palordrolap

One of Britain’s most commonly used political words is of Irish origin: Tory.

When you look into the etymology, and consider the historical relationship between Britain and Ireland, it makes sense that that would be the one we (Britain) heard often enough to copy.

There’s at least one other option: Making it look like you’re doing what you’re told.

Exchange line 6 for “Su-u-ure. I bet you can’t walk away from my desk without asking me to do something.”

A clever manager would go away and come back in 10 minutes with twice as much “urgent” work as previously and no pretence, but it would be funny for those 10 minutes.

As you point out, intelligence is fuzzy and dependent on many factors. Which is why a straight line hard cut-off above and below the mean of a distribution seems pretty arbitrary to me, even if it is based upon a particularly useful way of delineating variance from a mean.

I’m sure cognitive scientists had good reasons for that somewhat arbitrarily defined band of the bell-curve when they gave it the name “average intelligence” but it’s pretty clear that the joke isn’t using that definition.

50% of people are below average intelligence.

(Yeah, yeah, the implied conclusion is fallacious reasoning, but it’s still funny.)

Try to take deep breaths. If it’s low blood oxygen as others say, that could help.

Alternative if your brain/body won’t allow it: Try holding your breath. You might have control over that. The aim is to hold long enough trigger a gasp reflex which will, hopefully, shake you awake.

The hard part is finding the presence of mind to remember things to try when you’re in an altered state of consciousness.

Actually, the British beat the French to it. The Halifax Gibbet pre-dates the guillotine by about 100 years.

Yet another case where another nation somehow becomes better at a sport the British invented.

The southern English are trapped between a rock and a hard place with the whole thing. They do like the idea of stealing culture from the French, but they want to appear to be separate at the same time. And appearing northern would be even worse.

Curious as to what Commodore that was. For the C64, a full schematic came with the Programmer’s Reference Guide (PRG) which was a separate publication to the User Manual that shipped with the computer. There were bits and pieces about the internals in the manual, a lot of similar sections and tables, and perhaps a simplified diagram of how things were arranged logically, but not the full fold-out schematic.

That said, maybe I got a pared-down budget manual along with my C64C in the early '90s. When I found a pristine PRG in a bookshop, it was much expanded and had that schematic… which I learned didn’t quite match the C64C once I’d plucked up the courage to open the case.

I doubt anything this new Commodore are planning to release will come with anything quite so detailed, and even if they did, the new C64 seems to be an FPGA (computer on a chip) housed in a keyboard that looks like the original. The diagram wouldn’t be much more than a single box with a lot of wires coming out of it to the various ports.

I’m not sure Perifractic’s Commodore is ready for millions of customers with half-baked conceptions of how computers work, what they should do and how they should do it.

He’s used to dealing with technically-inclined folks of a certain age, not the average computer user, let alone those a standard deviation or more below that.

This is one of those situations where I’d like to be proven wrong, probably because I’m blowing it out of proportion, but better if he actually manages to step up. Even more so if he manages to engineer a legacy that can’t ensh-ttify the moment he’s no longer able to head the project.

When you have a hungry bear on your doorstep, your concern is not misplaced.

Deaf people will almost unavoidably copy the mouth shapes they’ve seen when other people have spoken. This means that how they sound will be at least somewhat informed by any hearing people they observe as well as indirectly through other deaf people who have also learned from hearing folks.

So yes, aspects of voice accent do carry over to deaf people.

There’s also the concept of “accent” within sign language too. How people move between signs, carry themselves and act when expressing an emotion, which is usually exaggerated for the sake of clear communication, can vary from community to community, even if the base sign language is the same.

I think this is more of a “If Israel keep this up, they’ll be coming for the rest of us once they’re done with Palestine. We need them as a distraction / punching bag to keep Israel busy.”

So far Jordan has kept their heads down and been left alone, but King Abdullah is probably starting to feeling a little tight around the shirt-collar as Israel’s belligerence continues to rise.

Decades ago, someone wrote a source filter for Perl that allowed for programming Perl-wise in Latin. To the point of conjugating and declining correctly, or at least in a manner that resembled correctness.

I figure with a sufficiently commanding voice you could do much the same with that as with this.

Link (which contains an example): https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm

Apparently so. It’s probably going to depend on distro, when that distro was installed and potentially also user preferences if they’ve installed something they found familiar instead of using a new default.

Those of us on older Linux Mints, for example, might have had Evince as the default, but now the default is Mint’s own Xreader, an Evince fork.

That’s presumably either because it was forked before Papers was a thing or because Papers has the enforced GNOME interface making Evince a better starting point.

I don’t even think about it. Double-click a PDF and Xviewer starts up and works perfectly.

If I’m going out, I change from cosy indoor clothing to tidier clothing so that I don’t look like I’m wandering around in public in my pyjamas, so I guess I’m fitting to a societal expectation, and thus dressing for other people in that regard.

That said, I wouldn’t want to sully my indoor clothing with the outdoors anyway, and I don’t like going out as a rule, so I think I prefer to be dressed for myself.

Asbestos is also inert.

Xbox was an indication of what Microsoft have always really wanted to do, what Apple have always done, and what Microsoft have tried to do with the Win 11 roll out:

A narrowing of the technical specification and focus in order to minimise support and required testing. That costs money.

Cost bad. CEO mad.

Each Xbox release has been a release of a bunch of clones. Yes, they are based on PC hardware, but it’s one set of identical hardware to support across tens of thousands of instances, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of actual PCs, barely any two alike.

Then note that many people don’t want to use a computer at home. Computers remind them of work. They want to play games and goof off in their spare time. A games console is ideal.

And if that console happens to be based on PC hardware, the games can eventually be ported to the myriad actual PC options. But they can get the game out and running quickly on that one well-supported platform and cash in quick.

Strictly speaking, black pudding is a kind of blood sausage, but we’d probably use the former term for the entire category in Britain.

Some people classify haggis as a sausage, but it’s definitely not a blood sausage.

Pretty sure druckef should be drucked. printf means print (to) file. “File” is valid German, but it is non-standard and “Datei” seems to be the preferred form.

I could also argue that that d should be capitalised, but I’m already overstepping my bounds considering I know very little German.

I wouldn’t want to say which should take precedence between C’s preference for all-lowercase keywords and functions and German’s Rule to capitalise all Nouns.