Cordiali

> He had special glasses with a special lens to read.

Bifocals, I'm guessing.

Not sure about love, but I like it at least, it's useful to me. But it's like a frozen TV dinner, not something worth bringing up.

People in the past couldn't get a diagnosis, so they had to settle for cirrhosis.

Jam jars were way more common. As a kid, I might've seen one Vegemite jar for every twenty or so jam jars.

Whenever I read some of these design articles, I usually see this same glaring issue. Without any distinction, they'll present together a grab bag of objective facts, best practices, and simple conventions.

There's nothing objective about using ctrl+s for save, but it's an obvious best practice. So not following can be considered bad design fairly uncontroversially.

The two you mentioned are obviously not in that category. I take issue with the logo one especially, because I find the style of the "bad design" better and more functional.

>[...] I’m probably the only one who noticed that it’s calmer.

Ugh.

That's what the European sequential method is. We have that in Australia, odd numbers are on the left, even on the right.

...Although sometimes it's the opposite, from before it was standardised.

I'd think passive recognition of a fair few states would be a pretty low bar for relatively educated, English-speaking people. It's a pretty low bar, just placing a region with its country. People also regularly just assume that level of knowledge for globally- or culturally-relevant cities.

Maybe I think too highly of people, but I'd also imagine most would be able to get say... 6/10 right, for which countries the following list is from:

- Flanders

- Nova Scotia

- Brandenburg

- Guangzhou

- Tasmania

- Minas Gerais

- Catalonia

- Chechnya

- West Bengal

- Bali

I was gonna mention that, but I felt I was waffling on a bit, so I deleted it!

We've got the same thing with GST, basically like VAT or sales tax. So that'll appear on the invoice from AliExpress or Steam or wherever.

Businesses have a threshold before they need to charge it though. If they're under that threshold (like a small business), but the value of goods is over another threshold, then the receiver has to pay GST.

If I remember correctly, customs would mail me a letter, and I'd pay it like a tariff. Which brings me back to the main point, that's just that the carrier has nothing to do with it. It's ridiculous to get them involved in a transaction they're not a party to.

Process might be slightly different, I'm remembering from about fifteen years ago.

>Normally tariffs are collected by the receiving country when a package arrives.

For good reason too, the sender engaged the carrier. The receiver has no business relationship with the carrier, so they don't have an opportunity to pay any tariff to the carrier.

This is especially relevant when the carrier engages a local contractor for the last leg of a delivery, because they don't even have a presence there.

You can check if there's agreement between different techniques. Tooth enamel would be a pretty trustworthy source of information, for example. It just depends on what level of confidence you want in the results.

I'm personally comfortable with a "probable" or "it's likely that" in my history docos. I'm a lot less comfortable with that standard when it comes to planes, trains, and automobiles.

Well... I'm not sure which bog body it was, there were a few!

It might've been the 'Haraldskær Woman', I found an article [1] about her which roughly matches my recollections, and is from around the same time I would've seen the documentary. Although she might've only travelled as far as central Germany.

[1]: https://journals.openedition.org/archeosciences/4407

Regarding the second one, variations of that, to help or protect strangers/travellers, seems to have been relatively common across a variety of historical cultures.

Tangentially, it also reminds me of a woman's grave that was found in Denmark I think. I can't remember how old the grave was, but something like 3-4000 years. They were able to use isotope analysis of her teeth, hair, stomach contents, etc. to trace her movements.

She was from the area, but in the last year of her life, she'd travelled down to around Switzerland and back. There was a documentary about it, I'll see if I can find it...

I just looked it up, and he was born the year after Mendeleev, who'd go on to design/arrange the periodic table of elements.

I'm guessing they had traditional assaying techniques, just with less accuracy than a contemporary chemist.

The article is about reducing pollution, so in this context, they're doing a good thing.

If you happen to be there and like this sort of thing, the lace museum in Calais is definitely worth a visit:

Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode https://www.cite-dentelle.fr/en/

It's been about fifteen years since I visited, but they had a big section on the evolution of the techniques. It started from hand lace making, then progressed through periods of different looms. From memory, I'm pretty sure they had a punch-card loom about 200 years old, that was actually operating while I was there.

Sure, I don't like creeks like in your last example. But I absolutely prefer paragraphs, where the final line would be considered 'too short'. It also makes an appreciable impact for me, in how easy a text is to read.

Which is to say, half of these things are pretty subjective.

Beyond Thunderdome was good in my book, because it expanded on the Mad Max world. Methane from pigs, of course!

I really didn't like Fury Road. It just felt like an over-the-top rehash of the end of Mad Max 2, without meaningfully expanding the world. Everything was far too polished, excessive, and wasteful, for no particular purpose.

LibreOffice still doesn't have tables! Not to mention the new(ish) functions in Excel, like LET and LAMBDA.

Power Query the language is nice, I kinda like it. I've read the UI and engine works quite well in PowerBI, but I haven't used it.

The Excel engine is way too slow though. Apparently they're two entirely separate implementations, for some architectural reason, not exactly sure why.

Excel's Power Query editor on the other hand, is an affront to every god from every religion ever. Calling it an "advanced editor", while lacking even the most basic functionality, is just further proof of their heresy.

> One morning last month, I walked into my kitchen to get a glass of water, but my smart faucet was out of battery.

Not sure what on Earth that is, but it doesn't sound too smart to me.

A legal resolution would establish which country has owned it the entire time the conflicting claims have been around, not just from that point forward.

So it's not really unclaimed, it's just Schrödinger guest starring in an episode of the hit TV show, The Westphalian Wing.

It's related to a thread from yesterday, I'm guessing you haven't seen it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43967208 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1922015999118680495.html

Tangentially related, when websites mess up the digit grouping in phone number input fields, I've noticed it becomes quite hard to read. Must be a headache to get it right though, because it's a convention that changes from country to country, but it's easily worse than not grouping the digits.

From the article:

>Another important thing to mention is that the chimney sweep was a good luck symbol at that time, especially in Germany. People dressed up as them and send each other postcards showing children as chimney sweeps.

I'd agree with non-capitalist, but the authors are far too absolute for my liking.

The whole article hinges on examples of a non-capitalist mode of knowledge production being hard to imagine or conceptualise. Wikipedia is often used as an example of precisely that idea; I reckon I'd see it in that context at least once a month.

At this point, it's basically the standard example.

The pronunciation equivalent is called a 'minimal pair' in linguistics. Two words that differ by a single sound, and they're pretty common.

The written equivalent is probably more common in most other languages than in English. English has a relatively 'deep' orthography compared to most languages, ie. the spelling makes no gosh darn sense.

An English example (when spoken) might be 'scanning' versus 'skinning', with very different implications. A vet might scan a dog, but hopefully they wouldn't skin one. I have no idea what 'skinning electron microscopy' could be, either!

> I'd challenge you on lacking the intellectual curiosity called for in the guidelines.

This is unnecessarily hostile.

Nope, I definitely wouldn't.

I would say that it's strongly implied, by phrases like "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" and "some interesting new phenomenon".

Because it's not interesting or insightful from a technical perspective.

The site's guidelines are pretty clear, that it's generally regarded as off-topic.