I was writing about someone writing cod-15th C English. An English person writing contemporaneously about Austrian fashion would have been writing in late Middle English. Yes, of course the Austrians would have been speaking a version of German, if not Italian.
There is a reference in Dante's Comedy, where Dante is told that a religious reformer is coming who will force the women of Florence to cover their breasts. The rules varied, of course, from time to time and place to place (and often with marital status). However, I doubt bras were ever censorious. Censorious cultures expected women to flatten their chests under their clothes.
Many cultures do put the most absurd expectations on women. The desire of (mostly old men and women) to control female behaviour is quite uniform and quite depressing.
You know the song "Gaudeamus igitur"? The one they used to sing in some US colleges? It starts "Jam nox stellata volumina pandet, nunc, nunc bibendum et amandum est" - "already night unfolds her starry veil, now is the time to drink and make love". If that isn't enough, read Rabelais, including his interesting proposals for how to build a new wall round Paris. Rabelais was a 16th century medical doctor who wrote humorous books to amuse his patients (and piss off the Pope). At one point he lists the best sound in the world as being bollocks slapping against a woman's bottom. With all the worries nowadays about the spread of pornography, we tend to forget that the 19th century and the rise of fundamentalist Protestantism was actually a very aberrant period of human history.
The castle is in Austria. And the period is the 15th century, not the 16th. Although the clothes have been carbon dated I can't find a reference to the exact date, but for most of the 15th century the language would have been Middle English. And educated people like yourself would have been writing Latin. (In fact, you have to resort to Latin to get your point over: grammar,singular, plural,fabricate,idiomatic,linguistic,conjugation,indicative, and a bit of Greek: orthological.)
Why am I being a pedant? It narks me, very slightly, that the GPP post is off-topic and gets modded +5, while on-topic posts are ignored. Come on guys, I know this is Slashdot, but have you really never seen a bra before?
And currently this intelligent post has no mods while a load of pseudo-15th century English tosh above gets modded up to +5. Yes, I am a boring old fart. And your point is?
In fact, I'd go further. certainly valuable clothes at the time. And yet another reminder that "trickle down" works so far as that, as the economy develops, the privileges of the rich extend to wider society. If this is "news for nerds" it is a reminder that what probably took a skilled seamstress a week in the 15th century is almost disposably cheap in the 21st, due to factory automation.
English is the language of almost all the people who came up with the stored program digital computer. That is the overriding reason.
There are other important trade languages and, during the period when computers were getting started, German was still the language of chemistry and our R&D library had lots of engineering textbooks in German. If you don't know basic Italian and German you won't go far with opera. Musical notation is still Italian and I haven't noticed any moves to replace p and f in musical scores with Q and L (quiet and loud). Words like "crescendo" just got taken over into English.
I am all for linguistic diversity, but this is really a straw man argument about learning programming.
This isn't to denigrate the Shuttle, just being realistic. We had to redefine what ordinary people meant by "space" just to get most manned launches into the "space exploration" category. The edge of space is now defined as "unstable low Earth orbit with significant frictional drag from atmosphere". It's a hidden humbling of our ambitions.
Space is not a suitable environment for people. We do miracles in planetary exploration; making the Mars Rovers work is incomprehensible magic to ordinary people. Yet it doesn't get as much publicity as sending a few descendants of monkeys to where the air is thin.
You do realise that Top Gear is aimed at skilled working/lower middle class don't you? The only lawyer I know who drives a Ford (for the rest think Audi/BMW/Merc/Porsche/Aston Martin/Lexus) is one of my kids, and that's because they live in an area of London which, while very fashionable, is a target for thieves of up-market cars, and the Ford garage is a few hundred metres away.
I doubt he's ever heard of it. In the UK, no, and I really mean no, US car has the slightest cool factor whatsoever. The coolest judgemobile ever was Scott's bicycle at the Scott enquiry (into illegal arms sales to Iraq).
The only things wrong with it were the resistive touchscreen and the slow processor, the result of coming out a technology cycle too early.That, and the major design fault that you could remove the telephone icon from the homescreen, which was not clever.
I think your comments about turbodiesels were true ten years ago. I also think you don't understand the Prius transmission.
The problem with turbodiesels (and the reason I no longer drive them) is that in the effort to reduce emissions and increase specific power output, they are getting very complex and expensive to repair. So much so, that a turbine failure can be a lot more expensive than, say, replacing the batteries in a hybrid. Also, as the supply of natural gas replaces oil, synthesising gasoline becomes more economic than extracting middle weight oils from shale or tar sand. It looks as if the balance is tipping in favor of gasoline/natural gas.
On the second point, the Prius transmission deserves study. It has not one but two electric motors, one of which can run backwards. They are connected via a differential. The effect is that, within limits, the engine speed can vary independently of the road speed; the second electric motor spins in either direction to take up the difference. This means that the gasoline engine can run on an optimised cycle.
I have worked with straight generators, and they have several problems. The main one is, what constant speed do you run at? If it is high enough to ensure that full power is available to drive the electric motor, that reduces the life and is uneconomical. If it is run at low speed, the battery will rapidly die if high road speeds or hill climbs are called for. Constant speed generators are fine for fixed loads, or for intermittent loads with battery back up, but not good for cars which are called on to operate over a wide range of duty cycles. That, basically, is why Toyota were willing to invest vast amounts of R&D money in their hybrid design. Nobody has yet equalled it.
Among its many virtues is that peak torque is provided by an electric motor so that the gasoline engine never needs to operate with very high BMEP, which contributes to wear, it is normally aspirated eliminating the expensive turbocharger, and that there is no gearbox. To get high efficiency from turbodiesels either a manual transmission or an automated crossover gearbox is needed, ideally with a large number of gears. This adds another expensive component, so that overall the add-ons to the basic Diesel lump are more than comparable to the add-ons needed for a hybrid.
Which, basically, is why I switched. Given the choice between a VW with a 7 speed automated gearbox and a turbocharger, and a Prius, the Prius seems a lot less likely to go very expensively wrong if I keep it for a long time (and it is cheaper to run).
RaceProUK already called out your selective quotation, but there's more. As we have seen in so-called "shareholder activism", in reality shares are held by fund managers who want their very highly paid jobs to continue. Most companies have few individual shareholders who matter, and fund managers are part of the same financial world as the CEOs. The truth is that many private companies are very poorly run but, so long as the people at the top pay themselves well and spread some cream around their mates, nothing happens. Private companies have become just like politics in that regard. The difference is that in politics you can make a career as a whistleblower or contrarian (in the UK, to name a few almost at random, Clare Short, Tom Watson, Geoff Bacon and David Davis) while in business it's a way to join the unemployed.
It is the result of private corporations lobbying for more privatisation. "Shrink the Government" is the voter-friendly PR spin on it. We have the same in the UK...fortunately the privatised "security" company G4S has just screwed up so massively that the agenda must have been put back a year or so. Personally, I think that any and all national security functions, whether physical or cyber, shouldn't be provided by anybody whose managers I cannot vote out of office.
In fact, because of the low loading on the power train and the lack of frictional components like a clutch, there are plenty of examples of the Toyota Prius going around with similar mileages. Over that sort of mileage, the fuel cost saving becomes enormous. One potential problem for the EV industry is that the electric motors are such a proven technology that no real improvements are likely, and battery upgrades should be rather simple. There is going to be very little reason other than a crash to replace an EV. The car is gradually ceasing to be a status symbol anyway, so the net effect could be a dramatic shrinkage of the car industry, with the replacement cycle perhaps extending to 30 years or more.
Oh dear, I seem to have touched a nerve. A down moderation and people justifying McDonalds. It was a joke, dear friends. Exaggeration for effect...hyperbole. I would never dare insult your wonderful fast food vendors. Especially one that appears to get the legal system in England to give them special rights and powers over anything relating to the ******. I really don't want a trip to the US to answer charges of being insufficiently respectful to the company that, after all, won the McLibel trial. Even if it did cost them £20 million to pursue it and they got derisory damages.
******I'd like to explain what this is. It's an event named after a mountain in Greece that nobody is allowed to mention unless they are a ******* sponsor, on pain of a fine up to £20 000. It is happening in a city which, apparently, you are not supposed to mention in your advertising. And one of its principal sponsors is McDonalds.
How is suggesting someone visiting a foreign country might actually find out what the locals do, elitist?
Once, just once in my life, I ended up in a McDonalds in Frankfurt after my companion had rejected every possible variety of German, Turkish and Greek restaurant and cafe. It was, quite simply, a "starve in the gutter before I do that again" episode. I fail to understand how an educated man, a professor no less, could conceivably end up in an American fast food joint in a city where sticking a pin in the map will possibly still give you too many choices. It's like visiting Niagara Falls and spending the entire time watching the toilet flush.
Up or down, though, is a different matter. Because as far as I'm aware the French who don't baiser are either underage or incapable. The first sentence might be seen as insightful, but the second is a gross libel on most French people over 90.
That would be clever. Maharsi was kind of the real thing, and he died in 1950, which would make it rather ingenious of Jobs to have studied under him. The "Maharishi Mahesh Yogi" associated with the Beatles was someone who cottoned on to how a Westernised version of Hinduism could be profitably marketed, and did so. Very profitably. Lennon saw right through him (and I have little time for Lennon). Jobs...well look it up. The similarity between Apple Stores and the Maharishi's TM centres is interesting to a part time student of sociology of religion.
Unmanned spaceflight is the ultimate test of everything from sensors to real time operating systems. It advances the state of the art. Putting astronauts on board could actually the pressure to produce 100% systems reliability because, hey, you can make in-flight repairs.
But as you say there is a change of apparent scale. And if your mountain then appears to be only a few metres high and a few metres away, you will get the disorienting effect of moving off axis.
No matter where you sit, you have the same view. Unless you view a stereoscopic pair bang on centre with an unmovable eye position, the illusion fails when you move your head. To be exact, the illusion is only perfect if your eye position exactly corresponds to the position of the lenses in the camera which made the pair. Victorian stereoscopes were like this: the images were 1:1 positives of the negatives, and the viewers were basically a copy of the camera, but with the positives in the negative position and, of course, light allowed in to illuminate them. (I did some research on this years ago for a thesis.)
In a cinema, most of the audience are viewing from the wrong angle and the wrong distance. Even at home, if more than one person is watching, the viewing angle must be less than optimal.
There is a story of an SR-71 being asked to move away from a commercial flight lane because a passenger aircraft was coming through...the pilot later remarked that they were all tooled up with near-space suits in a military vehicle with a terrible turnaround time on the ground, and they were overtaken by a commercial aircraft full of people in their ordinary clothes.
I've been told his businesses have to make a business case for every publicity stunt he does, and they have to fund it. Think of it as saving some of the money spent on expensive celebrity endorsements by being your own celebrity, and it makes a lot of sense.
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I was writing about someone writing cod-15th C English. An English person writing contemporaneously about Austrian fashion would have been writing in late Middle English. Yes, of course the Austrians would have been speaking a version of German, if not Italian.
Mostly students and I suspect mostly medical students. Some things hardly change.
Many cultures do put the most absurd expectations on women. The desire of (mostly old men and women) to control female behaviour is quite uniform and quite depressing.
You know the song "Gaudeamus igitur"? The one they used to sing in some US colleges? It starts "Jam nox stellata volumina pandet, nunc, nunc bibendum et amandum est" - "already night unfolds her starry veil, now is the time to drink and make love". If that isn't enough, read Rabelais, including his interesting proposals for how to build a new wall round Paris. Rabelais was a 16th century medical doctor who wrote humorous books to amuse his patients (and piss off the Pope). At one point he lists the best sound in the world as being bollocks slapping against a woman's bottom. With all the worries nowadays about the spread of pornography, we tend to forget that the 19th century and the rise of fundamentalist Protestantism was actually a very aberrant period of human history.
Why am I being a pedant? It narks me, very slightly, that the GPP post is off-topic and gets modded +5, while on-topic posts are ignored. Come on guys, I know this is Slashdot, but have you really never seen a bra before?
In fact, I'd go further. certainly valuable clothes at the time. And yet another reminder that "trickle down" works so far as that, as the economy develops, the privileges of the rich extend to wider society. If this is "news for nerds" it is a reminder that what probably took a skilled seamstress a week in the 15th century is almost disposably cheap in the 21st, due to factory automation.
There are other important trade languages and, during the period when computers were getting started, German was still the language of chemistry and our R&D library had lots of engineering textbooks in German. If you don't know basic Italian and German you won't go far with opera. Musical notation is still Italian and I haven't noticed any moves to replace p and f in musical scores with Q and L (quiet and loud). Words like "crescendo" just got taken over into English.
I am all for linguistic diversity, but this is really a straw man argument about learning programming.
Space is not a suitable environment for people. We do miracles in planetary exploration; making the Mars Rovers work is incomprehensible magic to ordinary people. Yet it doesn't get as much publicity as sending a few descendants of monkeys to where the air is thin.
You do realise that Top Gear is aimed at skilled working/lower middle class don't you? The only lawyer I know who drives a Ford (for the rest think Audi/BMW/Merc/Porsche/Aston Martin/Lexus) is one of my kids, and that's because they live in an area of London which, while very fashionable, is a target for thieves of up-market cars, and the Ford garage is a few hundred metres away.
I doubt he's ever heard of it. In the UK, no, and I really mean no, US car has the slightest cool factor whatsoever. The coolest judgemobile ever was Scott's bicycle at the Scott enquiry (into illegal arms sales to Iraq).
The only things wrong with it were the resistive touchscreen and the slow processor, the result of coming out a technology cycle too early.That, and the major design fault that you could remove the telephone icon from the homescreen, which was not clever.
The problem with turbodiesels (and the reason I no longer drive them) is that in the effort to reduce emissions and increase specific power output, they are getting very complex and expensive to repair. So much so, that a turbine failure can be a lot more expensive than, say, replacing the batteries in a hybrid. Also, as the supply of natural gas replaces oil, synthesising gasoline becomes more economic than extracting middle weight oils from shale or tar sand. It looks as if the balance is tipping in favor of gasoline/natural gas.
On the second point, the Prius transmission deserves study. It has not one but two electric motors, one of which can run backwards. They are connected via a differential. The effect is that, within limits, the engine speed can vary independently of the road speed; the second electric motor spins in either direction to take up the difference. This means that the gasoline engine can run on an optimised cycle.
I have worked with straight generators, and they have several problems. The main one is, what constant speed do you run at? If it is high enough to ensure that full power is available to drive the electric motor, that reduces the life and is uneconomical. If it is run at low speed, the battery will rapidly die if high road speeds or hill climbs are called for. Constant speed generators are fine for fixed loads, or for intermittent loads with battery back up, but not good for cars which are called on to operate over a wide range of duty cycles. That, basically, is why Toyota were willing to invest vast amounts of R&D money in their hybrid design. Nobody has yet equalled it.
Among its many virtues is that peak torque is provided by an electric motor so that the gasoline engine never needs to operate with very high BMEP, which contributes to wear, it is normally aspirated eliminating the expensive turbocharger, and that there is no gearbox. To get high efficiency from turbodiesels either a manual transmission or an automated crossover gearbox is needed, ideally with a large number of gears. This adds another expensive component, so that overall the add-ons to the basic Diesel lump are more than comparable to the add-ons needed for a hybrid.
Which, basically, is why I switched. Given the choice between a VW with a 7 speed automated gearbox and a turbocharger, and a Prius, the Prius seems a lot less likely to go very expensively wrong if I keep it for a long time (and it is cheaper to run).
RaceProUK already called out your selective quotation, but there's more. As we have seen in so-called "shareholder activism", in reality shares are held by fund managers who want their very highly paid jobs to continue. Most companies have few individual shareholders who matter, and fund managers are part of the same financial world as the CEOs. The truth is that many private companies are very poorly run but, so long as the people at the top pay themselves well and spread some cream around their mates, nothing happens. Private companies have become just like politics in that regard. The difference is that in politics you can make a career as a whistleblower or contrarian (in the UK, to name a few almost at random, Clare Short, Tom Watson, Geoff Bacon and David Davis) while in business it's a way to join the unemployed.
It is the result of private corporations lobbying for more privatisation. "Shrink the Government" is the voter-friendly PR spin on it. We have the same in the UK...fortunately the privatised "security" company G4S has just screwed up so massively that the agenda must have been put back a year or so. Personally, I think that any and all national security functions, whether physical or cyber, shouldn't be provided by anybody whose managers I cannot vote out of office.
In fact, because of the low loading on the power train and the lack of frictional components like a clutch, there are plenty of examples of the Toyota Prius going around with similar mileages. Over that sort of mileage, the fuel cost saving becomes enormous. One potential problem for the EV industry is that the electric motors are such a proven technology that no real improvements are likely, and battery upgrades should be rather simple. There is going to be very little reason other than a crash to replace an EV. The car is gradually ceasing to be a status symbol anyway, so the net effect could be a dramatic shrinkage of the car industry, with the replacement cycle perhaps extending to 30 years or more.
******I'd like to explain what this is. It's an event named after a mountain in Greece that nobody is allowed to mention unless they are a ******* sponsor, on pain of a fine up to £20 000. It is happening in a city which, apparently, you are not supposed to mention in your advertising. And one of its principal sponsors is McDonalds.
Once, just once in my life, I ended up in a McDonalds in Frankfurt after my companion had rejected every possible variety of German, Turkish and Greek restaurant and cafe. It was, quite simply, a "starve in the gutter before I do that again" episode. I fail to understand how an educated man, a professor no less, could conceivably end up in an American fast food joint in a city where sticking a pin in the map will possibly still give you too many choices. It's like visiting Niagara Falls and spending the entire time watching the toilet flush.
Up or down, though, is a different matter. Because as far as I'm aware the French who don't baiser are either underage or incapable. The first sentence might be seen as insightful, but the second is a gross libel on most French people over 90.
That would be clever. Maharsi was kind of the real thing, and he died in 1950, which would make it rather ingenious of Jobs to have studied under him. The "Maharishi Mahesh Yogi" associated with the Beatles was someone who cottoned on to how a Westernised version of Hinduism could be profitably marketed, and did so. Very profitably. Lennon saw right through him (and I have little time for Lennon). Jobs...well look it up. The similarity between Apple Stores and the Maharishi's TM centres is interesting to a part time student of sociology of religion.
I lost the word "reduce" somehow. And your point is?
Unmanned spaceflight is the ultimate test of everything from sensors to real time operating systems. It advances the state of the art. Putting astronauts on board could actually the pressure to produce 100% systems reliability because, hey, you can make in-flight repairs.
But as you say there is a change of apparent scale. And if your mountain then appears to be only a few metres high and a few metres away, you will get the disorienting effect of moving off axis.
No matter where you sit, you have the same view. Unless you view a stereoscopic pair bang on centre with an unmovable eye position, the illusion fails when you move your head. To be exact, the illusion is only perfect if your eye position exactly corresponds to the position of the lenses in the camera which made the pair. Victorian stereoscopes were like this: the images were 1:1 positives of the negatives, and the viewers were basically a copy of the camera, but with the positives in the negative position and, of course, light allowed in to illuminate them. (I did some research on this years ago for a thesis.) In a cinema, most of the audience are viewing from the wrong angle and the wrong distance. Even at home, if more than one person is watching, the viewing angle must be less than optimal.
It was still a flop, though.
I've been told his businesses have to make a business case for every publicity stunt he does, and they have to fund it. Think of it as saving some of the money spent on expensive celebrity endorsements by being your own celebrity, and it makes a lot of sense.