goddamnedtwisto posted:

Boris says "Hold my sherry".

At least Palmerston gave us those cool forts, the only physical legacy of Bojo's Wild Ride is going to be some new 50ps.

forkboy84 posted:

Feel like this may be the gooniest single post ever.

I'll be honest, I didn't think "going around and broadening your horizons

OwlFancier posted:

I guess if you like ticks. And bolshy curlews which technically aren't insects but also like to hide in the heather and then jump out at you.

There's probably a lot more but I don't go looking, generally lots of butterflies in the forest though.

Tesseraction posted:

big ben smashing the tower and collapsing the whole loving heap on 'brexit day' (ugh) would be the most beautiful metaphor in 100 years

OwlFancier posted:

The idea that not having children is a heritable trait is nonsensical on many levels.

Tesseraction posted:

otoh how your parents raise you is technically inherited

Ratjaculation posted:

i've said it before, and i'll say it again i don't sweat, i can't sweat, i didn't sweat

stev posted:

This seems like a pretty bold assumption.

crispix posted:

Every day is a school day for you, eh?

The Question IRL posted:

Unification sir. Data said that Ireland had achieved full Unification in 2024. When TNG was on the airwaves, Ireland had been an Independent Nation for some time.

OwlFancier posted:

I assume the british antarctic bases are still using 40 year old equipment which needs 40 year old programming languages to function.

Much like when I went to college in 2006 and the physics department computer was a BBC micro.

Guavanaut posted:

Harvesting neutrinos sounds like a couple orders of magnitude more frustrating than herding cats.

Guavanaut posted:

A currency based on something that scarcely interacts with reality sounds very Brexit.

Guavanaut posted:

If humans had dicks that were twice their body length and were stored inside before being fired out under hydraulic pressure that would also be terrifying.

Also the things that they do with them, which is also among the reasons why Jimmy Savile was terrible.

Tesseraction posted:

This is all funny until someone buys something for 1,99 and finds themselves down 200

Tesseraction posted:

only to find it was the rebate amount per month during the transition period

Guavanaut posted:

Are the Daily Star still terrified of black eyed ghost children?

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

Can't find any names, but this has been known about for a couple of years.

quote:

Left-wing candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey has said that shadow cabinet files were deleted by a frontbench Labour colleague who resigned during the 2016 leadership challenge.

The contender to replace Jeremy Corbyn in the ongoing internal election was speaking at a retirement party for Ronnie Campbell, the former Labour MP for Blyth Valley who retired last month.

Long-Bailey appeared to suggest that a member of the shadow Treasury team in 2016 deleted shared files when MPs stepped down en-masse shortly before a leadership challenge took place.

She told the audience how she watched Rob Marris, then MP for Wolverhampton South West, resign from his shadow ministerial role during a committee meeting in parliament. Long-Bailey said he “flounced off”.

Describing the unfolding events, the Corbynite frontrunner added that she had a “feeling that something wasn’t right” and rushed back to her office where a staff member told her that shared files had gone.

goddamnedtwisto posted:

It's normally just an age thing though - the SD standard has been updated as miniaturisation (and price) has made it practical to stuff more and more in. It doesn't normally cost anything more in hardware or software* to make your device compatible with the 1TB ones which are available now than the 32GB ones which were as big as the standard allowed ten years ago, but you will normally have to redesign your device (or at least rewrite the firmware which may or may not be possible) to allow it, so loads of stuff will have a ceiling of whatever the standard said a few years before they were made. For a while you could get full-size SD cards that would allow you to partition them as multiple smaller cards and switch between them, to allow older devices to use them, but I've not seen one in a while.

*The exception being if you need very high-speed access to large files (e.g. for video cameras) where you'll need considerably more on-board RAM and CPU for the interface as the size ramps up otherwise you get big bottlenecks.

baka kaba posted:

Do comma havers still say the local equivalent of "point" though?

Bobstar posted:

So you have to wait for the conclusion of each pair, or write the digits down really weirdly (right-hand one then left-hand one, and repeat). So I found this illogical, and thought these languages would be perfect candidates for the one-digit-at-a-time method.

quote:

The Danish number names are too confusing for kids learning maths, says a neuro mathematics researcher, proposing that Danes adopt the numeral system used by their Scandinavian neighbours in Sweden and Norway.

In Danish, counting above 50 is centred around a base 20 number system, called ‘vigesimal’, whereas most languages use the much simpler decimal numeral system, which is based on 10.

The Danish number 50, for example, is halvtreds (short for halvtredje sinds tyve) – or to say it numerically, 2.5 x 20.

This and further complications with Danish numerals has inspired researcher Lisser Rye Ejersbo and her colleagues at the University of Aarhus to propose that Danes adopt a simpler way of talking about numbers. She suggests a decimal-based system such as the Swedish one, where 50 is femti (five ten).

“The Danish numbers are a hurdle for children trying to learn mathematics,” she told science weekly Ingeniøren. “If you don’t fully understand how the numbers are positioned in relation to the words, you’ll have trouble understanding numbers in general. The names of Danish numbers say nothing about the numbers themselves.”

That, according to Ejersbo, is one explanation for Danish kids’ bad maths results, highlighted in the recently published Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

“What sets the Danish usage apart is that we say the numbers in reverse order, and that’s not logical for the kids.” The Danish 71, for instance, is called enoghalvfjerds (1 and 3½ x 20).

In France they also use old vigesimal names, but theirs is in the right order – as with the French number 91 (quatre-vingt-onze), which is 4 x 20 + 11.

She pointed out that some Danish teachers have started telling the smallest school kids the number names in Swedish to make it easier for them to understand numbers.

The Danish Language Council has backed the proposal, but the council doubts if such a change would work in practice.

“It would be great if we could change the Danish number names,” said Margrethe Heidemann Andersen, a researcher at the language council. “But it wouldn’t work because once we have learned the number names, we have internalised them to such a degree that replacing them would probably cause even more confusion.”

quote:

A 15-month-old Croatian child understands approximately 150 words, while a Danish child of the same age understands just 84 on average.

It’s not because Danish kids are dumb, or because Croatian kids are geniuses. It’s because Danish has too many vowel sounds, according to Dorthe Bleses, a linguist at the Center for Child Language at the University of Southern Denmark.

“The number of vowels has big significance for how difficult it is to learn a language. Many vowels makes a difficult language,” Bleses told Weekendavisen newspaper in 2011.

Forty vowel sounds to master
The official number of vowels in Danish is nine: a, e, i, o, u, æ, ø, å and y.

“’Y’ isn’t a vowel,” you say? Well, in Danish it is. In Danish, even consonants are vowels.

But written Danish is not the issue. The problems start when Danes speak. In spoken speech, Danish actually has some 40 vowel sounds, explained Bleses, depending upon where the vowels are placed in words and sentence strings.

quote:

While marvelling at Danish pronunciation is an amusing pastime for tourists, immigrants and other Scandinavians, the irony is that the pronunciation is terribly hard even for Danish children to learn.

Bleses researched how children in seven different cultures acquire their native languages. Of the seven – Danish, Swedish, Dutch, French, American English, Croatian and Galician – she found that Danish was the most difficult for children to learn.

Guavanaut posted:

There's a large difference between unavoidable circumstance debt (which should be covered socially)

That Italian Guy posted:

With the backstop dead and the 31st of January almost here, what's the situation on the Irish border?

Edit: 138 is the number of ideas Johnson doesn't have to fix this.

baka kaba posted:

Julio Cruz posted:

let's see what else the Great British Press is talking about today (well, yesterday)



boo hoo hoo for the poor middle class



ironicat the size of the universe dot jpg