failing on two points.
A very strong argument can be made that ALL language is metaphor. After all, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”! Certainly, a painting has substance and form–and it relflects light in a similar fashion to an actual pipe, but it is in fact merely a painting. How much more so a series of vibrations through gas?
And what happens when the ideas themselves are abstract? What is love? Or should that be “What is love?”? There is absolutely no way to be certain that I have communicated to you, nor you to me, what “love” means with absolute precision.
And in particular, when your toddler says, “I love you, mommy”. They have absolutely no ability to comprehend what we mean when we say something equivalent. What they know is that they almost always get really positive feedback when they say it.
Interesting. A lot of guys chasing tail are still doing that.
More generally, children learn language contextually. They are almost practicing science. Make these noises, see what happens. Guess which noises result in the outcomes you want. Take notes. Try again.
So, no. Language itself is almost certainly metaphor. And children learn language in a VERY similar way to adding ‘\t’ to the C compiler. And not just children. Language is pretty much constantly adding terms in this way.
It’s how some types of memes work.
Well the whole episode was based on a thought experiment regarding the use of metaphors as a spoken language. Unfortunately the writers failed on a number of points when attempting to use this bit of thought experiment for the basis of a story.
There is no reasonable way for such a method of communication to develop.
How one would be able to learn such a language without the knowledge foundation it is built upon?
It is not just putting the cart before the horse but putting the horse into the cart. It just does not work. At its most basic language is a means of transmitting information between two individuals. So you would need to know the metaphors before you could be able to communicate but then you would need to be able to communicate to learn the metaphors needed to communicate. Circular logic loop leads to a failed premise.
[second try – first try didn’t show for some perverted electronic reason]
Okay – either my Firefox is messed up or something else is wonky – I had to page back and forth for my post to show. To those in the know – please enlighten this decaffeinated one on what they are doing wrong.
It’s not anything you, or your browser, is doing wrong. It has been a problem for quite some time, and happens to all of us. We just had a discussion on the problem in the comments for the previous page.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/3080#comment-740233
No need to back or forth pages, unless you actually got a posting error, trust that it went through and either wait and refresh, or forget about it and move on (it will show up, eventually :D)
Yup, I hated that episode. It was so irritating to see a “language” of metaphors because there’s no good reason any race would learn to speak that way. I could see it more as an unlearning of basic communication due to a group of people so closely knit over a long period of time using specific metaphors in place of the words they mean to the point where they forget about using a more basic sentence structure , but it seems unlikely they would use lengthier phrases for even short statements that might need to be yelled out in a hurry for an emergency, like “No!” or “Stop!” And if their minds are so complex as to be able to communicate in metaphor speech exclusively, they should be able to recognize that other species do not share the same metaphor references that they have and thus expect different words and more basic communication. They were a space-faring race, after all, not a group of savages that didn’t understand basic principles of an advanced civilization.
The whole episode was one big fail, in my opinion. And it really irritates me when other people celebrate it.
Actually “You” is plural, the singular form is “Ye”, what southerners have been saying is “ye all” turning the singular into a plural.
Actually, the singular form is “Thou” (Thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself mirroring the 1st person I, me, my, mine, myself).
“Ye” is usually an older spelling of “The”, and the “Y” is actually a hand-written form of the letter thorn, “þ”.
“Ye” also exists as an informal 2nd person plural, where the “Y” is an older form of the letter “g”, which can still be seen in evidence in the names of some English places, such as Yate (a town which grew from a gateway to the King’s forest), etc.
So, “Y’all” being a contraction of either “you all” or “ye all” is basically referring to the entire audience, rather than just a portion of it.
It’s also because ‘th’ use to look like ‘Y’ (hence old signs that read ‘Ye Olde Tavern’), and ‘f’ use to look like a weird ‘s’
Yes, that’s what I said about the thorn.
I conſidered mentioning the long s, but didn’t want to dilute the diſcuſsion.
Except your thorn looks like a raspberry :P
That’s because that’s how the thorn should look.The one that looks like a y is a development from handwriting.
I took a long turn looking for this post. Both y’all need to sit a spell and git some learnin’.
Certainly, as a matter of etymology, “y’all” is a contraction of “you all”. However, there is no shortage of terms where current meaning has drifted from the origin–and “y’all” is certainly a case in point. When we lived around Austin, it was quite common to here “both y’all” and “all y’all” or even “ally’all”. While “y’all” can still used in the plural, at least when I heard it, it was generally declined as singular, necessitating “both y’all” and “all y’all”.
If you have a good enough translator AI it will translate at least as good as we humans do, and we quite often chose to not translate certain words in a text in order to convey clearly that we’re talking about a concept that is not exactly the native concept but another concept that the reader understands.
For example, in any text translated from Arabic you’ll find that certain words are almost never translated such as ‘Allah’ (‘God’), ‘Jihad’ (‘Work hard’). You as an English speaker will accept these words in the text and not really question why those specific words weren’t translated like the rest of them, and glean additional meaning from them by their lack of translation.
This can be a great way to squeeze some additional information from the text without writing anything extra. ‘Allah’ means the God of Islam, ‘Jihad’ is the workings of the Mujahedin to islamify the world.
There are of course problems when the original text did not intend that (Jihad as a name only means hard worker, the christians of the middle east refers to their god as ‘Allah’ etc), but the misuse of words when translating texts happen so often that this is just one more thing to think about when engaging the rage-o-matic after reading something abjectly horrible.
‘Allah’ means the God of Islam,
As Islam is an Abrahamic religion (together with Christianity and Judaism), that’s more correctly Allah is the Islamic term for the Abrahamic God. (ie Allah = God = Yahweh)
Jihad is actually the spiritual struggle within oneself against sin. Fanatics, like most, perverted the term and made it into their own version of the Crusades.
I remember that point being hammered into us by a guest speaker during Theology, as we had a few folks interpret the word as “Holy War”.
That’s because they are using it in the context of a ‘Holy War’ against everyone who does not agree with their beliefs (and that includes other Muslims)
Again, context is everything
Past a certain point, a translator has to basically be an AI, able to understand meaning and intent for an individual speaker.
So I’m imagining their translators (did Sydney ever pick one up?) sitting there in some sort of networked space going “I have no CLUE what my meatbag said. You?” “No idea, they’re just squawking at each other.” “I give up, send it as is. Meatbags are weird.”
Because Rainbow Dash is 20% cooler of course.
” because four different bloody words.”
You misunderstand what Thee, Thou, Thy, and Thine were. This should make it clear:
First-person: I, Me, My, Mine
Second-person singular informal: Thou, Thee, Thy, Thine
Second-person pluarl/formal: Ye, You, Your, Yours
Third-person singular (masculine): He, Him, His, His
Third-person singular (feminine): She, Her, Her, Hers
Third-person plural: They, Them, Their, Theirs
Aside from merging the two sets of second-person pronouns and combining “Ye” (subject) and “You” (object) into “You”, all that complexity is still present in modern English.
The other quirk people tend to recognize (“mine eyes” and the like) is just another variation on the same split we still have today with “an apple” and “a hand”. “mine” and “thine” are normally reflexive but, if the next word starts with a vowel, you use “mine” instead of the non-reflexive posessive “my”, and “thine” instead of “thy” in order to streamline the pronunciation, similar to how we don’t say “a apple”.
Sydney is still uncomfortable with her appearance!?
After spending prolonged time with the Barbie-squad? Nah, why would she?
I’d like to think that the UT is so advanced that it translates perfectly while keeping the original words used as background noise we hear subconsciously. It’s sort of in the zone of repeating on word for too long until it sounds foreign. “Don’t quibble with me.” “Quibble. Quibble. Quuuuuibleeee. Quibble! Quibble?” We hear and understand every word but we don’t really assign them importance by the way they sound until we focus on them.
So the UT translates and we hear it in our own language but if we tried focusing on the words we’d be able to hear the original.
I dont remember exactly what the timeframe is, but maybe Syd got enough of that ARC physical training to start making some kind of difference?
Also, RD Undies.
It is hard to calculate exactly, but the total time from the beginning of this comic until now is only a few weeks, a month as best I can tell. That is not quite long enough for Sidney to have lost significant weight because of the training.
If Sydney is as petite as DaveB claims, then she is probably actually wearing real boy shorts, and not just the female version of boy-shorts, which have come into style due to comfort and lack of panty lines. If you watch the more recent movie version of “Charlie’s Angels”, you will see Cameron Diaz dancing around in boy’s underwear. You can tell because they have the front partition, which pretty much no guy uses.
15# overweight? I always took her for ~15#underweight, which is also nerdy and, given her inclination to bounce off walls rather than submerge into a sofa, seems more likely. . . .
“Actually English does as well, but only if you count “y’all.””
Where I’m from it was ‘yous’. I’ve also lived places where it was ‘youse’, ‘younz’ and ‘yinz’.
I gotta say, that back is mighty fine; 5 stars, A+. Both from the perspective of the artist’s skill, and the attractiveness.
Hebrew has a different form of “you” for singular plural and male/female (so, four forms all told).
That’s why I really like the Bable Fish idea: it doesn’t translate what you say, it translates what you think you are saying. And it doesn’t translate it into another language, it transmits it into the wearer’s brain.
I’d always assumed since the intro (around the bank robbery time frame) that this is basically Sydney’s body type. She’s not super muscly like the other supers, but she’s got a FAST metabolism that leaves her with only a bit of soft edges. Cute in all the ways I like my nerdy girls!
Did they have sex or just a massage? It went from making fun of the human and woof words one day and continued with that the next.
Looks like just massage thus far.
Wouldn’t the grooming that Frix was promised be the last
event of the program?
They apparently Shenaniganized a little, which suggests at least something sex-adjacent or sex-tangential.
I believe the story line is deliberately ambiguous. Sydney appears to be a little too modest to have sex with a complete stranger, much less one of another species, but she has had a lot of life changing experience in the last few weeks so it is hard to be certain how she would behave in this situation.
Not going to fib here, but Syd does have a cute lil butt.
Maybe she was when she first joined up, but between the training and constant danger, she’s probably lost the extra weight. I dropped 10 pounds in a week last month while I was sick with the flu.