161–170 of 205 posts
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Ah, well, I neglected to think/realise AmE was generally 'nooze' too... So I might have to retract 'most dialects' (at least in the way I meant it which was counting speakers rather than distinct dialects). The other form you often see this in is long 'u's being 'oo' rather than (as I would say) roughly 'ew'. (Duplicate, repudiate, muse, etc.)
Are you from the Northeast US? I pronounce news rhyming with pews that way.
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A lot of it is precision and scale. Without coke (the coal product) how would you bootstrap large steel production? Electric furnaces exist but use a lot of energy. Without steel and the loss of knowledge on mass producing precision equipment, we lose most of modern medicine's advancements.
Yes to precision, that seems like a primary metric for "height" of civilization. But I wonder about scale. Like how much steel do we actually need? More to the point of the OP I suspect that energy usage per capita isn't intrinsically linked to quality of life or "height" of civilization at least above some baseline level. > we lose most of modern medicine's advancements. E.g. stone knives are sharp enough to serve a…
Steel is very easy to sanitize. Most of modern medicine also needs metal shaped precisely. Take out the precision and the sanitization and we're back to medicine that might kill people more often than it helps.
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To add to this (because the difference was really not clear to me from your suggested rhymes): The difference is in the sound of the final s. "loose" ends with "s" from "set", whereas "lose" ends with the z from "zoo". And while the vocal sound is the same according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loose , I feel that there is (or can be) some difference there. Just like in "j…
They are shown with different pronunciations. Do you mean the recordings? They sound different to my British ear.
Think bootstrapped company vs big money VC backed company. Fossil fuels are like a boatload of VC. It accelerates things but also promotes certain dysfunctions and wastefulness.
Of course maybe our slow renewable civilization would eventually find nuclear fission and take off like ours.
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Another "if" I'm often wondering is about the size of the Earth. Had we shown up on something the size of the Moon or Ganymede, the amount of resources we would have had at our disposal would have been a lot smaller. We would probably have figured that we weren't the center of the Solar system much sooner though. On the other hand if an intelligent species spawns on a much larger planet they can progress much longer…
Conversely, were we born on a world a bit larger than Earth, we wouldn't be able to reach orbit the way we did, due to limits of chemical rocket propulsion.
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Another "if" I'm often wondering is about the size of the Earth. Had we shown up on something the size of the Moon or Ganymede, the amount of resources we would have had at our disposal would have been a lot smaller. We would probably have figured that we weren't the center of the Solar system much sooner though. On the other hand if an intelligent species spawns on a much larger planet they can progress much longer…
Conversely, were we born on a world a bit larger than Earth, we wouldn't be able to reach orbit the way we did, due to limits of chemical rocket propulsion.
If anyone wants to learn more about the history of this specific/niche topic, there's actually an interesting book (with a foreword by Isaac Asimov), Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants by John Drury Clark:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drury_Clark
* PDF copy: http://www.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
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>nobody knows how to make cobblestone. Can you expand on that? I didn't think cobblestones were made? Don't you just pick suitable stones?
In the United States, cobblestones were manufactured large blocks that were impermeable and very durable. Streets were paved with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sett_(paving)
(which is often called a cobblestone)
Edit: Still being laid in Edinburgh...
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Yes to precision, that seems like a primary metric for "height" of civilization. But I wonder about scale. Like how much steel do we actually need? More to the point of the OP I suspect that energy usage per capita isn't intrinsically linked to quality of life or "height" of civilization at least above some baseline level. > we lose most of modern medicine's advancements. E.g. stone knives are sharp enough to serve a…
Without structural steel, we lose the ability for large structures (e.g. bridges, skyscrapers, large scale ships, etc.) and we probably denude the world of trees. You would be hard pressed to find any new construction using no steel at all. Steel is very easy to sanitize. Most of modern medicine also needs metal shaped precisely. Take out the precision and the sanitization and we're back to medicine that might kill p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another "if" I'm often wondering is about the size of the Earth. Had we shown up on something the size of the Moon or Ganymede, the amount of resources we would have had at our disposal would have been a lot smaller. We would probably have figured that we weren't the center of the Solar system much sooner though. On the other hand if an intelligent species spawns on a much larger planet they can progress much longer…
Conversely, were we born on a world a bit larger than Earth, we wouldn't be able to reach orbit the way we did, due to limits of chemical rocket propulsion.