mtts

They do indeed seem to use the last time something significant was added to a building, which leads to strange dates such as a 19th building around the corner from where I live getting reported as 1983 because that, apparently, is when they added the hideously ugly front portal to it.

Strange thing is, they're inconsistent about it. De 1914 building De Vereeniging is listed as 1914 even though they've at the very least added a large conservatory to it since as well as a humongous - and very ugly and cheap looking - backstage area (though that was only this year, so maybe that hasn't ended up in the data set yet).

Oh well ...

Cute, but riddled with errors. In my area (Arnhem / Nijmegen) it assigns 1975 as the date for buildings that are much newer. It also sets my house as 1925 when 1900 would have been more accurate (it was, however, split in 2 around 1920 or so - maybe that’s where the confusion comes from?)

Exactly, but from what I remember reading somewhere - but can’t of course now find a source for - it wasn’t so much that he invented the word but that he decided to use it for his comic characters. The word was in common use at the time - and, in fact, it was Franquin that used it on that occasion, not Peyo.

Not at all uncommon. The dialect of Brussels has something similar: “schroumpf”. This word has become famous the world over, albeit in translation. You likely know it as “smurf”.

> Java got things like Lambdas and other modern stuff in recent years is great

These feel incredibly bolted on. Instead of a utilitarian, if verbose, lowest common denominator type of language, Java is becoming a Frankenstein monster. And a verbose one at that.

> Neither is the Prince best known for his stylishness.

You'd be surprised.

https://www.nowtolove.co.nz/celebrity/royals/prince-charles-...

I think I meant it more in the sense of "smoking causes cancer and so does exposure to chemicals so it's not the smoking or the chemicals that we need to look at but something they both have in common."

I may not have made that clear enough, however.

The Chinese don't follow an Abrahamic religion and yet they've built huge urban empires.

It's unlikely this is a factor.

"The original system was programmed by a high school student in the ’80s, and he’s the only one who knows how to fix software glitches. "

Wow ... That is beyond irresponsible ...

I love Kafka and I think The Trial could have done with quite a bit of editing.

Try the stories instead. Many of those are very good. "The Metamorphosis" is an obvious starter candidate, as is "The Hunger Artist".

I think the author's perspective is skewed because he's living in Yogya, which is, and has been for a long time, the center of a large and prestigious culture. Yogyakartans don't need to speak Indonesian unless they're dealing with the government.

It's very different if your native language is only spoken by a small number of people and / or isn't very prestigious.

Then there is, like you said, the capital, Jakarta, where non-Indonesian languages are only spoken at home (or not at all).

And I know for a fact there are is at least one region - but there's probably more - where the local language has pretty much died out. Minahasans, from Northen Sulawesi, no longer speak Minahasan languages, they speak Indonesian.

"Well, call me a rebel, but I don't stretch my strings and I will go one stage 30 minutes after putting on new strings"

Which would probably work.

Back in the day I would break strings on stage. Yes, stretching strings helps a lot in that case.

Of course you can only do so much of it before the rest of the band has milked the specially rehearsed for just this occasion "intermission music”, but it really does help.

It's been quite a while since I tuned a guitar this way, but isn't the trick with using harmonics that you listen for clearly audible "beats" when it gets in the ballpark? Once there are no more audible"beats" you're in tune.

Hearing loss has no impact on this - unless it's really, really bad, of course.

Fantastic! Didn't know about this one. Will add it to my list. Thanks!

Love this stuff. It's like an illustrated version of Jorge Luis Borges' Book Of Imaginary Beings, which is likewise a wonderful catalog of all the strange things the human mind can dream up.

An amusing anecdote I heard about this a few weeks ago: he came up with "P" and "V" when explaining the concept to his students at Eindhoven University. He looked outside the window of the classroom he was teaching in and saw the name of the local soccer club on a nearby stadium which is PSV.

Oh, I'm not disputing Vermeer may have used photographic techniques to aid him. There is definitely a very photographic look to his work that is unlike that of most of his contemporaries. What I am disputing, however, is that they were merely used as a shortcut and that the use of these aids is the be all and end all of Vermeer's talent. Even without his alleged use of photographic techniques Vermeer was a masterful painter: his handling of paint is otherworldly and that is something no photographic aid can help you with.

It's also true that his work is much flatter than that of his contemporaries, but to my eyes there's still a lot of 3D construction lurking behind those dazzling light effects that is completely missing in paintings that we know for sure have been made as copies of photographs. Like I said, to me Vermeer is a much better painter than the grandparent gives him credit for.

Occasional amateur painter here.

Yes, tracing images is immensely easier. Problem is it yields lousy paintings. Photographs have different perspective and lighting than what you see with your own eyes and paintings that have been made by tracing or even merely copying photographs almost always look, well, like someone smeared paint all over a photograph.

If you look at a Vermeer painting, you'll find it does not look photographic at all. The objects in the picture are almost tangible and seem to jump off the canvas. This is an effect that is only achievable by having very strong 3D skills: you basically have to be able to paint even more realistically than mere realism. So it might very well be that Vermeer used some tools to get a feel for what it was he was going to paint and maybe even to study the fleeting effects of lighting, but the final paintings themselves are without a doubt made by someone with exceptional skill.

TL;DR;Vermeer did not use these techniques because his paintings are way better than what can be achieved using only these techniques.

Because running a VM still incurs a lot of overhead. Which is a bit excessive if all you want to do is run a terminal.

Not true. My mom (otherwise heavily into classical music and, through the influence of her older brothers, somewhat interested in singer songwriters like Bob Dylan and - gasp - Donovan) bought a copy - and went to a concert. She didn't start a band - but did instill a love of very noisy, very nasty rock'n'roll in her children.

> That's why France has one of the highest birthrate in Europe for instance.

France has very active policies in place to promote large families, which is why if you run into a French couple with children they'll often have three or more instead of just one or two.

Nice idea. In practice, if you live in a large urban area, especially in warmer climates, by the time those fruits and vegetables get to your plate, they'll have far fewer vitamins than you'd expect.

Back when I lived in Jakarta (very large urban area, very warm) I used to get mouth ulcers constantly, despite eating more than my fair share of fruits and vegetables. The solution, according to the family GP, was to supplement vitamin C. Yeah yeah, n=1 (well, n=a family of 5, but still), but it worked and seemed to lend some validity to this theory.

You actually touch on a good point: because educational success of a country is measured in the number of university* graduates, governments incentivize universities to, well, produce more graduates, which they do both by lowering standards for existing fields of study and by creating new fields that attract a lot of students but which don't really teach anything worthwhile.

The result is graduates are far, far less well educated than their predecessors but on paper (including, I would presume, PISA) a much larger proportion of the population is "highly educated", making the government look good.

To give an example of lowered standards everyone here can probably relate to: up until about five years ago, students at the school for applied information science where I work were required to learn (a bit of) assembly so they understood how computers work at the CPU level. This requirement has now been scrapped, resulting in applied information science graduates who don't know the first thing about how computers actually work. On paper, however, our school looks very good, because, after all, it is producing a larger number of "knowledge workers" than before.

* this goes for schools for higher vocational training as well

Not a bad guess. The literacy rate at the end of the Chinese civil war (1949) was only about 11% or so. That can't possibly have been good.

It's an interesting topic - but this article is wrong on so many factual counts it's probably not worth bothering with. Here's three of them:

> The British Empire acquired the then nearly barren island of Hong Kong as a base

Which was then, and had been for some time, a major trade center

> And one's [ an upwardly mobile enterpreneur's ] children could do the most important thing needed for upward mobility: study the Confucian classics and do well on the examinations: first the local shengyan, then the regional juren, and then the national jinshi.

Nope. Succeeding in the examinations meant having been brought up in them, which only aristocratic children were. Though the examination system seemed meritocratic from the outside, in reality it was anything but.

> Perhaps 10 million people, 3% of China's population, died [ during the Taiping rebellion]

Nope, more like 50 million

It's an interesting question why China suddenly fell behind the West after 1700 and this article touches on some of them - the Qing were definitely part of the problem - but it veers off course so often it pretty much becomes worthless.

Typical self-congratulatory anglo-conservative clap trap. No one outside of a very small group of wealthy Britons and Americans (and, alright, some wealthy educated descendants from the former colonies) could possibly share such an immensely bowdlerized narrative of anglo history.

The freedom he praises is the freedom of the very rich and well-connected to impose their success on the less fortunate, be they poor sheep farmers in Scotland who saw their commons taken away by enclosures, indentured servants who were shipped off to the colonies in America or the inhabitants of India who had their livelihood taken away from them when textile manufacturers from Manchester forced the destruction of their local economy. (Notice, by the way, how this essay makes no mention of Indians other than the 2.4 million Indians who were pressed into service in the trenches in World War I and who, for the most part, suffered terribly to defend a country that had pretty much ruined their own.)

For this rich mercantile elite, yes, the anglo system is superior, which is why its ideals have now spread across the entire world (even in China there is now an elite that dresses in suits and engages in trade unencumbered by rules and regulations that protect the millions that are pressed into working in their factories under appalling conditions).

For the vast majority of people, however, the system is a disaster. It has ruined communal forms of organisation that protected the unfortunate and the weak. It has destroyed perfectly viable local economies and it has reduced millions of people to little more than debt bondage.

It takes a special kind of myopia to gloss over all of that and proclaim, like this article does, that the anglo system is superior because it promotes free trade and rule of law for the rich.

> But the government, in an effort to make sure there was absolutely no risk, mistakes, or accountability associated with software development, started adding more and more mandatory forms that had to be completed each time a developer checked something back in.

That's because "the government" is operating under different pressures than corporations. A corporation, big or small, screws up, only a handful of stakeholders are affected and raise a stink. If the government screws up, you're looking at headlines in the Washington Post.

Plausible deniability is a powerful force.

Ok, I see where you're coming from.

But I disagree that this puts Jared Diamond in the same category as the other three. I think the fact that he is, for the most part, not wrong, clearly sets him apart from Gladwell, Lehrer and Freakonomics.

Dumping too much data on your readers to ram home the point you're making may be tedious to read, but it's not reprehensible the way twisting and stretching the truth to appear original and profound is.

Jared Diamond counter-intuitive? I'm with you on the other three but Guns Germs & Steel always struck me as very "D'uh".

Learned something today. Thanks. Didn't know what a "Pigouvian tax" was.

Somewhat more on topic: in the interview I saw Lomborg didn't talk about earmarking or anything like that, he merely said the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Maybe a carbon tax would indeed be the best way to go about collecting the money, come to think of it. "Want to pollute? Fine. Just pay up for the 'Dikes for Bangladesh' fund first."