Viewing profile — Kolya

The article you linked to specifically says there are only voiceless plosives in Mandarin!

The examples are cherry-picked. I took a photo outside my office window in a built-up area, o3 thought for 5m 7s (!), and it got the location wrong by 40km. Doesn't look solved to …

There are ways you could establish eligibility without a birth date. For example, they may have a WW2 service record but no record of their birth.

Yep. Anybody who’s ever read written Cantonese or Shanghainese would realise they are often unintelligible unless you speak those languages and understand how they’re written. eg 「…

Writing the pronunciation above a character is normal when the character is rare or has an unexpected pronunciation. For example recently 龘 was often written with the pinyin above.…

I would prefer if Darwin remained on the £10 note and Turing was put on the £5 note instead.

$0.0013 doesn't sound a lot. But it's equivalent to about $1.50 if somebody listens to an album 100 times. That's less than if they were to sell the album in a shop. However they d…

The title should be "Xinhua Applauds UK Move To Restrict Access To Social Media". The relationship between Xinhua and the Chinese government is complicated. Treating them as synony…

Based on what they showed on UK news this evening, much of the police aren't well-prepared.

In Africa and the Middle East, the riots were heavily motivated - the rioters had strong political reasons to be there. In London, it's just some socially disaffected youths and lo…

Well, they were in a big town and were told by the county council that there were no charge points remotely nearby. Whatever you think of Top Gear, that fact does not reflect well …

The most popular crosswords in the UK are the same type as those in the US. But some newspapers have an additional 'cryptic' crossword. (I don't know more than a couple of people w…

I'm surprised to see a crossword editor use the phrase "crosswords in England". It's not what you'd expect from someone so concerned with trivia.

'common' and 'special' aren't antonyms.

as a guess, i would think the short-term churn has increased. most heavy users of fb that i know are people that signed up a long time ago. it was an important part of their social…

It's interesting he uses Andrew Wiles as an example. Perhaps FLT would have been proved faster if Wiles had not mostly shut himself away. His achievement was exceptional, yes, but …

While it is always nice to see someone turn their life around, I'm not sure how important or appropriate stories like these are. He has a nice voice. That's a nice novelty. But the…

That isn't a reason against incest per se. It is merely an objection to certain forms of incest - specifically, those that lead to children. With freely-available contraception and…

What are the names of the studies that demonstrate that?