zompist bboard

The Fifth Republic has obvious problems, and this has also been mentioned for decades: the concentration of power in the president. That's a feature, but it's not an obvious problem. In constitutions, there's a difference between something people don't all like, and something that stops the country...

What was the logic behind destroying the landing cards? Just the belief that they weren't needed anymore? Pretty much, yes. It seems there was a confluence of three impulses: a) we don't need paper and cardboard anymore, because we have the internet. Anything that was important would already have b...

An update for anyone puzzled by the latest Issue of the Day. i.e. What on earth is "Windrush"? What was the Windrush? The Empire Windrush was originally a German cruise ship, captured by the British and renamed - each captured ship got the name "Empire" and the name of a British river. In this case,...

French politicians have called for a sixth republic every election since the 1980s. It's never happened, largely because a) it's not clear what's wrong with the fifth, and b) it's even less clear what could be tried in a sixth. So Melenchon, last I heard, didn't actually have a plan, just a desire t...

dulce de leche I used to pronounce this as though it were Italian - though only a couple of times, since it usen't to be common here. I've since made the correction. Your other words are too rare for me to honestly have a fixed pronunciation (I don't think I've ever encountered them, in fact), othe...

Presumably it's a confusion caused by the non-standard grammar. I had no trouble, because there's no real altenative interpretation, but it did feel like gears grinding the wrong way for a couple of words there until things started working again. [because the grammar 'error' throws the parsing into ...

alynnidalar wrote:What an odd response to my post.

In what way?

Seriously, be more constructive in your criticism.

What an odd news story. In what way? There have been similar stories from the US, haven't there? (eg Martin/Zimmerman?) Essentially, the problem is that They are putting up large floral tributes in front of the house of someone who 'justifiably' killed one of Them. The killing is already controvers...

Yup. This is, relatively speaking, both functional and humane governance - two standards that much of the world, including France, have often failed to live up to. It could, and has been, and in many countries is, so much worse.

Hell, I'd rather have Macron than May...

Former Brazilian president Lula has handed himself in to the authorities to start serving his twelve year sentence for corruption, which means he won't be eligible to stand in this year's elections, which he had a good shot of winning. He is still a candidate though, which means the election board ...

I don't know. It's worth mentioning, though, that Ranked Pairs is, as it were, a system rather than a method - there are various ways to deal with the various details. For instance, are pairs ranked by margin, or by the number of votes for the winner? Things like dealing with ties will fall under th...

When asked about one's values, do yous think it's appropriate to respond 'to be respected' and 'to not steal'? I'm not sure I understand the question. Appropriate for what context? It's probably not socially inappropriate per se - i.e. it is unlikely to invite public shaming. You seem like you migh...

Sorry, I forget that people change their usernames. No offence or confusion intended.

They wouldn't be any more diverse than the descendants of 2000 Swedes. Yes they would. Genes, in general, don't intermix themselves, only chromosomes as a whole are mixed*. So it would be still very clear that some people of the population have a certain version of a gene (or small variations of a ...

Exactly. And when I originally saw it, it was actually arranged as: US cop sacked for shooting dead black man Which emphasises the wrong construction. Although it's also the syntactically normal construction: if you see the headline "man paints blue house", you assume that the house begins blue, rat...

I appreciate that on these racial topics we're getting into religious territory for you, and I also appreciate that we're getting very off-topic. However, I feel I should make at least some effort... If a thousand Nigerians and a thousand Swedes had gotten together long ago and settled the Americas ...

This is clear from population genetics I thought this doesn't prove anything about language. Of course it does. Or as much as anything can be 'proven'. It's true, of course, that genes don't always perfectly line up with language - although actually there seem to be remarkably few exceptions, when ...

What's key for me is finding a particular feel that I'm interested in. That applies to phonology, but also to grammar. To take Wenthish, for example: years ago, repeatedly, I wanted to make a sister language to English, derived from Old English. But I never found something that really grabbed my att...

There are some cities in the Red Sea region that are very hot but also humid: e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Muscat with temperatures comparable to the southwest USA and humidity comparable to Miami. Not that humid, and not in the Red Sea region, but I take your point. Muscat does ...

Regarding the importance of max temperature rather than average, I found an interesting thing: if temperatures rise ten degrees or so, a lot of the US, such as Chicago, would be as physically uninhabitable as the Amazon or the Sahara. We don't think of such polar areas as hot, because on average the...

What use is a "classification" which includes, within the domain of indigenous American languages, everything except two families ? It is pointless. The point, the use, of such a classification is that it may be true . The purpose of genealogical linguistics isn't to group languages into groups of ...

Torco wrote:drat, and here i was thinking 'hey! another one of the cool scifi thingies'

Ha. Sorry!

huh, that was another post that didn't update the last post date, it seems...

OK, so what you mostly need here is not normal temperature - "dry-bulb temperature" - but instead "wet-bulb temperature". Why? Wet-bulb temperature is the temperature recorded by (simplifying) a thermometer covered in a damp cloth - the drier the air, the more the water evaporates (cooling the therm...