dmurray

Wiktionary [0] seems pretty confident ("Germanic" includes all of the languages below, not just modern German).

[0] From Middle English chiken (also as chike > English chick), from Old English ċicen, ċycen (“chicken”), of uncertain origin. Possibly from Proto-West Germanic kiukīn (“chicken”), or alternatively from Proto-West Germanic kukkīn, equivalent to cock +‎ -en.

Compare North Frisian schückling (“chicken”), Saterland Frisian Sjuuken (“chicken”), Dutch kuiken (“chick, chicken”), German Low German Küken (“chick”), whence German Küken (“chick”), (elevated, obsolete) German Küchlein (“chick”) and Old Norse kjúklingr (“chicken”).

Chicken/pullet seems to have gone the opposite way: pullet (French) is exclusively for the animal but chicken (Germanic) can be either the animal or its meat.

If no one else wants to burn coal, coal will be cheap. It's not that expensive to dig it out of the ground and transport, and most of China's coal is mined in China.

Any solution that doesn't involve everyone agreeing to care about the externalities of coal (air pollution and greenhouse gases) will result in someone continuing to burn a lot of coal.

TIL! I did not know batteries behaved like that, but given that, it makes sense.

I feel like the first part of your post shouldn't be needed. But perhaps the word Kafkaesque will long outlive the memory of Franz Kafka, and future generations will curse the name of the unknown Kafkae who delighted in building such impenetrable systems. Perhaps he was an emperor of Byzant or a rival of Orwel.

I don't see the purpose in this feature even if your alarm was at 4:00. Why wouldn't you keep charging until the user picked his phone off the charger?

One thing you might do is only charge to 80% or 90%, to improve battery lifetime, unless you detected the user is going on a long flight tomorrow and needs it at 100%. But I don't see any reason for the opposite behaviour.

You probably want your washing machine to finish when you'll be ready to take the clothes out, rather than leave them sitting damp in the machine.

There should be plenty of opportunity to load shift with other things though, a dishwasher as you mentioned, or a fridge or a storage heater or a charger for your electric car. All can be done with minimal inconvenience to the user.

Yes, but I'm saying the brief isn't parody, it's real. Unless I'm the gullible, unreasonable person who was tricked and still doesn't fully get it.

Maybe because it's not true? Selling early access to posts through Truth Social is worth $10-20 million a year (most estimates are they have 10-20 subscribers at 60-100k/month). And obviously no one is valuing that revenue stream at 50x or 100x earnings: it's expected to go away when Trump does, which, actuarially speaking, should be in the next ten years.

I'm surprised they got away with the first two paragraphs! The Onion wasn't really founded in 1756, doesn't control the world's shipping lanes, etc.

Later on in the brief they get all self-referential and point out how this brief itself exemplifies parody. But this isn't a parody of a legal brief. It's a real legal brief with arguments and citations that might really sway the court, with some parodic elements.

That doesn't sound right. Newton's contemporaries like Leibniz, Huygens, Halley all wrote much of their most significant work in Latin.

Newton also wrote Opticks in English, perhaps because he was aiming at a more mass market audience.

The Anglican church (to which virtually all of the Victorian elite belonged) had phased out Latin since the 17th century. Likewise Victorian scientists, eg Darwin, wrote in English. (If they needed to correspond with their peers abroad, they might use Latin, but many would learn French, German, Russian...)

Its use in the Catholic church probably helped Latin survive as long as it did, but by the 19th century it was already an impractical relic whose prestige in English schools came partly from the fact that it had no actual application.

According to Wikipedia the leading plans were more like evacuate everyone, build some protection around it, then dissemble it one piece at a time and blow the pieces up individually.

This makes sense if you can tolerate some chance of the whole thing blowing up, but you'd still prefer not to replace all those windows.

And Luke Skywalker's spaceship crash landed in a swamp.

That's two of the most famous sci-fi franchises in the world, so I don't think sci-fi creators are as guilty of ignoring this possibility as GP seems to think.