bloak

22 ms·

331.
by bloak 3y ago
Lots of the world's languages have exactly five vowels corresponding to [a], [e], [i], [o], [u], but Japanese is a bit unusual in that the Japanese [u] is unrounded, so it can be more precisely (narrowly) transcribed as [ɯ]. Spanish ha
332.
by bloak 3y ago
Definitely. According to the OED, "ape" included monkeys before the word "monkey" was introduced in the 16th century, and even after that any primate without a tail was an "ape", including the "Barbary ape
333.
by bloak 3y ago
Of course this is just pedantry, but if you wanted to compare different places on Earth then the difference between civil midnight and solar midnight can be a lot more than one hour. China has a single time zone, for example, so solar noon
334.
by bloak 3y ago
Of course, the definition of "hottest midnight" depends on time zone arbitrariness, unless they mean local astronomical midnight, which I doubt. (The definition of "hottest day" hardly depends on time zones in practice b
335.
by bloak 3y ago
Yes, it's pedantic, but I think you're right. A price of $0 should mean that people are buying and selling for $0, which isn't as stupid as it sounds because prices (of some things at least) can be negative, so why shouldn&#x
336.
by bloak 3y ago
> If I read a few books about a subject as research, and then I write an article about the subject, it's my own copyright. Yes, because in that case you'd be the "author" doing "creative work". > Perhaps
337.
by bloak 3y ago
I presume this statement from May 25 is still valid: https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2022/05/what-happened-to-pe...
338.
by bloak 3y ago
I've not yet read anything by Ernst Jünger. Which would you recommend?
339.
by bloak 3y ago
A provisional driving licence costs £34 (though you could also pay for the photo). I expect some young people get one primarily in order to be able to buy alcohol. A passport costs £82.50 and is rather less useful as ID inside the UK becau
340.
by bloak 3y ago
This is probably worth doing, but one should be aware that a typical e-mail address does not contain enough entropy to not be guessable offline. Perhaps someone should deliberately leek a bogus database that contains the bcrypt hash of dave
341.
by bloak 3y ago
> Why are timestamps increasingly being replaced by vaguely worded junk? I don't know but it's clearly part of the general trend for everything to get worse. Fortunately, many of the web sites that show the time as vaguely word
342.
by bloak 3y ago
You're absolutely right about British newspapers using double quotes nowadays, but British books still use single quotes, as far as I can tell. An interesting question to ask, and a harder one to answer is: what kind of quotation marks
343.
by bloak 3y ago
The following isn't a serious contribution to the discussion, but somehow this reminds me of the people in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy unable to invent the wheel because they can't decide what colour to make it. Personal
344.
by bloak 3y ago
I suppose it's to be expected that the order to stop using Gothic script comes on headed writing paper that itself uses Gothic script: the order has to precede the execution.
345.
by bloak 3y ago
I agree. There are plenty of words for which the earliest surviving example of it being used is in a work attributed to Shakespeare, but there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare was the first to use any of those words. People don&#x27
346.
by bloak 3y ago
> Maybe one day we will get a drug that enhances mental function, that works effectively and has no real downsides. What's the closest we have today to an effective drug with "no real downsides", assuming that nutritional
347.
by bloak 3y ago
There is at least one fully specified proposal for gender-neutral German: geschlechtsneutral.net. I don't know whether there's anything like that for French. In both languages there's a lot more to it than just personal prono
348.
by bloak 3y ago
I think perhaps the difference is that while in English it's people that have gender, in German it's the words that have gender rather than the things that the words refer to. Each of these words might refer to the same thing: * M
349.
by bloak 3y ago
What I've found is that it's very often worth doing your own painting, but if you need carpets laying or walls tiled, then get a professional, because the professionals are awe-inspiringly fast and do a better job.
350.
by bloak 3y ago
It's not "nobody" because I've never been to South America, but I know the song well, sung by various male performers, or just the tune without a singer, and I'd never heard of Astrud Gilberto. I don't think th
351.
by bloak 3y ago
> I believe intelligent life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but that we’ve never been visited and will never be visited due to the distances involved. I suspect that at least one and perhaps many alien intelligences have been here
352.
by bloak 3y ago
It seems that (some version of) the C standard contains these words: argv[argc] shall be a null pointer So I wouldn't feel too bad about relying on it.
353.
US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles(theguardian.com)
568 points by bloak 3y ago|1113 comments
354.
by bloak 3y ago
I wouldn't have thought that either the Tractatus or westerns have much to do with ethics but philosophy can make some strange connections and that book does sound interesting.
355.
by bloak 3y ago
Just in case anyone's interested, in the UK a parking space is usually 2.4 x 4.8 metres, with 6 metres between the double rows of cars for manoeuvring. (It's not a law, as far as I know, but those dimensions are mentioned in lots
356.
by bloak 3y ago
"Obviously, if argc == 0, you should not dereference anything in argv." I'd say that's not obvious. Normally argv is null-terminated so you can read argv[argc], and it's zero. There's no need to read argv[arg
357.
by bloak 3y ago
"You might have cancer" is an example of a sentence whose meaning can't easily be analysed in terms of "truth conditions" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_condition ). When used appropriatel
358.
by bloak 3y ago
I suppose it's a bit like the question of whether non-human animals have "language": they do, in a sense, but it's rather different from human language.
359.
by bloak 3y ago
There is very little similarity between music and the sounds made by a songbird. According to an article I read about a scientific paper on the subject, I think, birdsong doesn't have particular notes belonging to a particular scale in
360.
by bloak 3y ago
If the flute is designed for a pentatonic scale, why did he play a melody that isn't even heptatonic? He should have played a well-known pentatonic tune like "Auld Lang Syne"! [The tune of the Spar-Spangled Banner uses all th

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