Posts by linger
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
OnPoint: Association of Community…, in reply to Sacha,
we return to a mainly oral culture digitally
going digital but throwing away the manual,
as it were, leaving only speech -
(…Buggrit, you know what I mean. At the end. ‘nsy’. )
Anyway. Yeah. Joe Bennett. Wonderful column.
-
(By contrast, practice is the favoured American spelling for both noun and verb. So much for consistency – which, I note, no-one spells with an ‘ns’…)
-
OnPoint: Association of Community…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Americans use licence as both the verb and noun
As the noun, in American English, the -ence spelling is theoretically possible, but not actually used to any appreciable extent.
As one recent example, the Macmillan English Dictionary contains the following headword listings:
licence noun
license[1] verb
license[2] the AmE spelling of licence [i.e., the noun]Cf. also such American-only noun spellings as defense.
Sigley (1999) provides the following figures for nouns potentially showing this spelling variation in American, British and NZ English:
1961 AmE (Brown corpus): 2.4% -ence, 97.6% -ense (n=251).
1961 BrE (LOB corpus): 100% -ence, 0% -ense (n=209).
1986 NZE (Wellington corpus): 99.3% -ence, 0.7% -ense (n=295).
1991 AmE (Frown corpus): 2.4% -ence, 97.6% -ense (n=248).
1991 BrE (FLOB corpus): 99.4% -ence, 0.6% -ense (n=181).These differences in American English are legacies of Webster’s spelling reforms, which predominantly sought to match spelling to pronunciation – in these cases, promoting <s> to represent [s].
Reference:
Sigley, R. (1999) Are we still under England’s spell? Te Reo 42: 1-19. -
You’re both right. There are hydrangea species in which pH affects flower colour (most notably H. macrophylla), but there is some genetic diversity in baseline colour within those species, and there are also other species with different flower colours (including white).
-
Hard News: Nobody wanted #EQNZ for Christmas, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
there’s a hell of a lot about Singapore that gives the “usual cargo-cult suspects” wood that creeps me out.
in other words: the opposite of Norwegian wood? (… it isn’t good …)
-
Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Hilary, have you tried “Save As… JPEG”? This should give you a “quality” option which you can set to something less than 100% (70%-80% is generally adequate for eyeball viewing, and usually results in at least a 50% file-size reduction).
-
so, basically he’s setting up the tourism marketing angle
“Christchurch: it’ll rock your world”.
Is he actually trying to promote disaster pørn tourism, or is he just trying to describe some trend that actually exists to some significant degree?
(What's more offensive about the comment -- his description of this motive, or his apparent approval of it?) -
Hard News: Nobody wanted #EQNZ for Christmas, in reply to linger,
Hmm, interesting.
Using an energy scale of (number of M4-equivalent quakes), and smoothing each day's total over the surrounding week, a plot of (log energy release) vs time for Japan is roughly linear, but with clear outliers on 22 June and 11 July, and then a sustained higher-than-expected release from July 23-August 4 -- from which I'd conclude that the initial quake may have triggered other events that should not be counted as "aftershocks" per se. -
Aftershocks follow a logarithmic decay curve on the standard scales
I’d qualify that slightly: aftershocks from one event follow a logarithmic decay curve. It doesn’t quite work that way when you have several interacting faults.
Hang on, I’m going off to try plotting data from Japan since March (since I have that to hand). I can say at this stage that, for the Japan dataset,
(i) a plot of (log # quakes) vs magnitude (which is a log scale to begin with) is roughly linear.
(ii) a simple plot of (log # quakes) vs time is not linear.
… Maybe I should be trying to calculate (log total energy release) vs time.