George W Bush lives
I see that the problem has been "remediated". When was it mediated? There's a syllable too many - what's wrong with remedied? Sounds like the comedians on Radio 4 mocking the late, great Dubya.
312 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Apr 2014
Since carbon fibre is graphite and at least partially conductive, balls of diamond might be preferable. Or, perhaps even more appropriately, balls made of buckminsterfullerene, C60 (don't know how to get subscript here) which is, of course, the "football" molecule. But it hadn't been discovered fifty years ago.
Scientific definition of a split second: the time between the light changing to green (you are the front of the queue) and the driver behind hitting the horn.
Action to be taken: get out of your car and go slowly round it while asking the driver behind if there is a problem with your car.
Just as long as you don't pronounce Clydebank with the emphasis on the first syllable (confusion with Clydeside, compare Tyneside, Wearside).
I remember the revelation when I went to university in Glasgow and met my wife-to-be's family (Vale of Leven and Dumbarton) and friends from various points across central Scotland between Glasgow and Edinburgh. There is a continuum with subtle differences as you move west to east and so an undefinable number of different accents.
Reminds me of bread sold in Co-op supermarkets which is labelled Parisien Baguette, presumably in order to try and add some "authenticity". Its a pity that their marketing people hadn't done their French homework and would have appreciated that baguette is a feminine noun and (more subtly) that the adjective would be after the noun as in Baguette Parisienne.
Re Gene Cash
You state a view that I have often observed myself. I have frequently been shocked/appalled/disappointed by the inaccuracy of detail in newspaper articles about a familiar scientific subject (in my case, chemistry). As a consequence, I now mistrust any articles on other areas of science with which I am less familiar.
When walking towards someone on a pavement just wide enough for two people to pass, my tendency is to pass on the left (must be the Scottish Country Dancing experience). Unfortunately, an awful lot of people seem to have the opposite tendency leading to the "Shall we dance?" moments as described, if not actual collision.
This discussion reminds me of the time when, as a final year undergraduate studying chemistry, I set out to read the venerable professor's book on Crystallography. The first paragraph consisted of a sequence of words that I could recognise as English but I had no idea what they meant collectively.
In older, simpler days, the one question I always used to ask when hiring a car was how to put it into reverse as that was the one thing that seemed to vary from one type to another. More recently, I discovered on a trip to Thailand to see my son that, in his car, the control stalks behind the steering wheel were the exact opposite way round from my car in UK. Much potentially dangerous confusion there until I got used to it and then again on my return home while I readjusted to "normal".
I know for a fact that I am not the first to put the wrong fuel in the tank soon after changing cars. On this occasion, I realised almost immediately that I was putting petrol in a diesel tank (not as bad as the other way round, thankfully). Since the tank was pretty low, I was able to fill it with about 50 litres of diesel and the subsequent receipt showed I had put in about 450 ml of petrol which turned out to to have no discernable effect on the car's performance which subsequently gave me 150,000 miles of sterling service.
Stylii, the plural of stylius?
I have posted before about mock-Latin plurals of words that end in -us. The generally correct way of forming the plural is to add es. Thus we get viruses, campuses, grampuses, octopuses, omnibuses (buses), calluses, cactuses (yes!) and styluses. But the plural of opus is opera.
The golf club where I play has no external windows in the men's locker room toilet. It also has movement activated lights. So, if you come in after playing on a quiet winter afternoon when it gets dark not long after 4.00 and disappear into a toilet cubicle for too long, you can find yourself caught with your pants down plunged into almost complete blackness.
As all primary school children learned, three (old) pennies weigh an ounce. A pound's worth of old pennies (240) therefore weighs 80 ounces or 5 pounds (lbs). Which explains why in my first week of Christmas post work in 1963, two of us were sent to collect a basket containing £10 in old pennies.
Years ago, when living in Malaysia, my wife occasionally bought fresh coffee beans and roasted them herself. The smell of roasting coffee was fine in the later stages of the process but, during the initial stages of heating, a lot of very unpleasant smelling substances were released. Fortunately, as is common in the tropics, much cooking could be done outside.