koreth

Obligatory

Not Ed, but here's an answer:

Of course, as with anything in science, you can't say it's 100% certain -- but it's very, very probable. Combine the fact that we only know about a tiny percentage of the objects in the solar system, the fact that Earth is struck by space objects on a regular basis already (most, happily, fairly small) and, most critically, the fact that the kinds of measurements Sentinel will take will allow us to predict the orbits of a large number of currently-undetected objects with high levels of accuracy for decades, even centuries. It would be astonishing if we didn't find one that was going to cross Earth's path on such-and-such a date.

Not discovering at least one object on a collision course with Earth would require either that Earth suddenly stop being hit by objects in the size range Sentinel can detect (a major event in the history of the planet, since collisions have happened regularly for billions of years) or that the sensors in Sentinel are faulty in some way and fail to detect the objects they're supposed to (unlikely given their technical pedigree).

The thing to realize about the statement is that it isn't, "We'll discover an object that will hit within the next decade," but rather, "In the next decade we'll discover an object that will hit at some point in the future." That point could be pretty far in the future, but the mathematics of orbital mechanics don't lie.

English is not much more obviously phonetic than Chinese (compare to Spanish if you don't believe me).

English is less phonetic than Spanish, no argument there, but I don't think the first part of this statement is close to true. Have you ever seen a native, literate English speaker know a word's meaning but have no idea whatsoever how to pronounce it? Or know how to say a word but draw a complete blank, unable to even venture a guess, when asked to write it down? Because I've seen college-educated native Chinese speakers in both those situations. Ask 20 random Chinese white-collar workers how to write the word for "sneeze" and I can practically guarantee you will embarrass at least a few of them.

In English, you do have to memorize that "ough" is pronounced "ooh" or "off" or "oh," but if you see a word that ends in the letters "ough," having memorized that list, you know the word is going to end with one of those sounds. In Chinese, you never quite know for certain which of the multiple radicals in an unfamiliar character, if any, is the pronunciation hint. If you guess wrong you will not mispronounce a portion of the word as you'd do by guessing the wrong "ough" sound in English; you will say a completely different word, e.g., 住 zhù vs. 往 wàng. And even if you choose the correct radical, you still have a better-than-even chance of using the wrong tone, since tones are rarely indicated at all in the writing system.

Don't get me wrong, I love written Chinese for a lot of reasons (I've been studying it for the better part of a decade now and read Chinese novels for fun) and I do agree that it's much more systematic than people generally realize, but at the same time it's definitely more work to learn than a phonetic or somewhat-phonetic writing system. The simple fact that until you're a fairly advanced student you are unable to pick up new written vocabulary by listening to conversations pretty much guarantees that.

Yes, and in fact there is a growing number of expats who are doing just that. Not only to personally stop paying taxes, but because the US government has started demanding tax records from foreign banks and other financial institutions, and some of those banks have decided it's less trouble to just refuse to do business with US citizens than to comply. So expats are in some cases finding themselves unable to have checking accounts or credit cards in the countries where they've been living legally for 10+ years.

It's pretty ridiculous.

Yeah, my (Taiwanese) aunt-in-law is married to a guy who openly cheats on her to the point of not bothering to come home most nights and posting pictures of himself out having fun with his mistresses on Facebook, has turned their two teenaged kids against her while refusing to lift a finger to help with their upbringing, and has told her to her face that he only married her because of the glass ceiling for unmarried men at his company. Yet she refuses to contemplate divorce because she's a traditionalist and thinks divorce is immoral.

My mother-in-law is a petty, selfish, lazy woman -- those are all words my wife has used to describe her, mind you -- who refused to even visit her husband in the hospital after he had surgery and showed up late to her parents' funeral (she felt like sleeping in that day) but my father-in-law, even with his friends urging him to dump her for years, sticks by her side because she's his wife and that's what one is supposed to do.

Much as I appreciate other aspects of Chinese culture, some people really deserve to be left.