So I did a quick pass through the paper, and I think it’s more or less bullshit. To clarify, I think the general conclusion (different languages have similar information densities) is probably fine. But the specific bits/s numbers for each language are pretty much garbage/meaningless.

First of all, speech rates is measured in number of canonical syllables, which is a) unfair to non-syllabic languages (e.g. (arguably) Japanese), b) favours (in terms of speech rate) languages that omit syllables a lot. (like you won’t say “probably” in full, you would just say something like “prolly”, which still counts as 3 syllables according to this paper).

And the way they calculate bits of information is by counting syllable bigrams, which is just… dumb and ridiculous.

I am pretty skeptical about these results in general. I would like to see the original research paper, but they usually

1. write the text to be read in English, then translate them into the target languages.
2. recurit test participants from US western university campuses.

And then there’s the question of how do you measure the amount of information conveyed in natural languages using bits…

Yeah, the results are mostly likely very skewed.

The only problem I have with this is if I eat this many eggs in one sitting I will be on bed for the next couple of days.

what, you never heard of the room temperature room?

this argument isn’t going to work on someone who believes god created said lead… and also, pretty sure not all lead was created from nuclear decay.

i get dunk on people feels satisfying, but this is just bad science communication through and through

that heavily depends on how you define “intelligence”. if you insist on “think, reason and behave like a human”, then no, we don’t have “Artificial Intelligence” yet (although there are plenty of people that would argue that we do). on the other hand if you consider the ability to play chess or go intelligence, the answer is different.

IIUC during REM sleep your body loses muscle tone. And that’s the phase of sleep where dream happens. Which means, at least in humans, when you twitch in sleep, you aren’t dreaming. Same thing when someone is sleepwalking.

I always felt Google is just a collection of startups each doing their own thing, and they live and die like startups, too. There’s barely any overall strategy, and whenever they actually try to do something strategic, the result sucks (e.g. G+)