bloak

14 ms·

181.
by bloak 2y ago
The official language of Bhutan seems to be Dzongkha. Now there's a pub quiz question not many people will be able to answer, I suspect. People being forced to work in call centres, speaking a foreign language, sounds like a kind of ne
182.
by bloak 2y ago
It's normal, but it causes some problems: people using the wrong exonym or failing to find something they're looking for. And it seems to be gradually going out of fashion. Which places in Belgium have an English Wikipedia page wi
183.
by bloak 2y ago
When talking about aliens people often use the word "civilisation" to mean just "intelligence" and perhaps that's what you're doing because you're thinking about something that doesn't resemble a huma
184.
by bloak 2y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis... I've not yet seen an explanation of what counts as a single "organism" for these purposes and the estimated ages are all over the place
185.
by bloak 2y ago
They are useful for quality control when the author is not well known.
186.
by bloak 2y ago
We can't be certain about anything Jesus said but it's possible that some of the sayings attributed to him in the Gospels are roughly accurate. There are a lot of similarities between the Gospels, of course, and one of the theorie
187.
by bloak 2y ago
It's an exaggeration but there might be some truth in it. For example, J. K. Rowling was advised by her publisher/agent to use those initials rather than a first name because a feminine name would have discouraged boys from readin
188.
by bloak 2y ago
Which edition of Frankenstein would you recommend, 1818 or 1831? (Gutenberg.org has both.)
189.
by bloak 2y ago
I've worked with systems that were so utterly and entirely broken that the only way I could confirm that a particular code path was followed was by inserting an infinite loop and observing that the system then hung instead of crashing.
190.
by bloak 2y ago
It sort of worked like that, though that wasn't the intention? By which I mean, as I understand it, all the pyramids were robbed a very long time ago, but Tutankhamun's tomb survived undisturbed until the 20th century because it w
191.
by bloak 2y ago
Serious question: do people use time_t for representing a date of birth? To me that wouldn't seem right: a date of birth isn't a timestamp and you typically receive it without a corresponding place or time zone so there's no
192.
by bloak 2y ago
A lot of communication isn't about "established facts/research"; it's about someone's experience. For example, if a human writes about their experience of using a product, perhaps a drug, or writes what they th
193.
by bloak 2y ago
I liked the "New to AWS / Experienced at AWS" cartoon.
194.
Severe unauthenticated RCE flaw in GNU/Linux systems awaiting full disclosure(securityonline.info)
6 points by bloak 2y ago|0 comments
195.
by bloak 2y ago
Another example of the same phenomenon, perhaps, is the respect given to people who have written a novel compared to the respect given to people who have done journalism. Since I like novels I am not particularly annoyed by this phenomenon,
196.
by bloak 2y ago
If you try the experiment lots of times with drops of different sizes you find the oil layer always has roughly the same thickness. That's an interesting observation that calls for some kind of explanation, and the hypothesisis that th
197.
by bloak 2y ago
Also surnames like d'Urberville? (Alec d'Urberville in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is a nouveau riche person who adopted the name rather than a descendent of the original d'Urbervilles. Probably that happens in
198.
by bloak 2y ago
But you can't use patents to protect yourself against a typical patent troll. A typical patent troll doesn't do anything except sue people so they are unlikely to infringe anybody else's patents.
199.
by bloak 2y ago
That's right: his books are very readable. (With a couple of his novels I felt that if he had made them a bit less entertaining and a bit more pretentious and if he weren't already famous as an actor and comedian then probably the
200.
by bloak 2y ago
It's nowhere near as widely used, but there is such a thing as a 2.5mm jack, and you can buy a converter from 2.5mm male to 3.5mm female. Has any telephone handset ever had a 2.5mm headphone jack? (Presumably no telephone handset has e
201.
by bloak 2y ago
An interesting feature of people voting from abroad is that it is very easy to make it very easy or very hard for them to vote, and the choice between those two options tends to depend on how the current government thinks those people are l
202.
by bloak 2y ago
> the association with an old British poem Wait, are you sure about that? Wikipedia says "an 1869 minstrel song". I had assumed it was a song from the USA that happened to be fairly well known in Britain. Also I have the impres
203.
by bloak 2y ago
Nice! In case anyone else is curious, the original German seems to be: Der Irrsinn ist bei Einzelnen etwas Seltenes,- aber bei Gruppen, Parteien, Völkern, Zeiten die Regel.
204.
by bloak 2y ago
Presumably you mean "prosecuted" rather than "sued" for the criminal case in the USA. I think the civil case against him in London is still continuing. (It's hard to tell because journalists almost always garble alm
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Briton dies before clearing name after 38 years for murders he denied(theguardian.com)
2 points by bloak 2y ago|0 comments
206.
by bloak 2y ago
Here's a nice list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_physical_constants G (the gravitational constant) is an interesting one: the value is only known to about 5 significant figures, but GM (the gravitational
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by bloak 2y ago
Perhaps it is (or at least was) to some extent regional. Oxford English Dictionary does not have the sense of "trader" that's being discussed here. It does however have "tradesman = A man engaged in a trade or a skilled
208.
by bloak 2y ago
Yes, but as I understand it, being a "sole trader" is different from being a "tradesperson". If you're an employed plumber, or you're a plumber with your own limited company, then you're a tradesperson but
209.
by bloak 2y ago
Here's an example: https://www.myworkman.co.uk/tradesmen/ The term seems to lack gender-neutrality so Wikipedia prefers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradesperson The trouble with "trad
210.
by bloak 2y ago
It's very unclear and therefore not a good definition. (It could equally well describe native Americans with a totemic animal, which is hardly the same thing, obviously.) OED says for "furry": Also with capital initial. An en

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