I think it’s the difference in frequency. There’s likely other factors too, I’d suppose rain purges mold spores from the air for example, as it does with particulate pollution.

May I ask why you used there's instead of there are? There is likely sounds wrong and is wrong and I see it very often

"other factors" can be treated as a singular group noun if you want, so I think both are correct.

By example:

"There are likely to be cows over that hill" - correct, many cows

"There is likely to be a herd of cows over that hill" - correct, one herd

"There are likely to be other factors" - correct, many factors

"There is likely to be a number of other factors" - correct, one collection of many factors

"There are likely to be a number of other factors" - correct, emphasizes the factors over the collection

"There are likely to be other factors" - correct if you want to treat 'other factors' as a singular group. Up for debate.

Also, "there're" is very hard to say, so using "there's" as a contraction for "there are" is, in my book, okay, even if it's not technically correct.

I agree with all of your examples. But his sentence misses the crucial to be part to be correct. I'm just wondering whether this is deliberate and just a way of speaking informal english, or just the person doesn't know it's incorrect

I'm a native English speaker, and if I'd spoken what they said out loud then I would've said "there's" precisely because "there're" is more difficult to pronounce. It's also how I'd write it, even though I know "there is" is not correct; it's just an evolution of the language, like "ain't".

It's a common way of speaking informal English.

Its written the way it'd be spoken, which seems fine for informal writing

Yep. The thoughts are evolving during the speech process. The speaker might start the sentence thinking about one factor, but decides to make it plural after the first words have already started.

I don't think this is the case.

1. If you accidentally say There is and want to use a plural after, (for example, a lot), you can just say a number in between. The sentence stays correct, you just have to say 2 additional words. I personally never had this problem

2. This is internet. You are free to edit your comment and reread it a million times before posting

Hope you understand what I'm trying to say, not being native sometimes restricts my ability to properly articulate semi-complex stuff

You have very strong opinions about correct English for someone who doesn't speak it as a native language.

Those are not opinions, I am handing you literal facts

These are all things people can do, but might not be in the natural flow. Any it depends how the person is speaking. To use a car analogy, a driver can either be looking far ahead and flowing smoothly or looking only a short distance ahead and having to make lots of awkward adjustments. I personally go back and edit things most of the time, but that takes more time for only "style points" in most cases.

The point is it shouldn't be spoken like this. It's just wrong. I'm wondering whether the person is unaware or is this some slang I don't know about. I've seen a bunch of people speak like this, I'm trying to understand the reason

According to whom?

Why are we grammar policing on hackernews? This is a tech and startup forum not a language forum.

> It's just wrong.

Language is ultimately descriptive, not prescriptive -- so common patterns are never "just wrong". But as someone who taught English for many years, I'm actually fascinated by what you've noticed. Because as an overeducated native English speaker, I observe that:

- "There's likely other factors" sounds totally fine to me.

- "There is likely other factors" sounds horribly wrong.

- "There's other factors" sounds wrong, but not horribly so.

- "There are likely other factors" sounds fine, but you wouldn't usually say "there are" as two distinct words, you'd say...

- "There're likely other factors" which would sound fine if perfectly enunciated, except the "'re" tends to get swallowed up and it will easily sound like "There likely other factors" to the listener which will sound wrong

So my theory here is that, in order to aural eliminate confusion between "there" and "there're", there's an unwritten rule in spoken English where we substitute "there's" instead when the plural object isn't immediately following, but has an adverb intervening.

I'm not 100% sure this is a full explanation of the phenomenon, but what I can tell you is that criticizing it is useless. It's just how native speakers talk -- it's conventional English (at least in the US). What is interesting is investigating it, though! So thanks for noticing a little quirk of English like that.

hell, I'd argue that it should be fine for formal writing as well. Ideally, the gap between written and spoken language is as narrow as possible, since ideally a written text communicates with the reader directly, with as little hurdles to parsing the content as possible. Having to maintain a secondary vocabulary is exhausting and creates barriers. There is a limit to how permissive I am with this personally though, generally I'd only be happy with changes that are semantically near identical, or introduce words which represent genuinely novel concepts rather than slang that re-brands existing concepts.

That’s a natural way to speak in American English anyway. You wouldn’t say “there is”. But “there’s” is fine.

It's not about the contraction of there is, there are has a completely different meaning

If something is used often to mean X - it starts to mean X. That's how language works.

Isn't the point of being smart human beings is that we do things better than what occurs in nature?

That assumes that rain falling on leaves serves no purpose.

Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.

We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.

> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.

That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature.

> We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.

We don't have to , no , but we do , because that's how we learn.

Nobody was claiming the "natural" way was better, just that it might serve a purpose.

> That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature

No it isn’t. You know what they meant, you are just one-upping them on a technicality in a way that doesn’t advance the discussion at all.

> No it isn’t.

Yes, it is.

> You know what they meant.

I have clearly stated what i think they meant.

They specifically said "disadvantages compared to us." that heavily implies ( if not outright declares ) an us vs them.

It seems you have a different interpretation, I'd be interested to hear what that is if you don't mind ?

> you are just one-upping them on a technicality in a way that doesn’t advance the discussion at all.

If you don't see how what i said was related to the discussion then we probably aren't going to agree on what constitutes a technicality.

> I have clearly stated what i think they meant.

Hey and you were wrong. You are pretty bad at understanding what other people are saying.

> how what i said was related to the discussion

It wasn't related because the other person was correct in that you misunderstood my statement.

> Hey and you were wrong. You are pretty bad at understanding what other people are saying.

Or you are bad at conveying an explicit meaning.

> It wasn't related because the other person was correct in that you misunderstood my statement.

I've outlined why i thought what i did, if that was a misunderstanding of your intention I'm willing to accept that, doesn't mean what you said was clear.

> at conveying an explicit meaning.

The other person understood me just fine, and also noticed how obvious my statement was, and how you avoided it.

> doesn't mean what you said was clear.

Oh it absolutely does. The other person understood it perfectly.

> The other person understood me just fine, and also noticed how obvious my statement was, and how you avoided it.

Of a sample size of two that's a 50% failure rate.

You stated an us vs them, i pointed out that drawing an us vs them assumes that us and them are different.

That you apparently meant something different is odd to me, but you do you.

> Oh it absolutely does. The other person understood it perfectly.

Again, 50% failure rate.

If you wish to conclude that a 50% failure rate makes something obvious in favour of one side, feel free.

> Of a sample size

Well, actually it's extremely obvious there you aren't actually attempting to understand my argument.

The other person noticed it as well.

Notice, how instead of going on about this, you could have instead gone back to my message and actually tried to figure out what my argument was.

But you didn't.

Because you aren't interested in understanding what my argument was.

> that a 50% failure rate

Oh you still aren't getting it.

It's not a 50% failure rate. It is a 0% failure rate. Instead it is that someone else noticed they you werent even trying.

Of course you aren't going to admit that.

But if someone else backs me up, thats really good evidence.

I am fully confident that the success rate is 100% and actually you could understand the argument if you stopped doing what we both know you are doing right now.

I've clearly stated what my interpretation was, with an explanation of how i got there.

A single line explaining how "people vs nature" doesn't imply that people and nature are different things would have cleared this up easily but instead we get multiple instances of you saying "it's so obvious I'm not going to explain it"

However, you have full confidence that everything is cleared up, so i guess it must be.

I'll see myself out.

Saying something like rain serves a purpose is backwards. Plants have evolved to survive in conditions that include rain, rain has not been deployed to serve a purpose for plants. There may be other conditions that are easier for plants to thrive in.

I was referring to the leaves in this case but i agree with what you are saying.

> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us.

Wow we have completely different world views. I think nature is perfect and it's us who have gone too far away from it to notice and hence we are far from perfection as well. Ideally we should not be comparing us to nature since we are part of it. But somewhere deep down we know we are not aligned with it so we end up comparing it to humans which seems pretty grandiose on our end.

How can nature be perfect when it is constantly changing? We alter our environment out of necessity, we would only be able to survive in a very small number of climates on Earth if we did nothing to change our surroundings. Lucky you if you happen to be somewhere with year round fruit to pluck from the vine and temperate climate in the winters but that leaves the other 8 billion people to die of starvation and exposure.

I'm sincerely fascinated by your perspective. I haven't heard this viewpoint before.

Why do you think nature is perfect? I.e. what is your "gold standard" against which you measure?

Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all the death and suffering that is abundant through nature. If the only thing that matters is propagation of life, then nature does seem pretty good at it, but as a being that operates some layers above the selfish gene, it seems far from perfect.

> Something that immediately comes to mind for me is all the death and suffering that is abundant through nature

What if this is the best it can do with all the things that can go wrong or are going wrong. Perfection does not mean things will never go wrong. They can and they will. I can give you example of process that is near perfection: photosynthesis. Nature can store energy and then utilize it without creating adverse effect on other life. This is just one example but there are many processes like this.

Nor are we perfect and we've been wrong about much in nature more often than we've been right over the past many millennia. The previous poster didn't imply either case regardless. The post simply pointed out an assumption being made.

Frankly, I prefer the way that thinks of 'ex post facto' explanations for nature. At least that keeps us hypothesizing and not sitting there tooting our own horns.

If modern farming protocols are to water at the soil, I would be strongly willing to bet that is the best way to water, at least for our particular situation of growing the crops we grow on the farms we grow them on.

Much has gone into studying how to best grow these crops, both at universities and research centers and on the field at farms themselves.

That assumes that we are better at doing things than nature is. I dont know if im sold on that.

We can also do stupid stuff much faster and efficiently and at greater scale than nature, too.

Yes, and rain fall causes the spread of fungal infestation as said above and it is why we farmers use drip irrigation when possible. FarmBot defenitly has a great marketing video, 3d animation and logo though!

Part of the problem is water composition. Water which contians fertilizers, surfactants etc is going to damage the protective waxy layer on leaves, while rain water will do so less. Next, when watering youre doing so as frequently as the plants can make use of, to encourage maximal growth rates. It would never rain that frequently. finally, the size of droplets is different. Rain drops tend to be big and fat and roll off the waxy leaves while smaller dropplets sit on / stick to the surface where they create a nice wet and likely to rot environment.

Why would you water your plants with surfactants/soap?

Genuine question, does it help the plants in some way?

Reduced surface tension will soak into the soil better and improve capillary flow to the roots.

I believe this is common for large scale irrigation and ferti-gation as it breaks surface tension and helps the water flow

It's a common traditional fix to aphids infestation.

Yes and that's a problem. Many modern plants aren't selected to grow in natural conditions. They're breed for properties like high yields, large fruit and often other characteristics are traded off to achieve that because the farmers can change the environment to deal with those problems with greenhouses, chemicals, fertilizers, irrigation etc.

in the wild, plants compete for space and resources and the leaves act as a funnel to direct water (including dew) to the roots that might not otherwise be captured. the leaves can also serve as a shield to prevent the soil around the roots from being eroded by rainfall.

in a garden where plants do not have neighbours competing for space and water isn't scarce, there's no reason to water the leaves when you could just water the roots directly.

Just a mild pruning: in natural/wild environments (I.e. not the sterile labs of monocultural agronomy), plants actually cooperate in the resources department, because each species and stage of maturity has different needs and resource extractive capacities. They’ll “use” their root systems and mycorrhizal connections (which are only reliably present in wild soil) as a medium of exchange.

We do plants a disservice by studying them when they’re grouped together by species and age cohort, and generalizing their behavior under those conditions.

You can recreate these circumstances in your garden by, for example, planting the three sisters (beans, squash, corn) together. You can also opt to grow perennial versions of your crops and stagger their planting / surround them with annuals the complement their chemical needs.

It doesn’t have to be either/or. Plants can both compete and cooperate with each other in different ways.

Here's a wild thing: at many of the high end vineyards they'll do low-level helicopter flights over the vines every time it rains to blow the water off the leaves and fruit specifically to prevent infection and rot.

I’ve heard of this for frost prevention, but never rain. Do you know of a specific vineyard doing this?

Napa and Sonoma vineyards have been doing it for decades: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/vintners-rush-to-dry... (dated 1997)

It’s pretty rare though. They usually only do it when it rains heavily right before harvest.

parent comment said “every time it rains”… this article and your comment make it sound “pretty rare”.

I could certainly be wrong about the timing. I’m definitely not a grape growing expert by any means, I mostly know about it from being in the UAV world and having had some discussions about replacing the helicopters with drones for getting the water off.

having worked at a cargo drone company, that is one thing that our platform would have excelled at. although ours had a tendency to simply flatten vegetation when "cornering" at low altitude.

Yep. I recently visited some high end vineyards in Arizona, and the grapes really thrive because of how dry it is. They are able to irrigate carefully to avoid wetting the tops of the plants.

Depends on the plant. There's little rain in the lowest layer of a forest for example. Or in a desert.