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  • I studied in Glasgow and one of my absolute favourite memories of the place is hearing a South Asian looking guy talking on the phone in a language I didn't understand or recognise... but I could still hear that he had a Glaswegian accent

  • Ironically, the most unbelievably stereotypically-American tourist thing I've ever witnessed was while I was in Germany. We started chatting while renting bikes, and upon learning that I was Scottish she remarked that she was surprised I spoke English

    She seemed lovely otherwise

  • Isn't RPS "meant" to be a game rather than a way to decide randomly between two options? There's an element of skill involved since you can attempt to avoid playing patterns and identify patterns in your opponent's play in repeated rounds

  • This is becoming enough of a pattern that I'm expecting that someone is going to come prepared for it soon. Like when he was doing that stupid thing trying to yank people's arms towards him during handshakes last time, and then Macron just crushed his hand until it looked like he was about to cry

  • Not quite, but the actual story is far weirder. He posted a whole bunch of explicit photos of his (adult) ex-boyfriend who turned out not to be consenting to this... and also his nephew. And also a candidate for the Canadian Conservative Party.

  • To be honest most of the basic physics behind rocketry actually isn't too difficult. The matter of engineering it into reality definitely is very difficult, finding fuels that burn hard enough and figuring out how to contain them while they burn and the like. The nature of going so far and so fast also means that tiny errors add up to very big problems.

    All rockets function on the fact that if you push something in one direction, you also go in the opposite direction by a proportionate amount. Lighting fuel on fire while it's in a tube that only has one way out just happens to be a great way to push the burning fuel really, really hard and therefore get a really hard push back. The forces involved always have to cancel out the total momentum of everything involved; you chuck X kilograms of burning fuel out of the back at Y metres per second, you accelerate forward by however much you need to to make your momentum match that in the opposite direction. This is Newton's third law of motion, the "for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction" one

    Nozzles and the like can adjust which direction the way out is pointing. If the way out points left a bit, the momentum of the fuel is also going left a bit, so the reaction momentum you get goes a bit to the right, and now you have steering

    I think the biggest conceptual block people usually have about orbits is that they're not about going up fast, they're about going around the Earth fast. If you point your rocket straight up and just keep going straight up, you won't go into orbit around the Earth. Either you'll crash straight back down when you run out of fuel, or you have a rocket with enough power and fuel to reach Earth's escape velocity, in which case you'll just continue travelling away from Earth forever until you find something else's gravity. You know the kind of arc that a ball has when you throw it? Imagine that you're superhumanly strong and can throw a ball literally however hard you want. You could throw it beyond the horizon without breaking a sweat. Once you're throwing it that hard, the curvature of the Earth starts to become relevant, right? The ground is effectively dropping away underneath the ball as it travels forward, letting it fly farther before it hits the ground. Eventually if you throw hard enough, the curvature of the Earth turns away from the ball at the same rate as the ball is falling. The ball is now in orbit. The ISS (and anything else that wants to orbit at the same altitude) goes around the Earth so fast that it does 15 entire laps around the planet every day

    Unfortunately for our rockets, the Earth's atmosphere is very bad to actually move through that fast, so they go up first to get out of the thickest part of the atmosphere and then gradually turn sideways to achieve orbit

    Once you start getting into things like how to get from Earth to other planets you've got to worry about some other stuff, but this comment is probably getting long enough by now and not many of our rockets do that yet

    I totally get what you mean about planes not looking like they should work. The size of them and the fact that we've got basically nothing to reference them against for scale and motion when they're in the air is really confusing

  • I don't know which one HK65 is referring to, but I know a few examples:

    • Punjabi, which is left-to-right in India and right-to-left in Pakistan (the Indian one being influenced by older Indian scripts and the Pakistani one by Arabic)
    • Kazakh uses the RtL Arabic script in the part of China where there are a lot of Kazakhs and the LtR Cyrillic script in Kazakhstan
    • At least some of the kinds of Tamazight (spoken by Amazigh people, mostly in Morocco and Algeria) use Arabic script, but there is a script specifically for Tamazight languages called Tifinagh which goes left to right and there's also some use of the Latin alphabet for these languages
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  • Yes. I think Australia and NZ spell it the same way as us. It's pronounced the same as the other spelling (allowing for accent variation, of course). We spell the homophonic verb meaning "restrain" as "curb"

  • It's about as close to a random person as you can get while still being recorded. They were royalty, but the two real ones get literally a sentence each at max

    • Eithne ingen Bresail Bregh married the king of Tara and is described as "having deserved reward from God for her good works, and for her intense penance for her sins" in one source and "deserved to obtain the heavenly kingdom, having done penance" in the other
    • Eithne ingen Cinadhon was the daughter of a Pictish king and is literally only recorded as having died
    • The legendary Eithne is the daughter of a king of Scotland (mostly Pictish at the time) and crossed the sea to Ireland, where she gave birth to the hero Túathal Techtmar. This is the entirety of her role in the story; a couple of paragraphs in a collection that, in the translation I'm looking at, has 600 pages just for part five
  • Not sure if I can call this knowledge since I don't know if it's true, but I think I identified a couple of women from the 8th century CE who are mentioned in some Irish annals as actually being the same person. As far as I know there's next to no discussion of these women on the internet and there are basically no historical records of them, at least. So I guess if I'm right it's very obscure?

    The women in question are Eithne ingen Bresail Bregh and Eithne ingen Cinadhon (and possibly also the legendary Eithne mother of Tuathal Techtmar)