exchemist

Well yes, I don't see why this remark is the least bit shocking, as it is obvious. The ambassador said he disliked references to this outmoded phrase, which is due to Churchill and was said 70 odd years ago. A lot has clearly changed and it has become both absurd, and in my view demeaning, for the Brits to keep harping on about it in the hope of special favours. The King I thought put the relationship in the right context by reminding everyone of the shared history and the fact that so many of the legal and constitutional principles of the USA are due to that history, right back to the Bill of Rights and even Magna Carta. If there is a special link, that is what it is. One perspective that being a hereditary monarch provides is a view of the broad, long, sweep of history. I think it was useful for the King to remind US politicians of history, their place in it and their concomitant responsibilities. Easy to lose track of that in the heat of the day to day pressures. One favour Trump has done the British is to strip away the cosy assumption that the USA will always protect us. It is clear that it won't, or rather may not, depending on the government of the day. We and the other Europeans need to be able to defend ourselves, possibly even from the USA. So let's junk this worn-out and subservient term and stand once more on our own feet.

What a lousy cartoon. As for @Linkey 's use of it to suggest that Navalny was somehow in the pay of Putin, to boost Putin's popularity, that seems (durrh!) to overlook Putin's repeated attempts to poison Navalny and his eventual killing. I can only presume @Linkey is a Russian troll.

No, I was very much a family man at that stage, being married to a Frenchwoman who didn’t like beer and with a small son at the Lycee Vincent van Gogh in Scheveningen. So no pubs for me then. But quite a lot of singing, in an English choral soc and also in a small a cappella group that sang Renaissance polyphony (early music being a speciality at the Hague Conservatorium). I learned a lot about music while I was there.

Yes I agree, on both points.

Hmm, Scheveningen, or St. Andrew's or Helensburgh for that matter, are hardly "safari parks", though.

Bit much though when they pinch your fush n chups out of your hand.

There seems to be a distinction made between herring gulls and lesser black backed gulls: Where such measures are proving ineffective, local authorities and landowners can take immediate action if these gulls pose a risk to public health or safety under the terms of a general licence, (a licence which is already in place provided certain conditions are met). This allows them to remove the nests and eggs of lesser black-backed gulls and herring gulls without having to spend time applying for a specific, individual licence. It also allows lethal control of lesser black-backed gulls in certain circumstances. Herring gulls, however, have been red-listed as a bird of conservation concern so their lethal control is only permitted by obtaining an individual licence from Natural England. From: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/advice-on-how-to-deal-with-problem-seagulls It is not very easy to tell the difference though. And they can be a menace, as we found out when we lived in Scheveningen in the Netherlands (and my son found to a lesser extent in St Andrew's). (But you are allowed to kill foxes, I've discovered, so long as humane methods are used, e.g. not poison.)

This thread seems to be a piece of Russian propaganda intended to tarnish the reputation of Navalny. Who do you guys bother? The man is dead.

Well he does claim to be on the spectrum, so might be wired up a bit differently from you and me I suppose. But he has a range of answers now so we'll see if he was genuine, or just a drive-by creationist 😀.

Ha. My paternal grandfather lived on the Firth of Clyde and was both a Methodist minister and prof of church history at Glasgow. He knew the ins and outs of all these denominations - and tended to poke a bit of gentle fun at the Wee Frees. (He was probably part of the reason why my father rebelled and converted to Catholicism.)

A lot of “Wee Frees” up there, a sort of Calvinist denomination that includes keen observers of the Sabbath, i.e. Sunday. It was only in recent decades that steamer services became allowed to run on Sundays. There is, or was, something called the Lord’s Day Observance Society that kept a beady eye on what commerce was allowed to take place on a Sunday. There used to a rhyme contrasting the Wee Frees with the established Church of Scotland (which is Presbyterian): The wee kirk, the free kirk, the kirk without the steeple. The auld kirk, the cold kirk, the kirk without the people.

Pronounced fush and chups. (My son went to St Andrew's).

Ah yes, not all woodlice can roll up. I’ve never come across those common names though. I’ve heard a Scot call them slaters.

"Fish and Chips delicatessen" 😆 That's Scotland all right.

Surely that’s just a woodlouse, isn’t it?

There is also the coconut crab, which grows up to 4kg weight.

Yes I too saw that fairly uninformative news article. There is no "before and after" diagram or aerial shot to give any clue about what may have happened. It is normal for meanders, for instance, to become increasingly extreme until the river breaks through, leaving what is known as an "oxbow lake" in the dead meander. But it doesn't look like that here. There isn't enough information to comment. But this doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with the thread topic.

It doesn't make sense to me either. Cargoes from where and going where?

That's stupid. There is no "signal" from a telescope to tell you it is emitting energy. And I'm reporting this as it looks like yet another thinly disguised re-run of your previous threads.

What would a -ve signal from a telescope look like? Radiation intensity is the square of radiation amplitude, isn't it? How can you have a real -ve square?

The arch-debunker Mike West has different figures from Sabine's, with a far higher estimate of people engaged in work that might be thought in some way sensitive: about 700,000. So he says 10 deaths is well within expectations. His comments are a bit buried in this longer BBC article about this issue: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyw9rpdl4po The quote is as follows: "The US Top Secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce is ~700,000 people," science writer, investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West wrote on 16 April on his Substack. "Ordinary mortality over 22 months predicts ~4,000 deaths, ~70 homicides, and ~180 suicides. The list has 10 … The deaths are real. The families' grief is real. The pattern is not." This looks to me like just another of those American panics. I'm reminded of James Thurber's "The Day The Dam Broke"

This seems to be a complete non sequitur. That energy is not an intrinsic property of an object is like pointing out that an object's velocity is not an intrinsic property. It is obvious that neither statement has any implications for the nature of the Big Bang, or (which is a different thing) the origin of the cosmos. You seem to be using this as a pretext to insert into the thread, quite arbitrarily, some unrelated metaphysical idea. Why? And please, please, do drop the crap about "frequency". It makes me suspect you are trying to work your way round to peddling quantum woo, Deepak Chopra - style. 🤪🤡🙃🫖

I suspect the key to your question is in the term "vertebrates", more strictly these days called "chordates". The common body plan you mention is due to evolution of all chordates from a common ancestor, an early fish-type thing. The legs evolved from fishy fins. Fish, amphibians, dinosaurs, modern mammals are all in the chordate family, having the same basic body plan. So that's why. But in fact there are a lot more alternative body plans in the animal kingdom than just the chordates and the arthropods that you mention (insects, crustaceans and so forth). Both athropods and chordates are examples of a "phylum", which is a biological classification based on the basic type of body plan. A few examples of other phyla would be molluscs (shellfish, squid, octopuses etc) echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, with 5-fold radial symmetry) and annelids (segmented worms). But there a lot more besides. You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylum It is true that all the large, land-dwelling animals are chordates, which is why you can get the impression that the majority of animals have the same body plan. But if you don't limit your consideration to size, or to dwelling on land, you get a very different picture, with a lot more variety.

According to Wiki, Hegseth thinks (probably rightly and along with the rest of the Pentagon) that these Trump Class battleships are an idiotic distraction, whereas Phelan, who is thought to be particularly close to Trump, is a great proponent of them. (I wonder if it may even have been Phelan who suggested the idea of them to Trump, as a way to curry favour.) It makes me wonder if Hegseth has fired Phelan before Phelan can whisper in Trump's ear and get Hegseth fired! So a Kremlin-style struggle so that Stalin executes not you but the other guy. But if Phelan is that close to Trump, firing him is taking a risk.......

Saw quite a good aphorism on another forum: MAGA are people with Stockholm Syndrome who don’t know where Stockholm is.