I've got about 50 of his 71 novels. For sure they're entertaining, well constructed and the use of language is delightful.
There's something you notice if you read a whole lot of Wodehouse in quick succession: I'd estimate that there are about 20 plots among the ones I've read -- that is to say, the same situations, characters and plot devices are reused often, and if you removed the redundancy, you'd end up with about 20 novels. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Good question. Maybe (just speculating here) because it would be dangerous to land with too much fuel on board? Planes dump fuel for that reason when aborting shortly after takeoff, but that may only be a problem with tanks close to full.
Unfortunately there's a scam for that,apparently. The scam caller tells the victim to call their bank, but doesn't hang up. The victim hangs up, calls the bank, the scammer is still on the line.
Global average temperatures 6000 years ago were 0.5 °C warmer than baseline (1961-1990 average), now it's 1.1 °C. Historical warm periods were local, and global average temps did not exceed current temperatures. (Also, modern is a weasel word here -- you could pick e.g. 1920 and be correct).
Even if warming stopped now, Arctic and Antarctic would continue to melt for decades to come. Rate of change is key.
Your reference is also local (to the arctic), not global.
Again, what argument are you making here?
Is it: 1: It was warmer in the past / 1a: but nothing bad happened / 1b: therefore current warming is not due to human activity / 2: therefore there is no need to reduce CO2 levels.
Misleading. You have to appeal to pre-history to find temperature levels similar to current.
> Eventually we'll plunge into another glacial period, and no amount of CO2 will stop it.
Eventually, i.e. 10's or 100's of thousands of years, if CO2 levels revert to preindustrial.
You are appealing to timescales of thousands of years, but the timescale relevant to the problem and our response is years and decades. Is your comment intended to minimise the problem of current warming? If so why?
Another niche sport recommendation: unicycling! Good for core, a unique skill, insanely fun. Learning is a test of perseverance. If you're physically talented, advanced skills will keep you engaged. If you're merely able-bodied, you can still learn to ride. A surprising number of people take it up in their 50s and 60s.
Even if it were true that the climate has changed as much and as rapidly in the past, what difference does that make to our current situation? All but a few years in the next 3 centuries will be hotter than all but a few years in the past 3 centuries, and look at the impacts we're experiencing already.
> There's no doubt we have impact, but it's not certain that it's the major driving force
Just false. There is no reasonable doubt that human activity is responsible for about 100% (could be less, could be more) of the current warming.
I'm in the UK. I get about 2-3 a week on the landline, 1-2 a week on the mobile. 30% "This is Microsoft/your ISP, your computer is hacked", 30% "You were involved in an accident that wasn't your fault", 10% oven cleaning services.
I suspect that English speaking scammer call centres are a reason for this.
It seems that scala-meta is alive (http://scalameta.org), but is now about developer tools (e.g. code formatting plugin used by IntelliJ). The macro part of scala-meta was spun off to https://github.com/scalacenter/macros, which is archived and points to Dotty macros as the way forward.
I'll be watching Dotty macros with keen interest, as I have found the current scala macro system very useful despite it remaining experimental. One thing I couldn't do with current macros was provide any kind of generic wrapper around macro methods in the same library, due to the separate compilation pass requirement. I hope this is what staging will address.
This would be perfect for me, and I suspect there are a lot of people in my situation: I would far prefer to pay for news than have intrusive and possibly dangerous advertising, and I do subscribe to a couple of news sites. I'm not going to subscribe to every paywalled news site that I might want to read, but I would be happy to pay for an occasional article.
If micropayments were ever to really take off, it would shift the balance of power on the internet in an interesting way.
I think you've identified the two most important topics. A nitpick, though: I disagree with your definition of forcing, it's the same as my definition of feedback.
A forcing is anything that moves the temperature away from the equilibrium between radiative losses and insolation, whether higher or lower. Additional CO2 is itself a forcing.
Great advice. I've had squeezeboxes since the SB1 in 2003, and recently got a Hifiberry amp running Squeezelite. It's as minimal as it gets -- power brick, RPi + amp in a custom case, and speakers. The class D amp is surprisingly pleasant.
> I haven't seen anyone on either side put forth detailed policy proposals other than voluntary carbon caps
You missed a carbon tax, in my opinion the mechanism most likely to make a difference.
> In my opinion, advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed.
I agree with you to this extent: with the current state of affairs, only advanced (and as yet untried) technology can avert disaster. I don't think it is at all likely to happen, and major policy changes were needed twenty years ago.
You would expect closely related languages to have similar words for a common animal, i.e. to be at least somewhat conserved. I do find it mysterious. Another one: Dutch vlinder, Afrikaans (very close descendant) schoenlapper.
I think the papillon dog breed has big, butterfly-like ears!
Opposite of the topic (ultra-nonconserved?), "butterfly" is a word that is strangely different in even closely related European languages (Romance, Teutonic, Slavic). Doing a cursory check in Google Translate now, but I've one found one language pair where the words appear to be related: French: "papillon", Catalan "papallona". Otherwise: mariposa, бабочка, motyl, schmetterling, vlinder, sommerfugl, fjäril, farfalla, пеперуда, leptir ...
I'd love to hear a linguistic explanation for this.
EDIT: Latin: "papilionem" (papilio?), so at least French and Catalan have conserved it, and I can see that Italian "farfalla" could be cognate.
EDIT EDIT: All the Slavic languages known to Google Translate have a word related to motyl, except for Russian: бабочка (butterfly) (but мотылек (moth)), so there is less to this phenomenon than meets the eye!
You addressed the substance (or not) of aaron695's post far better than I did, but I'm prepared to believe that the post is sincere, absent any actual evidence of shilling. (See also, Trump's repeated insinuation that protestors must be paid).
I don't doubt that there is a shit-ton of political trolling, which degrades discourse even if it does not persuade.
There's something you notice if you read a whole lot of Wodehouse in quick succession: I'd estimate that there are about 20 plots among the ones I've read -- that is to say, the same situations, characters and plot devices are reused often, and if you removed the redundancy, you'd end up with about 20 novels. Not that there's anything wrong with that.