mistermack

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

Many follies, particularly during times of famine, such as the Great Famine in Ireland, were built as a form of poor relief, to provide employment for peasants ...

While that's probably true, you don't have to choose a folly, you could build an extension, or anything useful, and provide the same jobs. And you could equally look at it as cashing in on some desperate people for cheap labour. Nothing wrong with that though, if it puts bread on the table. 

Of course, another motive might be to keep the labour from leaving, heading across the Atlantic for a new start. 

Unfortunately, Shinzo Abe seems to have been a victim of the success of Japan's strict gun laws. 

He would have had a lot more protection in virtually every other country, but the confidence of living in such a safe country left him vulnerable. 

On the ongoing saga of Johnson's departure, I would really like to know what severance pay these ministers are getting, especially the ones who were only in the cabinet for a day or two. I've only heard one fleeting mention, that they were getting £430,000 each. And when asked why, the minister just said "that's set by statute". 

Nice work if you can get it.

Unfortunately, this weakens the idea of moving rocks with mercury, because it provides an alternative explanation for traces of mercury being found. There's no doubt that liquid mercury thousands of years ago would have seemed highly magical to anybody who came across it, and it wouldn't be hard for the reigious con-men of the day to weave stories around it.

Surely mathematics is judged by the same standards as everything else. Does it produce results that are verifiable in the real world? 

Admittedly the concept os zero and infinity might be troublesome to verify, but so long as they don't produce nonsense results indirectly, we can work with them.

Never read such rubbish. I didn't vote in the Brexit referendum, I was pretty much perfectly in the middle of the argument. But a lot of what tilted me towards remain was inertia. It's always more tempting to stick with the devil you know. And I can absolutely confirm that the so-called lies of the campaign played no part in my decision, I could very easily discern what was being bigged up on both sides. People didn't vote on what the GDP would be, or red tape. They voted on who will run the country, the Westminster Parliament, or some back office in Brussels. And they decided to NOT stay in the United States of Europe. 

Since that decision was made, and looking at the reaction in Europe, I'm absolutely certain that they made the right decision, and if there was a vote today, I would definitely vote to stay out. The EU mandarins reacted more like a mafia than a club of equals.

The remain side constantly pushed the HUGE lie, that Europe was a club, not a government, but in private, the heads of the EU machine say openly that moving towards a fully integrated united state is their clear objective, and they are going there, little by little, every minute of every day. 

That's why there was so much rage, when we left. Apart from the cash cow that they would be losing. 

But it's not finished. We should pull out of the Human Rights courts as well. We have courts here, and MPs. We can decide on our own human rights. 

And pull out of the refugee convention. We can make our own rules. We have perfectly good courts and hundreds of MPs, all perfectly capable of making rules for this country. Why on earth should we farm out our own laws to foreign Quangos? 

So we're out in name, but there's still lots left to do. 

11 minutes ago, TheVat said:

The clever OP title...reminded me

I don't know if you followed what sparked off this final episode in the premiership of Johnson, but it was about a minister in the Whip's office by the name of "Pinchin" who was accused of getting drunk and molesting men at a club in London. 

It's all about what Boris knew when he appointed him, he has denied knowing anything apart from rumours. But a former aid reported that when Boris appointed him, he quipped " Pinchin by name, Pinchin by nature "  so that's where the title of this thread came from, Boris's own lips. 

33 minutes ago, Sensei said:

You may regret it, and miss him, if the new PM is pro-Russian.. risky operation at tough times.

I don't think there are any pro-Russian MPs in the running. In any case, if they were, they would keep it hidden. 

I'm pro-Russian, but if I got the job, I would keep my mouth shut and follow the official line of the rest of the West. I wouldn't want to jeopardise the UK's official position as first poodle of the United States. 

1 hour ago, geordief said:

Yes,pretty interesting (is that canned laughter,though?)

I don't know, it might be, but I don't think so. I've heard the original, and it's very wooley sound, so this is a version that's been worked on digitally, hence the slightly artificial sound.

Sometimes it takes an outsider looking in to appreciate the English language :

https://soundcloud.com/kamrantavakoli/indian-teacher-explaining-the?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing     

I don't get the point you are trying to make here. While the nature and mechanism of gravity is still to be nailed down, the modelling of it's effects is nailed down to a phenomenal degree of accuracy, so that the future course that asteroids take can be predicted to within very fine tolerances. 

The existence or not of a graviton particle doesn't change that, nor does the current lack of a theory combining general relativity with quantum physics. 

So there's no mystery concerning the effects of gravity on the surface of bodies, or how to model a gravitational field. None that I'm aware of anyway.

27 minutes ago, geordief said:

What is the story with the actual pronunciation of the letter "H" ?

Is it "aitch: or  "haitch"?

I have heard both (we need to know)

Casting my memory back nearly sixty years, when they were trying to teach me a smattering of french at school, I seem to remember the term " ash aspire" ( my own spelling ) which meant a 'breathed' aitch. So maybe it comes to English from French, and they specify a distinction between the two. 

3 hours ago, iweaver1772 said:

I was trying to say anything in our body related to electricity could be made healthier by "feeding" it electricity. 

Our bodies evolved over about four billion years. Billions of tiny changes have adapted that early life to it's environment in a continuous process. At no point in that four billion years, have our ancestors been fed electricity. So it would take a miracle for it to get benefit from something it didn't evolve to use. 

It might be different, if it was something that we have DESIGNED to do a certain job, to correct a defect, like a heart pacemaker. Just whacking a battery on a random body part isn't going to regulate a heart. It's taken centuries of research to got to the point where a pacemaker can be designed to do a useful job. 

It didn't come about by giving random stuff a try, it was the product of years of research.

2 minutes ago, geordief said:

Why don't you apply  for a post in this government ?

They are looking for people with your attitude 

I would have no chance. I didn't go to Eton. 

5 minutes ago, geordief said:

For his part Starmer,the Labour leader has promised to step down if the same kind of charges are brought against  him as were brought  against Johnson

I thought that was a ludicrous thing to say. He must have inside info that it's a safe bet. I don't particularly care what they drank in Downing Street, or what Starmer did. The world has gone mad over it. A drink with a meal is not any kind of party that I would recognise, and neither were the gatherings in Downing Street. 

A party is something you go out to, not drinks at work. 

But the real crime is not forseeing what the press would make of it. That's what is both stupid and amateurish. Everyone in government should be constantly thinking, "how will this be presented in the news" ? or even misrepresented. They should be on top of it, it's what they get paid for.

Johnson is finished. The govornment is hardly on the brink of collapse though. They will have an election and 'unite' around whoever wins. Conservative MPs will protect their own interests, once Johnson is history. 

Johnson has been on an amazing self-destruct course. Right from the early days, when he spent a spectacular amount of money on the 10 Downing Street flat decoration, including a truly ludicrous sum on wallpaper, of all things. He doesn't seem to have the ability to see the juggernaut hurtling towards him. 

Having the drinks parties during lockdown might look no big deal, at the time, but they should all know by now what the press will make of it. 

If I was in power I would appoint a minister for upcoming disasters, with a staff of ten to anticipate what the next press onslaught will be about. Mind you, what Johnson has done could all have been avoided by a tiny bit of common sense at the top. 

14 minutes ago, swansont said:

I’m bothered by the British tendency to drop the “h” that starts a word, or drops an “r” at the end, etc.

No need to worry. We have a royal family and ruling class that will always show us how to talk gramattical. Drop your h at Eton and you'll be in for a week of buggery by the English master. 

16 minutes ago, TheVat said:

I don't currently have the energy to reply to this.  Or wrap it up neatly and put boson. 

It's just not in your dna, is it? You probably lack the debating gene. 

13 minutes ago, TheVat said:

I live thirty miles from Deadwood, South Dakota and have rarely heard "perdict."

I guarantee you'll hear it all the time now. 

13 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Incidentally, in actual cattle ranching regions, it's common to say "stockman" or "ranch hand" in lieu of "cowboy. "

Well, they should get themselves an education, watching John Wayne movies like everybody else. 

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

Perhaps you need to live in America to appreciate the subtleties...

Back when I lived in America, nobody pronounced it per. But that was fifty years ago. 

One more bit of modern american language that grinds my gears is the pronunciation of "pre". As in "perdict"  "pervail"  "pertend"  and "percise" etc etc.
It's only come in in the last twenty years really. Even Barak Obama, in older footage, will say pre-dict, but nowadays, he says perdict. (mostly). 
It comes across to me that it's the American yearning for the cowboy or pioneering lifestyle.
Pernouncing it "per" is more homespun. They really want to be Paw Clampett.  
Obama obviously knows the word is predict, but he doesn't want to sound like a fancy Chicago Lawyer (which he is) so he has adopted the "per" pronunciation so as not to sound pertentious. To my English ears it IS pertentious, but it's not, to American ears. 
 

4 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

so we end up teaching intelligent people that it's OK to kill/hate/belittle those that you consider have wasted potential.

                      😄    Speak for yourself !

There are still plenty of crazy scientists taking a chance. One of the most notorious was Jenner, testing his smallpox vaccine on a small boy, the son of his gardener, by deliberately trying to infect him with smallpox after giving him his vaccine. 

In more modern times, you have the case of Barry Marshall, deliberately drinking a broth of  Helicobacter pylori culture in a bid to demonstrate the link to stomach ulcers. It did get him a Nobel prize. 

25 minutes ago, geordief said:

Well in the example I just gave I had my own mother down as a snob for using "amn't" and not "aren 't" when I expect   you know it is fairly commonly used  in Ireland, where she was brought up.

My own family in Ireland used to say "amn't" but my mother and father, who came over to the UK to live, would say aren't, so they changed, even though they kept their accent. 

I think in Ireland now it's the older people who might say amn't, and the younger ones rarely do, so maybe the nation is turning snobbish.

2 hours ago, StringJunky said:

It's snobbery. 

Disagree. I think them people what gets it wrong should have been learned to talk scientific. 

What usually makes me wince with "scientific" words like energy and vibrations is that people are often in bullshit mode when they throw them in to the conversation, thinking that it actually makes them sound more educated, when it's really having the opposite effect. It's the failed attempt at bullshit that is cringeworthy.

1 minute ago, zapatos said:

People wincing at the lack of education of other people is what makes me wince.

You seem to be defending these unknown people against some sort of attack, Sir Galahad.  I'm just saying it's sad that people don't get a better education. Not blaming them. I just find it a waste of potential.