Colin Watson

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• Commented on The coming storm
  I'm not sure what year that article was from - I suspect it may have been talking about Nov 2022, because one of my kids has ballet lessons in that area and I'm pretty sure I've seen the cute little...
• Commented on The coming storm
  I agree that modern Hebrew is a political reinvention, though it does nevertheless give its speakers a leg-up in terms of understanding the ancient language. (My general impression of the actual changes involved is that there's some amount of needing...
• Commented on The coming storm
  Yeah, it's possible that that has more of a poisoning sense, though as I understand the scholarship on that word then - assuming the "herb" derivation is correct - it's more likely to have the sense of somebody who uses...
• Commented on The coming storm
  Yeeees and there is certainly a lot of scholarship involved in any good translation, but it's not quite as bad as it might seem for a few reasons. Firstly, Hebrew is quite a regular language in many respects. For מְכַשֵּׁפָ֖ה...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  You're fighting battles from at the latest the early part of the last decade there. Admittedly battles that were mostly lost; nevertheless, something like rendering HTML emails is a drop in the ocean by any conceivable measurement of global energy...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Constitutionally, the monarch cannot be arrested or prosecuted for any matter, civil or criminal. Politically, it would doubtless have some interesting consequences for whether the monarch got to retain that power!...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Yes. I think the proper and (to me) more persuasive objection is not so much to the change in leader, but to radical changes in governmental programme which don't reflect the manifesto at the last GE. This has specific consequences...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  ... especially because that's explicitly listed as an option in the case of learning difficulties, so clearly something they already adjust for in a candidate-specific way in some cases....
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  There are adjustments for disabilities. They should really give some more concrete idea of what might be available there, but I'd be surprised if e.g. "I'm deaf and can't handle a satnav as a result, please use the other option...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  MediaWiki and its wiki syntax predate Markdown by a couple of years. It looks somewhat similar because they both came out of the same primordial stew of people trying to figure out ways to write markup with a different trade-off...
• Commented on Holding pattern 2022 ...
  I think it's peat-fuelled power station singular at this point; two were refused permission to continue burning peat and shut down in 2020, and the remaining one (Edenderry) is much of the way through converting to burning biomass instead....
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  It's a natural thing to do when you're dealing with literary traditions that involve substantial amounts of wordplay (much of which, of course, is easily lost in translation)....
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Sadly for the humorous potential, I don't think this one really stands up, because Hebrew has the same business of having one word commonly used for both sky and heaven (שָׁמַיִם, shamayim; the Aramaic word is just a regular sound...
• Commented on Bad news day
  Oops, the comment parser broke my link. Here's a fixed one: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/1791.pdf...
• Commented on Bad news day
  The main HoC report that comes to mind regarding social media interference was https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/1791.pdf. About half of it is spent on Facebook et al and so did have US involvement in the form of tech companies, as well as companies...
• Commented on Bad news day
  My wife has had a cargo trike for many years, and it was useful for me to learn to ride it as well as my usual bike for kid-ferrying purposes. You're right that there are significant differences from riding a...
• Commented on Bad news day
  My home dialect favours "yous", and I've been trying to consciously restore it to my idiolect in recent years after getting a bit annoyed at just how much I'd adapted the way I speak to living in southern England. I...
• Commented on Bad news day
  That particular variation is unlikely to have originated with translation from Greek to Latin. The Greek bishop Irenaeus, writing in Greek around the year 180, wrote that the correct text said 666 and speculated that 616 was probably a copying...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  This was excellent fun, thank you. I think the only question I have is: how much did you cackle gleefully at the point when you realized that you had a great excuse to write a para-time Project Orion battlecruiser attack?...
• Commented on Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
  You could translate "Wiedervereinigung" either way, but "reunification" is a fairly conventional term for the process in English-language German history (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reunification - both terms are used there)....
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  Does oral mRNA vaccine delivery make it easier? I believe some of the relevant pharmaceutical companies are already working on that for SARS-CoV-2, and that delivery mechanism would seem a lot more likely to have taken hold by 2070 as...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  Compose key systems are absolutely great for this - so much easier to remember. It's a shame they haven't become standard on more OSes....
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  Basically all those phonological terms have decent Wikipedia pages, so they're pretty easy to look up. Of course most people speak without really thinking about the physical processes involved. Alveolus just means "cavity", and you have more than your pulmonary...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  In England and Wales? More like first and second class. Grade 1 is "exceptional interest" and grade 2 is "special interest"....
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  The "r" sound is technically an alveolar tap with a palatal offglide, though a lot of people render that consonant more like an English "r". I think it depends on your dialect a bit (there are three major ones, with...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  The claim that the UK government's long-term failure to acknowledge the civil rights of NI nationalists isn't associated with oppression is at best a startling and ahistorical one, and whether you like it or not that's what the insistence on...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  Incidentally, actual unionists in actual Northern Ireland don't typically say "Eire". They'll normally say something like "the Republic of Ireland" (which only a small number of pedants will object to - it's in Irish statute law as the "description" of...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  NI already has a pretty stable temperate climate, but you do rather have to like rain. Fianna Fáil put out a white paper a while back proposing a federal Ireland with substantial autonomy for Stormont, basically switching the roles of...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  In fact I grew up in Belfast to mixed Protestant/Catholic parents, and as a result inherited a strong aversion to both sets of hardliners and an inclination to try to find compromise positions - I think it's likely I'm more...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  My first serious summer job (also telephony) had somewhat similar requirements. There's a hell of a lot less code involved in stacks that need six nines of uptime, though! And having to testify to Congress if you miss your requirements...