gxqoz

15 ms·

121.
by gxqoz 6y ago
John McWhorter has argued a few times on the Lexicon Valley podcast that although English has many problems (especially spelling), it's not a terrible lingua franca. Many complexities from other languages do not exist in it. Obviously,
122.
by gxqoz 6y ago
The Economist had a recent article on why spelling reform never really gains traction. Basically, those in power to change it have no incentive to do so: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/04/10&#x2
123.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Hrmm the link to an example from Pocket leads me to hope that these are coming to that app. The current TTS for listening to saved articles is decent but certainly not state of the art.
124.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Ultimately any re-creation is going to have differences from the original. Many fans are going to be attached to that original for various reasons. Even seemingly objective "improvements" are going to grate against the nostalgia f
125.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Germany was not unique in this. From Ian Mortimer's book The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: "There are considerable complexities attached to other measures. It is not so much that they vary as they may be differen
126.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Yeah my college MBA bro roommate for some reason got a subscription he never read (circa 2006). I'd occasionally read it and almost completely rejected its politics at the time. I got my own subscription a few years ago and now regular
127.
by gxqoz 6y ago
NPR's Code Switch podcast had an episode a few years ago on this, which they call the explanatory comma: https://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/504482252/-hold-up-time-for-a... It gets at what you assume ab
128.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Huh, had no idea Control + Esc loaded the start menu. Of course, not really needed these days with keyboards with a Windows key.
129.
by gxqoz 6y ago
I've seen some pushback that a lot of hard-to-diagnose chronic syndromes are now being deemed "long covid." My assumption is that at least some of this is happening as it's the trendiest disease of the moment. Not to say
130.
by gxqoz 6y ago
I think the author has a point that a future world where Mars has been completely transformed by humanity will represent some form of loss. But it does seem awfully low on the priorities list if it does turn out that Mars has no existing fo
131.
We're Already Colonizing Mars(slate.com)
10 points by gxqoz 6y ago|4 comments
132.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Another long review of this book that gets a bit more into the UK's lack of a written constitution: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n07/neal-ascherson/scrib... (May be behind a paywall.) Contain
133.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Are you like frequently traveling to different cities based on the covid level? Is your behavior somehow changing significantly due to slight differences in covid deaths in your city?
134.
by gxqoz 6y ago
This is effectively the same as the "wiki [query]" search shortcut you can add to a browser. This is useful, but there are also situations where I want to get to the search engine's results page but weighted towards the wiki
135.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Am I the only one who grew up pronouncing it "where-ez"?
136.
by gxqoz 6y ago
In most Office apps you can make this Alt + 1 by setting "Paste As Plain Text" as position 1 in the Quick Access Toolbar (the small list of icons in the top left of the app). But yes, would love for this to be a universal Windows
137.
by gxqoz 6y ago
One thing I liked about Napster and the like is that bootlegs and B-sides circulated along with the official releases. I miss not having these on Spotify. Yes, there are official live albums on there. And yes, you can still find these bootl
138.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Am I the only one who still largely keeps up with stuff via explicitly going to a website? The thing I never liked about RSS is that it fed on my inbox zero compulsion. I don't feel that I'm missing out on content when I just don&
139.
by gxqoz 6y ago
It's certainly true that it's gotten more topical and hence more overtly political. Part of this is surely a change to having more of an online readership (and online-only articles). When you're writing a magazine piece, it c
140.
by gxqoz 6y ago
I started reading about 10 years ago so don't have a great reference for earlier writing. But just looking at some of ones from this year highlighted on longform, there was some great stuff here: https://longform.org/ar
141.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Is this really the case? My sense is that newspaper writing went from something of a working-class profession to one that requires extremely high credentials. Certainly the most elite publications like the New York Times are basically only
142.
by gxqoz 6y ago
I'm not familiar with Lapham, but I'd consider many current New Yorker writers to be writing consistently interesting articles. Same with someone like Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books.
143.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Willa Paskin at Slate had an interesting take recently about how content creation has become the default endgame for politicians: https://slate.com/culture/2021/02/barack-obama-bruce-springs... "The cont
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by gxqoz 6y ago
I bought a used version of an early edition of the original Where's Waldo on eBay. I later picked up a modern reprinting of all of them. My son and I were inspecting side-by-side and noticed some differences. Made the books more fun in
145.
by gxqoz 6y ago
It's been a long time since I've used an RSS reader. I've moved to a read-it-later app like Pocket. Do any RSS readers provide all of the following functionality: -Let me highlight / add notes. -Randomly add things not i
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by gxqoz 6y ago
Not mentioned on this page, but a more virtuous campaign to ban a film in Boston was Monroe Trotter's attempt to ban the racist film Birth of a Nation: "Ironically, Trotter had succeeded in tightening a censorship bill but failed
147.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Not mentioned in this article, but I learned recently that cigarette use increased in the 1930s as the Great Depression drove Americans away from more expensive cigars. This caused a big depression in Tampa, the home of the US cigar making
148.
by gxqoz 6y ago
Oh yeah, forgot about that one.
149.
by gxqoz 6y ago
One thing I'm curious about is whether all this extra "deep cleaning" is going to have other negative health consequences. i.e. from increased indoor concentrations of the chemicals used to do the cleaning.
150.
by gxqoz 6y ago
There are a couple of institutions in the Seattle area that have pretty good generic domain names, presumably because of the tech connections in the area. For instance, the Washington State Fair has the domain thefair.com.

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