-The borders we have already are also artificial. Though some follow rivers, they are mostly the results of piecemeal negotiations and periodic wars with the Native Americans and other groups during the 1500-1950s era. Straightening them or aligning them with rivers would eliminate this artificial irregularity. They could also be based on the Global positioning system, so that you could read directly to a map without conversions.
-Really? Try the Khan Academy. It gives you math through Calculus CD, and it's taught in a friendly, comfortable way with built-in exercises. It also teaches physics, chemistry, art history, Python (computer language), and has entertaining videos on the idiosyncrasies of math.
-On what grounds? Most of a language follows its rules, so why shouldn't the rest of it? Arrive, arrived; open, opened, go, WENT? That's not human, that's just weird. Goed would be just as easy to pronounce, and would eliminate issues for those learning English. English itself, however, is a poor example of such frustratingly poor grammar. French has scores of conjugations for every single irregular verb, of which there are scores, too. What's worse, it has an agency devoted to controlling precisely what is and isn't French (L'Academie Francaise) so it has no justification for having all these irregular conjugations.
-Penguin
First, have you ever used Khan Academy?
Personally, I've used Khan Academy and similar tools as a learning aid in both of my calc courses so far. Online lessons such as those can be quite useful when you need a tiny bit of extra instruction or a different angle on a concept, but the core of the curriculum just has to be done by a real flesh and blood teacher, you can't replace it.
I've also done real math coursework, in a program (Carnegie Online Learning) bought by our highschool to review & drill concepts to improve student performance on Pennsylvania state assessments... Carnegie quickly became a dreaded, hated word in the school and even hundreds of points often fails to motivate students to complete their lessons. Trying to do algebra through a computer interface just sucks. Probably the best part of taking calc II is having a class with no juniors so I don't have to do Carnegie...
As far as borders go, even in the east American borders are pretty boring and arbitrary. But even beyond the obvious aesthetic advantage in organic border shapes, it really doesn't make any sense practically to have borders that ignore topography and cultural division in favor of having silly straight lines that don't really mean anything.
In language, rules are observed, like the laws of nature, not followed. True enough some countries have bureaus for language regulation but they're really quite silly as well, since they change the rules enough (since there really are no true rules) that they tend to confuse people as to what the accepted spelling is at the given time... we had a German exchange student who would always spell things wrong (well kinda) because he'd mix up spelling reformations and stuff like that. It's just not very useful to have a regulatory committee.
The more regular and strictly logical a language becomes, the less soulful and interesting it is. Honestly English is a kind of cool language but it really does lack a lot of things that make others beautiful, beside just the way it sounds, like grammatical gender and, to a large extent, mood. For example many times when talking to a Russian I have him refer to English as a 'robot language', because it's just so... barren, without irregularity or flair.
"English itself, however, is a poor example of such frustratingly poor grammar."
This is the worst. I don't know why so many Americans think this, perhaps because they never have to learn another language, so they assume that the irregularities of English must be unique, but pretty much every opinion I've ever heard or read from someone who speaks multiple languages and doesn't hold English as their mothertongue says that English is the easiest language they've ever learned. It's just not a really complicated language; our conjugation is insanely easy, we have no grammatical gender, etc.
Try reading Esperanto sometime, or even Interlingua or that pan-slavic one (though you probably won't have a very easy time with the latter). Perfect examples of soulless constructed languages, simple to no end (though even they have grammatical gender if I remember correctly), that just don't have any magic to them. When you're reading Esperanto (it's not hard once you pick up some of the basic rules) you don't feel like you're reading a language, there's no mistaking that it's just something some Polish guy came up with because he had too much time on his hands.
did you ever read 1984 by George Orwell? That sounds EXACTLY like "newspeak".... your scaring me after that statement....
I had the same think.
And the body of Orwell's work will be completely overlooked in favor of a sensationalist novel he wrote when it was the cool thing to do for Socialists to make the Soviet Union look as bad as possible
