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This is why I get agitated when Americans claim to use imperial units. If they did, their pints would be the correct size.

I think I've heard something similar -- that subjects have duties while citizens have rights.

But of course, citizens typically also have duties -- commonly, the duty to take up arms to defend the state -- and subjects can legitimately expect a reciprocity of obligations from the sovereign (e.g. the enforcement of the "King's Peace"), which sounds quite a bit like rights to me.

(All of which is a verbose and not very coherent way of saying that I agree with you.)

This myth keeps getting repeated. It hasn't been true since 1949, when British subjects in the UK became Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies.

In 1983, the status of CUKC was renamed to British citizen (for those CUKCs resident in or closely connected with the UK: the situation in the remaining colonies was more complicated). At the same time, the status of British subject was officially restricted to those few British subjects who didn't qualify for citizenship of the UK or of any other Commonwealth country in 1949, and who were formerly known as "British subjects without citizenship".

So we are officially and legally citizens, not subjects.

Tip from a “confidential informant”, I believe I read somewhere.

I would’ve posted to say what I think, but I got high.

Modern British style tends to prefer spaced en dashes over tight-set em dashes for parenthetical phrases.

> The Hakenkreuz is tilted at an angle

Not always:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_standard_of_Adolf_Hit...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_...

Wouldn't that be synthesising paradigms?

Is six hundred years ago more than a few? Chaucer is still more or less comprehensible. (Though Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from roughly the same time, not so much.)

How is it bigotry? I've never met anyone who likes, say, "Baby Shark" (well, anyone with an age in double-digits). I'd be surprised if many -- possibly any -- exist. But if they do, well, de gustibus non est disputandum. None of my business, and I bear no ill-will towards them.

Well, technically they're annual, but you're allowed to pay them in arrears over 10 or 12 months.

No egg banjo*? That sounds like it would sit close to, if not in, the abyss.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_sandwich#Fried_egg_sandwic...

This new rule might be problematic for those Northern Irish people who identify solely as Irish (as is their right under the Good Friday Agreement) and who only hold an Irish passport: unless things have changed since the DeSouza case [0], the UK Government and UK law treat everyone born in Northern Ireland (as long as at least one of their parents meets citizenship or residency requirements) as a British citizen, regardless of their opinions on the matter. The UK Government holds that this is compatible with the GFA because you can renounce your British citizenship; but you have to pay hundreds of pounds to do so.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_DeSouza

So, I got the physics wrong. Apologies and thanks for the correction.

But the semantic point still stands. Boiling water is still water -- in the specific sense of H2O in its liquid state -- while ice is not. The complaint that frozen water has a single-word synonym while boiling water does not is making a false equivalence.

But water that has boiled into gas also gets a word: steam.

As far as I'm aware, there is no separate word for freezing water -- i.e. water that is very cold and will, if it continues to get colder (and has something to crystallise around), turn into ice.

So the symmetry seems complete: ice -> freezing water -> water -> boiling water -> steam.

Colder than if you'd just left it on the table for two minutes?

I mean, whatever works for you. Go for it. It wasn't my intention to be prescriptive.

I don't like word processors. They're heavy and don't cleanly separate style from structure. And they use more or less obscure file formats.

I like text editors -- vim especially -- and plain text (or plain text with a thin layer of lightweight markup, like Markdown). And semantic linewrapping plus git is good enough for my purposes.

It may not be for yours, and that's OK. We are allowed to be different.

I can't remember who suggested it, but I'm sold on the idea that if you're committing your drafts to version control, then you should break your lines at syntactic points: at the end of a short sentence, or at the ends of the component phrases of a longer sentence. This should typically lead to a cleaner and more readily comprehensible version history.

Of course, this assumes that you're writing in Markdown or ASCIIDoc or something else that will get processed into the final displayed form. But even with plain text, you could always run it through fmt or something similar.

What? Yes you can. I know my laptop is running a web browser because I can see it and interact with it. That's a physical measurement.

Maybe? But I heard an Orkney accent once, and my mind refused to classify it as Scottish, even though it was coming from a Scottish mouth.

This is true, but you could also say the same about the phrases "English accent" and "Scottish accent" -- a Scouse accent sounds nothing like RP, and a Highland lilt is very different from the accent in the Gorbals.

And the Appalachian accents of Justified sound very different to the Mid-Atlantic accent of Frasier Crane -- yet to me, as an outsider, there is still an indefinable "Americanness" common to them all.

Are many people really paying dozens of dollars a month for things like Markdown editors?

> Since then it has variously been translated as “What ho!”

The P.G. Wodehouse translation?

All error messages begin "Strewth!"

Well yes, if you throw out half of the instances where your original choice was wrong, then the chance your original choice was correct will inevitably go up.

How does that contradict what I said? The way the game is set up, one of your choices -- stick or switch -- is guaranteed to win.

Your original door will be correct 1/3 of the time and wrong 2/3 of the time.

Therefore switching will be the winning move 2/3 of the time.

Eh, when you think about it, it makes sense.

Original rules (host knows where car is and always opens a door with a goat):

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, and you should stick

- 2/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, and you should switch

Alternative rules (host doesn't know where car is, and may open either the door with the car or a door with a goat)

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should stick

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should switch

- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens the door with the car, and you're going to lose whether you stick or switch

So even under the new rules, you still only win 1/3 of the time by consistently sticking. You're just no longer guaranteed that you can win in any given game.

> the logic of Monty Hall Doors does not make sense to me

For me, the core is that you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting it right on your first guess, and nothing can change that. So if you always stick with your original guess, you will win one third of the time.

Assuming "squat" and "svelte" refer to the aspect ratio, isn't B5 going to look just as "svelte" as A4?

Computer Modern is nice on paper but a bit spindly on screen, IMO: Knuth's other serif font, Concrete Roman, works better for that.