sethoflagos

Ultimately, we all have to commit to some significant level of trust in some foundational reference material. For me, it was the likes of Rogers & Mayhew Steam Tables and a small group of similar. I wouldn't say the trust was absolute, but it was necessary in order to function effectively in the workplace.

Perhaps one of the mods could perform the surgical extraction?

It's a life lesson. What you get out of it is a direct function of the quality and quantity of effort you put into it. Some will learn this and adapt accordingly. Others not so much. ...or how old are the electrons that define your external form? Yes, the recent development in interpreting naturally parsed queries is useful, but there's still no substitute for filtering out the dross by using carefully selected, specific keywords as we learned with Webcrawler etc many moons ago. Nothing beats picking keywords that only appear in the sources you're interested in and nothing else. (Try 'aerobates' for example) However, with the more selective searched I do seem to be receiving the following or similar with increasing frequency: Switching my VPN location usually clears it, but it's still irritating.

I've just checked my ancient copy of the Stainer & Barrett Dictionary of Musical Terms. For sesquialtera it has: 1) Numbers in the proportion 3:2 2) An organ stop consisting of several ranks of pipes, sounding high harmonics for the purpose of strengthening the ground tone. My money would be on this being accomplished via sum-and-difference tones, specifically the latter. Now that IS a subject worth arguing about.

I shall endeavour to remember that when @TheVat speaks, this is what is meant. But what of the looser speech of others? I'm more than comfortable with 'mixed meter'. But some clearly do consider America to be a hemiola rhythm, and whoever last authored the Wikipedia entry doesn't even seem to know what classic sequential hemiola is anyway. In the words of our esteemed leader ''Forget it, Jake - it's Crackpot Town". It's not science, so it's just not worth stressing out over the strictest of definitions. Few will take any notice. My own understanding is probably based on an exercise for the hemiola in Arban's Complete Method for Cornet, which consisted solely of alternating duplets and triplets repeated indefinitely. Or at least until the pattern was imprinted forever in my marrow.

...that's nothing compared to the brownout due to yesterday's mistyping of 'recital' involving Cleo Laine and Nat King Cole.

Perhaps if you had told the AI that you were interested in Dartmoor and Exmoor as tectonostructural units, rather than superficial accidents of recent periglacial erosion, you might have got more satisfying answers.

Easier just to raise our eyebrows, shrug, and silently mouth the word 'Yanks' to each other (JK). Perhaps rather than being relatively unschooled in the musical arts, both @exchemist and I have the Grove's on our bookshelves, rather than New Harvard. Different traditions; different words; crotchets in place of quarter notes. Everyone I ever shared a concert platform with from age 10 onward would call this a 3:2 cross-rhythm. A small advantage of this terminology may be some confidence that everyone understood what it meant. 😘 ... or just the simplest of the odd meters?

Ditto. The context being alternations between simple and compound rhythms eg 3/4 and 6/8. Common in some Latin dance rhythms, especially flamenco. Best explained with an example all us old gits are familiar with. Just try tapping your foot to the chorus of America from West Side Story. Always a fun one to play.

I suspect his rich baritone voice would have had a little more difficulty with the hoher sopran of Lied der Lulu However, Emily is more intrigued by the following Wikipedia note:

Not for the first time, Ms Laine fails to guess any of Ol' King Cole's playlist at the West End soirée. Draw "O" Cleo! Note nut Nat raps Agnus Dei; Lulu Lied; sung a Spartan tune to Noël Coward.

Emily learns of jungle justice defence against cultural appropriation, and some barely appropriate prefixes: Mad a meta-covert no-wit came to take Eka-totem. Act I won't revocate, Madam.

Interesting. Not really a viable lifestyle option given my freelance employment pattern, which relied heavily on close of business social networking, especially in those days. Still, that's getting rather off-topic.

The Sherlock? Did quite a reasonable fissionships as I recall.

Pity. (I did live in Scheveningen for a while. A bit chilly but matjes on the seafront were nice)

Similar to what I thought walking around the safari game park munching on a rack of ribs 🤕

Curious, since for many years the two taxa were considered end members of a classic ring species. This invites some question as to where exactly on the spectrum one taxon ends and another begins. I think Dawkins covered it in the Ancestor's Tale. However a 2004 paper, The Herring Gull Complex is not a Ring Species, threw a bit of a spanner in the works with an argument that divergence was more due to occasional long distance allopatric speciation. I did like the old picture. The jury is still out perhaps. Quite enjoyed the occasional trip to Bempton Cliffs to photograph the two where they overlapped. (I have no time for hostility to either; hardly their fault humanity is so messy that it needs a clean up crew).

Using exhaust air as the driving medium is a tough call as it carries so little momentum. First notion would be a conventional sealed tanker hull with forward water intakes funnelled into turbines which drive fan-assisted exhaust air ducts discharging aft. Not great since fans are fairly low efficiency devices, and much of the limited input energy would be lost as heat. Never going to match a pair of high efficiency propellers, or possibly even better, pumped water jets again discharging aft. But these deviate from the letter of the OP.

Just has to be Turnip's codename for the planned beach invasion of Lesser Tunb.

We still have some pretty large ones in the tropics (Apologies if there's a forum ban on myriapod porn)

I don't follow your logic. Surely I'm enforcing a probability distribution of 0,50,50,0 in order to subvert its ill-posed nature. I say 'ill-posed' on two counts: firstly, it is posing two different questions at the same time, the conventional understanding of which contradict each other; and secondly, there is no 'correct' choice offered for the 'non-random' answer. It's basically asking you to select the capital of Albania from four types of jellyfish. PS... Perhaps that last bit was hyperbolic: it isn't a category error as such.

See Arthropleura

I... Hades! I recognise face not! As mums at one cafe sing o' Cerise Dahi.

After a little thought, I shall define a 'random answer' as the result of one toss of a fair coin. If it is heads, the choice would be B; and if tails, C. Ideally, B and C each have a 50% of being selected, B clearly being a uniquely correct answer for this methodology. I do however recall being downmarked in exams for this kind of reasoning. Too 'engineeringy' perhaps. (It works; don't ask questions).

Because the transition from four limbs to six requires the precise coordination of thousands of individual genetic and behavioural adjustments. Statistics greatly reduces the chance of such a revolutionary change occurring all at once (see Saltation), especially in organisms above a certain level of complexity. On the other hand, achieving the same through many thousands of incremental changes is only feasible if each generation is at least as 'fit' as the previous. Which means that eg. an extra quarter of a leg must offer some survival advantage exceeding the extra energy needed to grow it, and having more bits that can potentially go wrong (see Exaptation). Not impossible, it's how we got our limbs in the first place, but still a major hurdle. Evolution is blind: even if six limbs were better than four, evolution has no way of knowing this in advance and therefore no reason to head off in that direction.