I’m watching Dexter. In a flashback, teen Dexter says, “Jesus, Dad, it’s called being on time, did you ever hear of it?”
The actors playing Dexter in the present and in the past were born in 1971 and 1987, so let’s assume the flashback is about 1990, 16 years before the episode was made. Was the sarcastic “it’s called” construction already current then?
Charity finds that U.S. food aid for Africa hurts instead of helps. Oh dear, CARE has been taken over by evil selfish libertarians. What else could explain such a conclusion?
What American accent do you have? I got Philadelphia on the first try, and I’ve never even visited Philadelphia. I went back and changed Mary/merry/marry from “marry is different” (a conscious affectation on my part; I value distinctions) to “all alike”, and got Midland, no surprise.
The Serious Organised Crime & Police Act 2005 forbids protesting in the vicinity of Westminster Palace without a permit. What is a concerned comedian to do? (three parts, about 29 minutes total)
I decided to rearrange my books by broad subject rather than by author. So far I have:
Does religion belong with psychology or with history? Does game theory belong with mathematics, psychology or economics? Do The Ancient Engineers, Engines of Creation and The Klutz Book of Knots go together?
Strange but true — People study for years to talk like this:
Infant is status post initial ampicillin and gentamycin for rule out sepsis workup.
I don’t suppose there’s any country where there wasn’t grumbling, when the French Republican system of measurement was proposed, that it is unnatural, lacking traditional measurement’s intimate link to human scale. And likewise I doubt there’s much agitation to go back in any country where meters and grams have been the rule for more than a generation. But . . .
I’ve read several stories in which seconds, kiloseconds, megaseconds, gigaseconds are the only units of time. The first that I remember was The Outcasts of Heaven Belt by Joan D. Vinge; another is her ex-husband’s A Deepness in the Sky; most recently, Charlie Stross’s Glasshouse.
Unless the human sleep cycle is somehow made obsolete, I can’t believe that people would not keep a word for a unit of roughly 86400 seconds. The key question is how roughly is is too rough? Can most people adapt to a cycle of 100000 sec (27:46:40)? I wouldn’t count on it, and anyway, it would be atrocious to impose such a cycle for the sake of mere notational convenience.
What, if anything, does this mean?
The racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of the United States has increased exponentially over the past two decades . . . .
Besides wondering whether the writer knows what exponential means, I’m curious about how much range there is for gender diversity to increase.
I had the idea to design a fantasy script from combinations of a small repertoire of features: namely, subsets of this set of twelve segments. Using a fixed number of segments gives some built-in error-detection. There are 924 subsets of six segments; discarding those that form disconnected graphs leaves 306, more than enough for a syllabary. (Syllabaries have been invented more often than other types of scripts, but they’re underrepresented in fantasy.) ( . . more . . )