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.
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.
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 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
Is that roughly the Canadian January experience if you swap C to F? I'm just south of Canada and its a balmy 40s day, when usually January is spent entirely below zero for the month. Not unheard of, but unusual to have a thaw in January. I'm thinking of selling my snowshoes after the last two years, which is too bad, because I really enjoy snowshoeing along hiking trails... well other than the snowmobiles trying to run everyone over. Its roughly like moving about 100 to 150 miles south.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
seeing a whole graph of temperature (or daily max, or daily mean or whatever) against time will always tell you much more about a trends than a list of its peaks can.
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
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.
Yesterday bumped Dec 20, 1972 out of third place and 1985 off the chart. Here's an updated list:
The good news is that it looks like it is starting to cool down. We will likely see a few more records broken before the end of the heat wave though.
An ice age is not a multi-variable problem. Understanding how they came to be and changing the climate, however, is.
Since it is difficult in how it forms and goes away, I said it was dangerous to engineer a climate change, because it's a damn difficult multi-variable problem, and chances are we won't be able to predict the side effects of changing the delicate climate.
Yet I like to see anyone deny that we're still in an ice age, and how the ice is still melting more than there's water being frozen, anualy.
Here be signatures
-1 for missing the apostrophe in the contraction for "it is" while engaging in Grammar Natzism.
{{citation needed}}
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.
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!
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.
"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).
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).
-Snipped-
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.
I'm not going to point out the obvious fact that they're out of order because it's a conspiracy to disprove global warming. However, I just want to ask, can we just have a giant, 10 year study of several locations among the map from Antarctica to Chile, seeing if cars or power plants may or may not have an adverse affect on weather? I'm getting tired of hearing this story, but I also know that there might be SOMETHING man-made affecting our weather.
Consider the fact there the industrial revolution happened a hundred years ago, back then there was no control of pollution until fairly recently. Today, there are a few tens of millions of cars on the road, about half of that are semis, half of that are trains, with a few thousand coal plants, several hundred thousand oil rigs, and several dozen places where garbage burning is done (rough numbers yes, but I think these are fairly close), you're going to give me a straight face and say that man has absolutely nothing to do with affecting the temperature of Earth by a single degree?
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.
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?
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.
Fire Storms!
No train in New South Wales may move.
No train may enter New South Wales.
No rail building in the area.
seeing a whole graph of temperature (or daily max, or daily mean or whatever) against time will always tell you much more about a trends than a list of its peaks can.
"Hottest national averages on record (before today)."
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
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
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.
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.
Cars/factories/whatever wont do a damn thing to the places hitting mid/high 40c temps in australia.
These are in places where your next door neighbor is 200kms away, and a drive to the nearest store requires a day, emergency CB radio and 3 days backup water supply just in case the car breaks down over the potholed dirt roads. A
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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....?
However, I just want to ask, can we just have a giant, 10 year study of several locations among the map from Antarctica to Chile, seeing if cars or power plants may or may not have an adverse affect on weather? I'm getting tired of hearing this story, but I also know that there might be SOMETHING man-made affecting our weather.
I don't think that would help. If I understand the theory correctly, it's that high atmospheric CO2 is affecting our climate by trapping more energy in the system, and localized weather events (such as a heat wave in Australia or a less-than-usually-cold snap in Antarctica) are expected to reflect that change in an average, aggregate sort of way.
Of course, it's just a theory, and one that has a number of dubious advantages:
On the other hand, lots of really smart people seem to agree that it beats out a hotter sun, too much pavement, some other natural or manmade aerosol, God's wrath, "natural" climate change, whatever that might be, and angry space bunnies as a cause for the planet changing its average temperature.
cogito ergo dubito
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.
Thanks to you and everyone who looked at the map. The extensive slashdotting let me code some improvements :-)
Jeremy Lee | Orinoco
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.
Would be good to have a an equivalent of http://www.geomac.gov/index.shtml
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).
I notice that things are still okay in West Wyalong.
Impressive map.
That particular colour cannot be used to indicate bushfires. I believe it's been reserved for smoke on the water only.
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
Except emissions fly up into the air and get moved around the earth by the jet streams. What you are referring to is localized which has crap effect on the world, but does majorly affect the ozone layer
"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
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.
Re:Deep purple has been invented!
That particular colour cannot be used to indicate bushfires. I believe it's been reserved for smoke on the water only.
Not only, for fire in the sky as well.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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
"Hottest national averages on record (before today)."
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)?
need to add the weather events to the map
Cat 4 cyclone off WA
"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.
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
[news.com.au]
[time.com]
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"
Yes, but they had abortions in the 19th century, too.
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 ^_^
*sigh *
If only grammar discussions could put out great fires..
Defining Statistics and Social Research
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."
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.