> ANSI K 100.1-1974
On a related note, there is also BS 6008:1980, a British Standard for making a cup of tea; later ratified as ISO 3103.
Things I Learnt in 2020
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Things I Learnt in 2020
#32I went into the article expecting it be full of usual banal platitudes, but it's a cute little list of random stuff. I was also pleasantly surprised to see 'ek number' on the list though.
As an Indian who's lived almost 4 decades in India, I have never heard of "ek number" as the response to a joke, or even ever used in the stated context of the joke being rated no 1. The closest I can think of is the phrase being directed at the joker, not the joke; a sort of "Oh, you're a first rate a-hole for cracking that joke". It's a terminated "Ek number ka ... (haraami?)", which is the only form I've ever hear…
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Re: Things I Learnt in 2020
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an Indian who's lived almost 4 decades in India, I have never heard of "ek number" as the response to a joke, or even ever used in the stated context of the joke being rated no 1. The closest I can think of is the phrase being directed at the joker, not the joke; a sort of "Oh, you're a first rate a-hole for cracking that joke". It's a terminated "Ek number ka ... (haraami?)", which is the only form I've ever hear…
Same here. The most common term I've heard is badhiya or mast or even jhakas. Never heard anyone say ek number. The closest I can think is ek-dam but a person would rarely say that in response to a joke.
"Mast" and "jhakas" sound like Maharashtra- or even Mumbai-specific words. As a North Indian Hindi speaker I can attest they are not used in North India. Specifically "mast" has a different connotation in the North, something like 'entranced', not just 'nice' the way it is used for almost anything in Mumbai.
Re: Things I Learnt in 2020
#34I learnt that I'm a loser.
You learnt, so you aren't a loser! ;)
Re: Things I Learnt in 2020
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics[0]: > Epidemiologists are public health professionals who investigate patterns and causes of disease and injury in humans. They seek to reduce the risk and occurrence of negative health outcomes through research, community education and health policy. So to cavalierly categorize epidemiologists as "more usually a bureaucrat" speaks to a myopic understanding of what value they…
You’re arguing with a connotation when the denotation is true. Most epidemiologists are bureaucrats not scientists. They don’t do research and probably can’t, certainly not at the level of someone who has done a Ph.D. Also, let’s be honest. The FDA and CDC have been of negative value in the US, on net, during the current pandemic. Lying about masks, lying about the threshold needed for herd immunity, prosecuting dist…
> Most epidemiologists are bureaucrats not scientists. They don’t do research and probably can’t ...
Please reference the definition quoted and provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Regarding the rest of your post, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. And I am entitled to disagree.
Re: Things I Learnt in 2020
#36> once a foreigner understands the difference between a Chip butty and a Crisp butty, the doors of the most exclusive private members' clubs will never be closed.
Heh.
Re: Things I Learnt in 2020
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re arguing with a connotation when the denotation is true. Most epidemiologists are bureaucrats not scientists. They don’t do research and probably can’t, certainly not at the level of someone who has done a Ph.D. Also, let’s be honest. The FDA and CDC have been of negative value in the US, on net, during the current pandemic. Lying about masks, lying about the threshold needed for herd immunity, prosecuting dist…
> Most epidemiologists are bureaucrats not scientists. They don’t do research and probably can’t ... Please reference the definition quoted and provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Regarding the rest of your post, you are certainly entitled to your opinion. And I am entitled to disagree.
A public health professional who does health policy and community outreach is a bureaucrat, not a scientist. The subset of epidemiologists who do research are scientists, whether they have a Ph.D. or somehow got into it without ever having graduated high school. Some of the bureaucrats are also scientists but most aren’t.
Re: Things I Learnt in 2020
#38Simply great.
Re: Things I Learnt in 2020
#39About Ogden's Basic English, prominent Esperantist and United Nations translator Claude Piron[1] had this to say[2]:
> ""Basic English cut its essential vocabulary to 850 words", says our critic. Let's not discuss the fact that the 850 words of Basic English do not enable you to say, for instance, "Waiter, a tomato salad!". But what is amazing is that Mr Rye appears not to know that people whose mother tongue is other than English have to learn by rote probably twice as many words as what they need in order to get along in an average language, and something like ten times as many as what is necessary to express everything in Esperanto.
Esperanto's basic vocabulary, unlike the basic vocabulary of English (as in Basic English or Nerrière's Globish) is a source of many thousands of words, because the right to combine elements is unlimited, or, to put it otherwise, because of the multiplying effect of many morphemes. The first level of the youth magazine Kontakto uses less than Ogden's 850 words: only 520 lexical elements. Since these include a hundred of vocabulary-enriching words, like igi, (words the Chinese call "empty words"), the list contains only something like 430 semantemes ("full words" in Chinese parlance). But when you read the short stories and the articles written with this limited vocabulary, you don't notice that the author was restricted in his choice of words. Esperanto enables him to be lively, expressive, fun, with a very small lexical basis, precisely because nothing restricts what French speaking mathematicians call the combinatoire (do you say "combinatory"?).
In Esperanto, most roots give birth to dozens of words, easy to form, or forming themselves automatically, by simple reflex, since the patterns are regular, whereas in English, you have to learn a new word for each new concept. Where in Esperanto you make up the adjective with a simple - a, in English you have to learn it by rote, and English differs from most other languages in that very often no similarity of form helps your memory. You don't derive lunar from moon, annual from year, rural from country, urban from city, avuncular from uncle (Esperanto: luna "
Re: Things I Learnt in 2020
#40On TV Pickup, it's no longer such a thing as it was in the 1980s and 1990s; Tom Scott has a video mentioning it - Dinorwig pumped storage hydroelectric power plant in the UK. One of the reasons for building it was to provide power to the UK national grid at short notice, and the national grid organisation would study the TV schedules for the UK's 4-5 terrestrial channels, and put Dinorwig on standby for power generation. Now with so many different channels and streaming, there isn't the same effect of the country all having an ad break at the same time, and Dinorwig's main use now is in balancing calm moments of solar and wind power generation.
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