Originally Answered:
Types of Nouns?
Proper nouns and common nouns.
For the rest, see Wikipedia.
Day: October 18, 2016
How does the character of Nasreddin Hodja change across different Muslim countries?
Greeks got him from Turks; he’s much bigger, I noticed, in Cyprus than in Greece. I don’t know enough to compare with Nasreddin in Muslim countries, but in Greek accounts he’s a promulgator of often absurdist folk wisdom. “The argument over the mattress” is a journalistic cliché in Greece.
The argument over the mattress?
Glad you asked.
One night, two people were arguing outside Nasreddin Hodja’s house. Nasreddin got fed up with the fighting, and at his wits’ end, he threw his mattress at them to shut them up.
The two people promptly ran off with his mattress.
Nasreddin returned back to his wife.
“What was that all about?” she asked.
“Oh, they were arguing over who’d get the mattress.”
How do rural people dress/look like in your country?
If you’d asked this question 100 years ago, Pegah, I could give you an interesting answer. Then again, if you’d asked this question 100 years ago, you would have been my sworn enemy, and there’d have been no Quora to ask me this through anyway.
Australia:
Australia is absurdly urbanised, and those of us in the cities really don’t know enough about those of us in the country—even though our national mythology is all about how the country is where the Real Australians are.
We do know they listen to country music. We know that they wear jeans even more than urban Australians do.
And we know they all wear hats.
You can tell Lee Kernaghan is a Real Australian. He’s a country singer. And he wears a hat. A real Australian Akubra hat.
McLeod’s Daughters all wore hats (some of the time). It was a soap set in the country, with empowered female leads. Who wore hats some of the time. And jeans.
… This *is* safe to show in Iran, isn’t it? 🙂
I haven’t seen many hats in country Victoria. But I don’t think country Victoria is where the Real Australians are. It’s more the fine food and wine provedore for Melbourne, where urban Australians go to eat nice things. (And it’s a provedore, because that’s the kind of snobs we are.)
The hats seem to be more a NSW/Queensland thing. With sheep stations. And a Wide Brown Land. And Country Music.
The agrarian populist politician Bob Katter is from Queensland. He always wears a hat:
Alas, I am an effete urban Australian. The closest I’ve ever come to wearing a Real Australian hat was when I was in Texas:
Howdy pardner.
Do you ever wonder why people choose to follow you on Quora?
Yes. I don’t get it. I’m funny, but I’m not *that* funny. I’m knowledgeable, but that’s a dime a dozen here. My drawings are shit. I don’t get it.
… You know, this question is a good idea. We can find out! Yay!
Can musicians be replaced by computers which can read musical scores (with emotional connotations) and play back the tune with emotion?
Hello Curtis Lindsay. I’ve been upvoting you for a little while. In fact, because of you, I’m about to force myself to listen to *shudder* Chopin. (Michael Masiello will be pleased.)
It’s about time I disagreed with you about something.
I think OP’s dystopian scenario is not impossible. The thing about machine learning is, it doesn’t need to understand its input in terms of rules and emotional state; you don’t need a good notation to do it. It just needs the input to be quantifiable; which music performances are. If you feed a music composition system lots of Bach, it will spin out more Bach (and that’s been possible for the last twenty years). Maybe not divinely inspired Bach, but certainly competent Bach: there are, after all, rules and regularities recoverable from Bach’s music.
Well, same with what we impute as emotion in music. Rubato may be ineffable in effect on humans, but it’s not ineffable in execution. Neither is articulation, nor dynamics. I think they can be learned.
The thing is that, as Curtis said, we have had player pianos for a century, and they were much more accurate than humans. Conlon Nancarrow relied on that for his pieces. But they didn’t put pianists out of business.
The reason is that, even if technically—or even emotionally—a machine does replicate a good musician, that’s not why we go to concerts. Live gigs have in fact taken a downturn in attendance, and performers will tell you they’re already losing out in competition to digitised sound; except the digitised sound is recordings of Billy Holliday or Miles Davis or AC/DC or Yitzak Perlman.
If people would rather show up to your live gig than listen to Horowitz at home, it’s not because they expect you’ll do a “better” job than Horowitz. It’s because the live performance is the point, and they want to see humans, imperfections and all, grappling with the piece.
But that means that live performances will be more a niche thing: they’ll be competing with computer performances, as well as YouTube and CDs and DVDs. They’re already a niche thing though, and they’ve been a niche thing for decades.
Can any one guide me about how to delete an approved question on Quora with comments on it?
Once answered, questions are indeed the community’s, and can’t be deleted: they belong as much to the answerer as to the asker, if not more. And believe me, the answerer does not want to see their answer disappear.
The only recourse you have is to ask a moderator to delete the question; but you’d have to have a very good reason, that cannot be addressed simply by going anonymous.