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Australia Is On So Much Fire, You Can See It From Orbit
Jeremy Lee writes "Temperatures in Australia this week hit the point where the Bureau of Meteorology had to invent a new color. And with heat and winds come Bushfires. So it's probably good that I made a real-time bushfire map with every known source of public data directly relating to fires in Australia, mostly because fire doesn't respect state borders."
From space.
I've been looking for a full country version. This is awesome. Thanks.
Kangaroo BBQ? anyone?
Once you've smelled burning kangaroo mixed with the acrid stench of melted dune-buggy and dead mutant, you're never the same again. I can still hear the koalas screaming in my nightmares.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
they've gone to plaid.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Invent a new colour?
Is this some new mix of visible wavelengths that had never been encountered before?
Seems to me they just used an existing colour that had not previously been used on the temperature gradient maps.
I suggest that we go to... Purple Alert.
Yes, because English teachers are the only ones against it. Everyone else understands that it's acceptable when used properly.
Is this a drive-by post by a moron?
I'm sure the Global warmers/deniers will be all over the place. Either way, the article for those who didn't read it have the following stats:
Hottest national averages on record (before today).
1 January 7, 2013: 40.33 degrees
2 December 21, 1972: 40.17
3 December 20, 1972: 40.01
4 December 22, 1972: 39.82
5 January 1, 1973: 39.79
6 January 6, 2013: 39.71
7 December 17, 2002: 39.7
8 January 2, 1973: 39.65
9 January 3, 2013: 39.55
10 December 16, 2002: 39.54
11 December 30, 1972: 39.48
12 December 31, 1972: 39.43
13 January 27, 1936: 39.4
14 January 1, 1990: 39.39
15 January 4, 2013: 39.32
16 January 5, 2013: 39.26
17 January 2, 1990: 39.22
18 January 2, 2013: 39.21
19 December 18, 2002: 39.2
20 January 13, 1985: 38.98
So it would appear that 1972 and even 1973 were very hot years there. As well as it appears that 2013 will be as well. Finding cause in those two anomalies will be interesting. I don't think 1972 had as much CO2 in the air as we do now. Is the area of temp measurement too small to say either way was is the cause? I'm not a climatologist. But what I do know is it's hot.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
I think that could be phrased better.
To be fair, the new colors would fit best in the scale in the range well below freezing.
Australia is pleased and proud to announce that the number of horrid and lethally venomous creatures per hectare has reached historic lows!
Of course this has nothing to do with the fact that the north pole melted to record small levels this years. This is an isolated incident of freak weather, as was Sandy.
It's all about finding better ways
You know must of us English speakers, both in the USA and else were would have written "So Much of Australia is on Fire" for a headline. "Australia Is On So Much Fire" Sounds like George Lucas is posting now.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
And I don't think there is a proper use.
What's the big deal? It's 54 degrees here in Texas right now...what? metric? we don't do metric here in Texas. How much is that in 'merican? Wow, that IS hot. Never mind.
My brain is overly lubricated
Actually, this summary is pretty good. its concise, its not repeatin half the article its linking to. I'd prefer more summaries like this.
Greetings, time traveler from the 19th century. "And" has been an acceptable opening segue for some time now here in 2012. Also, we attempt to use gender-neutral language, which has made using the plural "they" and its variants as singular forms increasingly acceptable. In addition, the delineation between "effect" and "affect" seems to be fading in popular usage as well, as have traditional meanings of "irony" and "hacker" (a word which probably means something REALLY different to you).
Oh, and we have a cure or treatment for every venereal disease now! And we have a polio vaccine too!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
To be fair, one of the "new colours" should be used to indicate Smoke on the Water.
Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.
I suspect next summer is going to be another bad year for fires in the USA. Seems like the entire goddamn west burned down last year. The sky was brown all summer. We cleared the layer of smoke in a plane, and the blue of the sky came as quite a shock. I'd actually forgotten the sky was supposed to look like that. I didn't want to descend back into the sludge, either. It was the first time in a couple of months that I'd had a breath of fresh air.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We're now using and at the start of sentences?
and why not?
I wonder if this will create enough particulate in the atmosphere to reduce global temperatures.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
yes. but it's ok.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
But it's not technically allowed. But everyone does it.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I thought so too but then at 55 degrees north I probably see temperature gradient maps of sub-zero temperatures more often than an Australian does.
think of them as negative kelvin (i.e. hotter than normal temperatures).
Here, allow me to blow your mind:
"And" at the start of a sentence is not acceptable.
Greetings, time traveler from the early 21st century. It's only 2013 now, maybe you should have gone for a longer journey than coming from 2012.
You seem to not understand the idea of colloquial grammar. "And" at the beginning of a sentence can communicate information that isn't necessarily directly dependent on the previous independent clause. It can, for example, represent the notion of building on a previous assertion in the same paragraph. And that is why colloquial grammar should be understood, and not edited for no better reason than "I say so".
Oxford disagrees (about conjunctions, but you are spot on about potatoes): http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/conjunctions It is fine to start a sentence with and.
Get a web developer
And it was really amazing! I went to sleep in 2012 and I woke up in 2013!
How can we sleep while our beds are burning?
That's nothing. I slept through the end of the world a few weeks ago.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
The summary somehow leaves out anything related to the headline - the view of the fires from space. Didn't even bother linking to the relevant NY Times article. Okay then.
For the real good stuff, though, check out the high res images in the Universe Today coverage, which showcases several of the images directly from Cmdr Hadfield's twitter feed.
Acceptable to who?
Some pedantic grammar nuts nobody gives a fuck about?
Ok. I shall continue to not give a fuck it upsets some people. AND the rest of the world will continue to communicate just fine.
Stuck on rules just because they are rules.. Is a sign of mental illness. You should get that checked before you shoot up a school or something.
-1 for missing the apostrophe in the contraction for "it is" while engaging in Grammar Natzism.
Looks to me, as short as the second half is, like it was a typo and should have been a coma instead of a period. I would give the person some slack. Depending on how small the screen was that the entered the comment in you may not be able to tell the difference between a comma and a period.
"And" has been an acceptable opening segue for some time now here in 2012. Also, we attempt to use gender-neutral language, which has made using the plural "they" and its variants as singular forms increasingly acceptable. In addition, the delineation between "effect" and "affect" seems to be fading in popular usage as well, as have traditional meanings of "irony" and "hacker"
What those usages all have in common is that those who are skilled at using the English language don't use them.
Clearly, we must always accommodate the most ignorant and unskilled (at their single native language!) among us. That will definitely raise the bar. In fact, let's do the same thing for cars. Someone might accidentally press the brake pedal when they intended to use the accelerator. That might make them feel bad. So let's make cars where both the brake and gas pedals accelerate the vehicle. It'll be great! Then the driver is never, ever told they did something wrong. We'll just keep moving the goalposts so that no one is ever mistaken.
As a brilliant British writer once said, "This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put."
I am officially gone from
everything is BIG... and its started with BEER...
I can't believe I'm reading comments complaining about the grammar of the post title. It's a perfectly hilarious bit of hyperbole, and I enjoyed it. "Man, Australia is on so freakin' much fire right now!"
These people must have already run out of stupid IRC arguments and stuff to downvote on Reddit and imgur for today...
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
You will not get me to use the plural pronouns to make gender neutral references. There are perfectly acceptable made-up words for gender neutral pronouns. If we're going to abandon traditional English, we might as well do it with new words rather than abuse the accepted meaning of existing ones.
Mr. Gordon Sumner may feel free to die in one of the aforementioned brush files. If I love someone, I will set her free. Or perhaps hir if I'm feeling especially androgynous at the time.
AND, there are FOUR lights!
Is saying "We are" when writing a question another symptom of the demise of the English language?
Aaaaaandddd Whooosh!
-1 for misspelling Nazism. It's Nazis all the way down.
"Acceptable to whom?"
Says the guy who writes "its not 'used properly'". I think you mean it's. That's the problem with correcting people, throwing stones etc.
Acceptable to whom?
That's a quiet life.
Everyone I know was awake for the rollover from 2012 to 2013. Most were consuming some sort of alcohol too.
Oh, and we have a cure or treatment for every venereal disease now!
Including pregnancy?
"between "effect" and "affect" seems to be fading in popular usage as well"
No more than "then" and "than", "there/they're/their", or various other commonly confused words with different meanings. No, they aren't "fading in popular usage". They're just more confused than ever because more people tolerate sloppy writing. They are still distinct, and the need for them to remain distinct has not vanished. (Example: "It is better to be pissed off then pissed on" -- "Uh, I think you meant 'than'")
And you have a problem with this?
Yet you managed it.
It's a reasonable colloquialism. It basically indicates a strong tie of one sentence to the previous sentence. It is probably just a lazy way of avoiding run on sentances. And I think it does a great job at that!
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Ice Cube, and not just for the irony.
No, it's not formally correct.
It's very much allowed, it just ceases to be formal English at that point. Most people do not communicate using formal English.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
And yet it still makes horrid prose.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Should you put "and" in quotes or should we wait for the rest of the sentence?
I want to be a grammar nazi too. ;-)
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Oh, and we have a cure or treatment for every venereal disease now!
Greetings time traveler from the 22nd century.
rather then argue with you id say your rite wen it cums to ppl dropping some real anachronistic and arcane usages of grammer speling is also real grate hear U definately have a point weve cum a long way!!! i think the affect of this has bin AWESOME!!!
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
And only one statesman has!
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
FROM SPAAAACE! Is the sort of thing which is apparently supposed to sound impressive, but rarely is. The ability to 'see' something from orbit is about as precise and interesting as saying that you can 'see' a shrub from a couple miles away while standing on the hill in Kansas, which is not much at all.
While I'm at it when something 'makes its own weather' it is about equally as impressive.
Looks to me, as short as the second half is, like it was a typo and should have been a coma instead of a period.
Oh, the irony. ;-)
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I find it slightly ironic that you're talking about the demise of the English language when evolving use is a sure sign of a living language.
You seem to not understand the idea of colloquial grammar. "And" at the beginning of a sentence can communicate information that isn't necessarily directly dependent on the previous independent clause. It can, for example, represent the notion of building on a previous assertion in the same paragraph. And that is why colloquial grammar should be understood, and not edited for no better reason than "I say so".
This is because they live in constant terror of comma splices or run on sentences. Bad grammar is a leading cause of slow painful death.
Mod parent up. You can affect an effect, but you can't effect an affect unless you're in the same business as Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I've re-read both our comments carefully, and I can't find a reasonable plural noun to which "they" might be a back-reference. Could you tell me who you mean?
Bad writing is still harder to read than good writing. Rather than being a matter of style or preference, some of the conventions that are around are there for good reasons. For example, starting sentences with "and" generally means that your first sentence wasn't well formed; in TFS none of the sentences were well formed, resulting in a passage which was jarring to read and harder to understand than it should have been.
"They" is useful (and less of an abomination than "s/he"), but you're losing information. "One" sounds very formal, but it does exactly what "they" (singular) tries to do.
Effect and affect are so frequently confused that you're right; they are essentially interchangeable. There are a few edge cases however where they have different meanings, but mostly it's just a shibboleth indicating a reasonable level of education.
Irony has been clobbered because most USians don't understand the difference between irony, sarcasm and surrealism; I have no idea why. They are quite different concepts to anyone from this side of the pond.
The whole "hacker" thing is best left alone. It's perfectly linguistically acceptable for a group to identify themselves with a word that is used by outsiders to refer to something else (e.g. "American").
I'm not an English teacher, but I think that starting a sentence with a conjunction is okay if it is used for rhetorical emphasis.
What surprises me is that nobody in this grammar-nazi thread has picked up on the dyslexic object phrase in the article's headline. I guess they're "on too much fire" about other trivialities.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Of course we could use the semicolon; which was designed to allow two related, but seperate, senatces to be joined.
Starting with an "and" is conversational and is only used by people who didn't realise they had more to say than they did.
There's no excuse for such lack of planning when writting.
P.S. I'm terrible when it comes to spelling and grammar in general. This doesn't mean I would choose to get rid of them, especially given the confusion saved when they're correctly used.
just try to help your uncle jack of a horse with out using the correct language
Fire Storms!
No train in New South Wales may move.
No train may enter New South Wales.
No rail building in the area.
We're now using and at the start of sentences?
Yup.
Face it: language changes. The English of Beowulf is a foreign language to modern speakers. Chaucer is heavy going. Hell, many people struggle with Shakespeare and Dickens.
Some changes I've seen in my own life. I'm 51.
Loss of distinction between adjectives and adverbs in spoken English, particularly "good" vs. "well".
Loss of "hw". "Whale" and "wail" are homonyms except in a few regional accents.
Singular "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun. I like this and use it myself.
Very few people use colons or semicolons in written English. Fewer still know how to use them correctly.
My grandparents were born from 1884 (paternal grandfather) to 1905 (maternal grandmother) and used the subjunctive mood. It was largely gone before I was born. It only survives in fossilized expressions like "so be it" and the song title "Let it be".
...laura
As was I, yet I still can't write 2013 when I write (or type) the date, dammit!
Can't wait to tell my former art teacher.
It's not 50. You see, most charts, you know, will be capped at 50. You're at 50 here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on 50 on your chart. Where can you go from there? Where?
I don't know.
Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Put it up to 54.
54. Exactly. 4 Hotter.
Educated people still use this and other grammatical flaws to identify less educated, less qualified people.
Yes, language evolves, don't be a grammar nazi, blah blah blah, but it still marks you as inferior, and will for some time.
I like to wait for early adopters to find the problems with new technology, and buy the perfected products a few years later. This is similar; I allow the early adopters of lazy, incorrect language to suffer the disadvantages. When some new usage is almost universally accepted, I'll start using it.
That would be 'we are' [grammar] nazis all the way down.
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
Mod parent double plus good.
Methinks you are mistaking "acceptable" for "commonplace".
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
One of the fires is in Africa....?
And that's a big problem?
Your Elizabethan is horrid. Verily, the king shall be enraged.
If we're going to abandon traditional English, we might as well do it with new words rather than abuse the accepted meaning of existing ones.
If using 'they' was good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for me.
I'm getting tired of the Nazi phrase. Let's cut to the chase and simply call it what it is: "Grammar Dick".
Let me guess, droughts and similar in various parts of the world have never happened before. Really, do you guys ever think twice before declaring doom and gloom and how "THIS DISASTER PROVES BEYOND ANY DOUBT" really looks silly.
Sorry, we have been here before, seen it before, and will see it again. I am quite sure environmental issues faced by previous generations were just as end of world as some are today, replete with fools going "SEE SEE SEE".
About Sandy, there were some big ones in the 50s... the difference is that people hype things now rather than take care of the people affected.
Karma to burn...
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Really?? I'm only asking for a friend.
Seeing wildfires from space is not unusual. All wildfires are visible from space, and we have several monitoring programs going on right now that use satellite imagery to track wildfire appearance and growth.
The most dramatic imagery I remember doing was the Rodeo-Chediski wildfires in 2002, which burned half a million acres (compared to the 50,000 acres burning in Australia so far, although they might get larger.) There are also a few good pics from the Alaskan wildfires in 2004, which burned 6.6 million acres. That was such a large-scale disaster that it was almost too big for the satellites to view; smoke obscured almost the entire state.
The bad news for Australia is that the climate is getting hotter. The good news is that there ain't a whole lot in central Australia to burn.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Quote: Australia Is On So Much Fire, You Can See It From Orbit Of course you can see Australia from orbit! It's big. What would be impressive would be if there was so much smoke from fires that you could not see it from orbit.
Real Time Map?
doesn't have 90% of the fires.....
try http://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/dsp_content.cfm?cat_id=683
and stop pushing your shitty web site
I've re-read both our comments carefully, and I can't find a reasonable plural noun to which "they" might be a back-reference. Could you tell me who you mean?
I could. And I meant those who use "And" at the beginning of a sentence.
I'm not sure if it slipped your attention, but a lot of online communication, even if typed rather than vocal, tends to take the conversational form/tone.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
every known source of public data directly relating to fires in Australia, mostly because fire doesn't respect state borders.
Fortunately, fire does respect country borders in Australia. The fires of Australia are polite and diplomatically respectable kinds of fires in that way. Or they just have a flaming fear of Australian customs officers.
I notice that things are still okay in West Wyalong.
Impressive map.
Oh, well, then I find your position unreasonable.
Meanwhile, down under is burning. Could you all topic drift back to that huge problem?
Agrisea Tsunami - Epyc Servers... https://agrisea.net/products
I think "nazi" is intended as an insult. Accordingly, it's a lot more inflammatory than simply calling someone a detective...
Your brilliant British writer is an idiot. A better phrasing that avoids a dangling preposition would be: "This is the kind of arrant pedantry with which I will not put up". "up" in this sentence is an adverb so there should be no objection to putting it at the end of the sentence.
"And" has been an acceptable opening segue for some time now here in 2012. Also, we attempt to use gender-neutral language, which has made using the plural "they" and its variants as singular forms increasingly acceptable.
You will not get me to use the plural pronouns to make gender neutral references. There are perfectly acceptable made-up words for gender neutral pronouns.
In Indo-European languages, such as English, interrogative and indeterminate sentences are obligatorily masculine, which makes masculine interrogative, relative, and personal pronouns gender neutral (unmarked), and anything else would be marked. (As a Slavic speaker, I regularly laugh at the American and British attempts at such precisely directed language engineering: they very much remind me of your right-wing religious nut-heads trying to get *only certain parts* of science out of schools. "Science is fine, but don't teach evolutionary biology, that one part is wrong, the rest is right, of course.")
Ezekiel 23:20
"And" at the start of a sentence is not acceptable.
And yet you wrote it right there!
Ezekiel 23:20
I know! A period takes a few days, while a coma may take years for a woman to recover from. What I don't understand is how the size of my screen with my ability to distinguish between the two. I usually just ask, and a lack of answer usually indicates coma.
Ezekiel 23:20
If we are going to nitpick, I do believe the final quotation mark should go after the period. Just sayin'.
Whooosh!
To your left you'll see the remains of Hitler. On the right here we have on display the remains of the last grammarian.
Much to the chagrin of the grammarians the cobbled together English language continued evolve. Not even the machine learning systems cared for the antiquated language bound communication style; They strove to understand what people meant regardless of how precise they were in saying it. Both races having been developed in much the same way, through evolution, realized a Universal truth that escaped the grammarians (though they could not escape the truth itself): All that can not adapt becomes extinct.
And that, class, is how we won the war against the Grammar Nazis. Now, let us momentarily link minds momentarily so we may more deeply contemplate the significance of this achievement.
We could call them pedants, possibly even elide the - nts, maybe throw an -o on the end for ease of use.
Woosh!
fify
To continue with the color scheme they had been using they would have had to gone to ultraviolet (and as you know UV light is cancer causing :).
It's got nothing to do with language changes. Starting sentences with "and" has been valid usage for centuries, formal or informal. An example off the top of my head - "And can it be", a hymn composed in the 16th century, where "and" isn't simply the first word of a sentence, but the first word of the entire piece, although it's not used as a conjunction in this context.
Starting sentences with "and" is a frequently mis-used construction, and primary school grammar teaches instruct their pupils to avoid it for that reason. The problem is, few people ever advance past grade school English, which is why people can't use colons or semi-colons properly either.
I have no problem with the evolution of language, but evolution should be progressive - as the language develops, it should become able to express more concepts. This is happening - we're constantly adding new words and new idiomatic expressions to the language - but it's also devolving, we're expressive ability is lost due to the increasing lack of speakers to appreciate grammatical precision and fine distinctions.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Another old joke about this problem:
Visitor to Harvard: "Where's your library at?"
Harvard student: "This is Harvard. We don't end our sentences with a preposition."
Visitor; "Ok, where's your library at, jerk?"
I am officially gone from
Greetings, time traveler from the 19th century. "And" has been an acceptable opening segue for some time now here in 2012.
It's been normal English-language usage since before English was a written language. "And therfore at the kynges court my brother Ech man for hymself." - Chaucer. "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night." -- King James Bible, Luke 2:8
Also, we attempt to use gender-neutral language, which has made using the plural "they" and its variants as singular forms increasingly acceptable.
Generic "they" is also not a modern innovation. Generic "they" and generic "he" have coexisted ever since Old English's grammatical gender evolved into Middle English's natural gender. Generic "they" was used by Shakespeare and Austen.
Find free books.
Quote from the linked Mashable article:
with temperatures hitting 107 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas
That's 41C, and not entirely accurate. The island-state of Tasmania, the coldest (on average) place in Australia, reached 41C. Some areas on the mainland have reached 49C, which is 120F. My home in central NSW (six hours west of Sydney) was 40-42C for 4-5 days, with high winds for the last couple. Bushfires were burning several kilometers from my home, with over a hundred firefighters fighting to contain them. Emergency vehicle sirens have been common, and I've received SMS messages from the Rural Fire Service warning about how close the fires are.
Thankfully a cool change appeared yesterday, but there are still many fires burning around the country and temperatures are expected to increase again tomorrow.
As an aside, why won't Slashdot let me post the degree symbol (alt-248)?
Thats so awesome The CFA pissed me off because their map was just Vic. Great Work.
The Australian government already has an online map of bush fires based on temperature information from NASA satellites.
http://sentinel.ga.gov.au/acres/sentinel/index.shtml
"They" has been used as a singular pronoun in English since at least the 15th century, and can easily be found in examples of all kinds of writing - including novels, plays, essays - ever since then. There has never been a time when they/their/them weren't used as singular pronouns.
It's about as "traditional" as it gets,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
The only reason it's controversial is because of reactionaries using bogus "it's not proper English" arguments as an excuse to refuse using gender-neutral terms, to mask their sexism - "I'm not sexist, I'm just a language pedant". Yeah, right.
That's not from bush fires, that's your regulation layer of pollution that is normally present over all large areas where cars are driven.
Rulz r cmpltly uslez. unli peedntz karz abt dem.
There was a town in the centre of NSW yesterday that had to shut down it's petrol station because the petrol had vaporized and couldn't be pumped from the tank into the cars. Wish I could find the link.
This space for rent
I want to be a grammar nazi too. ;-)
Nazi
[news.com.au]
[time.com]
Last time I had that issue, a liberal dose of miconozole fixed it.
Oh wait...
Heretic!
English is perfect! There is no room for improvement! Mark Twain was wrong!
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
No-one's ever seen a drop bear. Well, no-one's ever seen one and lived to tell the tale :-)
Yes, but they had abortions in the 19th century, too.
I remember another slashdot thread that was hijacked discussing this, I believe it comes down to a geographic differences, and whether the quoted statement would independently require a full stop.
Putting the full stop inside the quotes, "just because", looks silly to me.
Loss of "hw". "Whale" and "wail" are homonyms except in a few regional accents.
Oblig. Family Guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TTvHTxHX-Y
and said oh lord jezuz its a fiire
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I agree. However, remove the word "and" from the summary and it loses no information.
That picture is composed of images taken in april and october of 2012. It has absolutely no relation to the fires currently going on.
http://spaceinfo.com.au/2013/01/05/why-was-australia-lit-up-like-christmas-tree/
Better a grammar nazi than a nazi gra'ma ^_^
You're a passive aggressive idiot.
This reminds me of the guy who told me that "fewer" and "less" can be swapped, without exception. I disagree, which leads me to ask who is fewer right? He didn't respond to that one, for some reason.
*sigh *
If only grammar discussions could put out great fires..
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Contrary to popular belief, the use of the third person plural as a gender neutral pronoun has been part of English since at least, Early Modern, if not before. It's well documented, I don't have the links right now (for the same reason I am not logged in), but if you want proof now just pick up your nearest Jane Austen book. Yes, it has been looked down on by grammar nazis since it's inception, and I personally try not to use it where possible (although my preference is for the masculine as the gender neutral, simply for neatness), but it IS traditional.
Cool change my arse, the heat just moved somewhere else, doing a big anti clockwise circle across the country.
To be fair, in this case, he's an unambiguously right, because what is in the quotation marks is a complete sentence. Pretty much every style guide tells you to then. My mistake.
What a load of garbage. At this moment in time "then" is not the same as "than", and given that substituting one for the other often gives a syntactically correct sentence with an entirely different meaning it's unlikely they ever will be. It follows that if you exchange them you aren't driving progress or invigorating the language or any other airy-fairy claptrap.
You're just wrong.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Fair-use excerpt: ""Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future." As Yasi bears down on the coast, the massive storm seems to embody the not-quite-conscious fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global warming. This year's disasters, in fact, are only the latest installment in an ongoing series of climate-related crises. In 2009, wildfires in Australia torched more than a million acres and killed 173 people. The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves as the country's breadbasket, has suffered a decades-long drought, and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming decades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.
On Perth (Australia) TV I remember seeing a 52 degrees C recorded earlier this year (or late last year) when watching the weather report on TV, but looking it up from the WA Bureau of Meteorology doesn't have it listed. I can remember seeing a number of temperatures listed over 50 degrees C from the middle of WA before, but they are obviously unofficial ones that the TV likes to report. Max. temp. I can find for WA was 50.5 recorded in 1998 (which would have put them in the now purple colour range). No bush fires in WA on that map! Hope it stays that way indefinitely.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Really? That's your argument? An example that has NOTHING to do with the example of the grammatical construct that's being discussed. At no point did I say that I agree with every modification of the English language, I was just indicating that a fixed language is a DEAD language.
Remember that last year the place was on fire and flooded at the same time. Bugger me if that ain't blue ruin, mate!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wrong. There's two styles, English and American.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_stop#Punctuation_styles_when_quoting
Since it is inception? Retard.
I wasn't aware that they were in the same business.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Blake's (or is it Parry's?) "Jerusalem" opens with "And did those feet...". Several other lines begin with it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You appear to be confusing the appearance of new words, which is all well and good when new things are invented or discovered, and sloppy usage, which serves no useful purpose.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Verily thou doth speak truth.