Viewing profile — paulific

Interesting. I didn't know they moved the Siegessäule. Reminds me of what I read about the approach to the Vatican and the way Mussolini obliterated bits of (messy) historic city t…

Microbrewery? ;-)

The blind leading the blind and both shall walk into a transparent wall.

The Monty Python custard pie lecture is also hilarious.

For a look at just how hands on early motoring was, check out this article about Kipling and cars (he was an enthusiastic "early adopter"): http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_steam…

Part of the politics is that the Republic of China still officially claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China. So it really is recognize one or the other. Politi…

I guess this is why I have free to play games sitting on my phone but never play them. They take me through a tutorial full of tasks and menus and resources and I subconsciously fe…

Yup. By no means a developer, but I Python was the first programming language I learned and I always felt it was my native language. I was happy to stick around with 2.7 for as lon…

I learned that from Tony Robinson's "Worst Jobs in History" http://www.unofficialtonyrobinsonwebsite.co.uk/pages/worst_j...

The quotes in the Wired article are all kind of the opposite though. For example: "Today, 99.9 percent of humanity cannot beat the best commercial software at blitz chess. Within t…

Yes, I remember my local supermarket had 'recommended' products that were marked like they were specials, but were not actually discounted at all. I appreciated the business logic,…

Yup, almost everything in I have ever worked with in Japanese to English translation has been shackled by the need to produce English translations optimized for English speaking Ja…

I think I'm going to go back and finish Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife. It feels less like dystopian science fiction and more like realistic observation than ever at this point…

Well, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy had both. The premise of William Gibson's The Peripheral also seems to be that the development of futuristic technology is not going to st…

From the article: "From left to right, these rosettes show the surprisingly beautiful paths of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus as seen from Earth. " https://earth…

One of the university labs I had to use did not allow access to Netscape for whatever reason, so I actually used Lynx a lot. For reading text on webpages it actually did a quite st…

You can pass N2 in one year of full time study (if you apply yourself). The multiple years tend to be when people are trying to pass it doing part time study.

Oh, I thought it was the Cumaean Sybil. But I guess that is where Trelawney's name comes from.

If you only hear it spoken, or you don't understand the naming convention and start making guesses about what you think is going on. People in countries where middle names are norm…

I deal with the reverse of this problem all the time. Living in Japan, my bank cards (and other ID) all have my name in the Japanese order, with my surname first followed by my fir…

Notably there have only been two reigning empresses since the 8th Century and none at all in the modern era. The current Imperial Household Law only allows males to ascend the thro…

That was more or less the point of Tolkien's Lecture "The Monster and the Critics". He compared it to building a tower out rocks that came from a historical ruin. Everybody was int…

I think the original comment only really mentioned taxes in passing and then the discussion went off down a rabbit hole; but a wonderful rabbit hole in which each subsequent commen…

That is the point. The Japanese approach to creating legal documents is to make them as ambiguous as possible so that they can be interpreted any way the creator likes. This is som…

US jurisprudence may be different from the Australian law I studied, but as I understand it the "more likely than not" applies to the facts in a civil case not to the legal issue o…