Law terminology specifically can seem pretty archaic because there’s a high need for terms to be stable over time. In other fields and everyday speech terms can change over time. There’s contracts signed decades or even centuries ago that are still binding today. So it’s practical in a sense if the words within and those used to discuss legal dealings don’t change over time.

That sounds like a useful feature. Which apps are you using?

How do you tag another user? Did you just mean you left a mental note or is it possible to assign custom tags to users somehow?

The 35 year old requirement seems bizarrely high to me, I can’t see why a smart and capable 32 year old should be prevented from running for the office. A minimum age makes sense, but it’s weird that it’s far removed from when most states start to legally treat kids as adults (anywhere from 16 to 21).

Pretty much. I keep a sheet of aluminum ready to put on top in case the outside is getting too crisp while the inside still needs more time.

Yeah the locker/towel thing would be a habit especially if you don’t actively think about it.

You may not have a strong daily routine but all humans have habits and it’s precisely because you don’t actively think about them a lot that it’s can be hard to become cognizant of them.

They also include behavioral preferences such as scratching your chin with your right hand when lost in thought 🤔, calling your girlfriend ‘honey’ frequently, consuming certain foods/beverages more than others, separating the trash, opening up social Media on your smart phone when bored, or taking your jacket with you when you go outside.

Those are not the same for everyone but everyone has them useless maybe some severe medical condition is present.

Fair point. Although I suspect you could still kill people that just happen to be walking by the buildings and such.

Tacking on: as far as translation of ancient texts is concerned there is also a selection bias. It is far more likely that an important formal document endured the times than some every day scribble. Of course a political treaty is crafted, conserved and replicated more carefully than a note someone left for their neighbor. Both the skill of writing and the materials required were much rarer and access more prevalent among the upper classes. Finally important formal documents are more likely to be translated precisely because they are important. Imagine that in 2000 years from now you would be one of the few scholars capable of translating English. You would be much more to likely to study and translate the declaration of independence than some mundane Twitter post.

Blowing up buildings with people inside them is evil.

Fight Club

That’s my point though: to me buying new garments just because they aren’t as white as they used to be is both economically and ecologically wasteful. Ideally you just adjust your sensibilities or else purchase colors, fabrics, patterns less affected by tinging.

I have to admit though I’m looking at this from my own biased perspective of a single household though. I do basic separation of light, dark and hygienic (anything that needs high temperatures to kill germs) but also spontaneous mixed loads depending on what’s in the laundry bin and what I need soon. If you’re in a big household you can actually do real nice sorting like all the reds together, all the sports wear together, all the rags and towels, etc.

It’s also that the natural resting position of our eye lids when fully relaxed isn’t fully shut (that requires muscle power). Rather the relaxed state is almost-but-not-fully shut which let’s in more light than expected.

Honestly I’m more in the “buy durable fabrics and treat them well but if they acquire a tint or lose color over time so what” camp. Good linen shirts for instance will still look great after a long time, never mind any fading. For some stuff it can even enhance the optics like the famed worn out jeans look.

Dunno about the bleach part, that might be in some as well, but typically white fabric detergent contains optical brightener that counters the typical yellow tint of worn garments by emitting extra blue light (and your eyes perceive the full presence of the spectrum as white). That’s also why this whitening effect will fade off if you then use detergent that doesn’t contain brighteners: you are washing out those blue light particles once again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_brightener

Very insightful post.

It’s interesting to see that the European Union will start to force interoperability of some networks // applications // protocols. This makes it for instance that people who use WhatsApp and Signal messengers can communicate. At least a step in the right direction it seems.

I haven’t seen an app that does it really well like some libraries or ontologies do but I’m certainly not well versed with all of them. Back in the day I used Evernote which was at least a start, as you could create arbitrary hierarchies (nest tags within tags).

So ideally you would want to be able to nest tags like this:

news.politics.europe.denmark

of course another person might prefer the hierarchy

politics.elections.news.denmark

There’s no strict right or wrong here but often over time some consensus forms. Bonus points if there are equivalency classes, ie “recipe”, “recipes”, “cooking recipe”, and even the Spanish versions “receta” and “recetas” all refer to the same thing.

By meta tags I mean the ability to describe and classify certain tag groups. For instance “politics”, “cats” and “Hollywood” are content tags while the tags “English”, “Danish” and “French” are language tags. “PDF”, “MP3” and “HTML” are file format tags but “video”, “music” and “text” are content form tags while “2023”, “2004-04-03” are time-line tags

Meta categories allow you for instance to search for pages that are about the English language, but not necessarily in English and surely not written by people who happen to have the last name ‘English’. Now some systems encode this information inside the string of the tag itself like so: “language = English” or “topic = cats”, but I think the most elegant solution is really to let a tag have categories or tags on its own which describe what it’s used for (thus meta tags).

The current demo is quite limited. I hope they add (nested) tags and meta tags at least.

Sure they are not strictly necessary, but nice to have. It’s like how we capitalizing the first word of every sentence in English. Really helps guide the eye.

The ¿ and ¡ prepare the reader mentally for what’s coming and let the speaker adapt pronunciation.

Consider the following 2 sentences in English:

It’s raining.

and

It’s raining?

Meaning and intonation are different. Luckily our eyes don’t read strictly in one direction like a scanner but instead they skip back and forth a lot (saccades) which means your brain registers the question mark even before you get to pronounce the first word. Still it’s helpful to have an extra signal at the start of the sentence.

So why no extra dot at the beginning? Because it’s the default case. And since the function of the dot is to separate sentences a single one already does the job. Note how there is also no double period when a sentence ends with an abbreviation or abbr. And in headers it’s often fully omitted because the layout itself signals the separation from what precedes or follows.

Recently purchased a high class ebook reader and had to return it. The display technology simply doesn’t match paper yet.

As far as the pure reading experience goes paper is better. Also less distractions and no blue light that keeps you awake late at night. Printed books take up physical space which is a negative for me.

But digital has the advantage when it comes to working with the text: quickly being able to search for strings, copy and paste whole passages, get translations or pronunciations, reorder pages, etc. Plus all the meta data and library management.

Libraries are in a weird space betwixt when it comes to digital versions btw. They give you a digital text but lock you into a specific app that denies the advantages of the digital format mentioned above.

That being said stuff like blog posts, online articles, social media, etc simply doesn’t exist on paper. But for anything I read for pure enjoyment like literature paper is the way to go.

Lastly, in my experience electronic versions tend to be a bit cheaper than paperbacks but a lot less so than you expect. But a library card pays off after borrowing even a single book, so there’s that 🤷‍♂️.