mayd

"I have no spoon." Correct in a situation where exactly one spoon is expected.

"There are no spoons here." Correct in a situation where there could be zero, one or more spoons.

The obvious answer is: because zero is not one. Singular means one. Plural means not one.

This example does sound wrong to a native English speaker. It contains a subjunctive mood construct and the correct version would be:

"What if there were no stars in the sky?"

David Hilbert and Stefan Cohn-Vossen.

Hardy's "A course of Pure Mathematics" has been highly regarded since it was first published in 1908 because it was an innovative text: rigorous, modern, well-written. Its intended readership was always first year "honours" mathematics students. This book inspired innovation in subsequent generations of textbook writers.

However, in the 21st century, this book really can no longer be recommended for its original teaching purpose. As a textbook it is outdated (a term I hate, but it is true). It is now an historical curiosity - although one which I am pleased to own, and the exercises in the book are still worth a look.

Calculus teaching has progressed considerably since 1908. The construction of the real number system in Hardy's book, using the Dedekind Cut method is overly complicated - the use of the of Least Upper Bound is much simpler and clearer. Hardy defines the concept of integral solely as the anti-derivative; there is no discussion of Riemann sums, or Darboux sums, etc. I am sure I would not want to take Hardy's approach today.

I think we are better off recommending books are more modern.

I will start by recommending "Calculus" by Michael Spivak.

Apart from the Tk and Expect extensions, one of the best parts of Tcl its general extensibility through the Tcl C API. Unfortunately, this is one of Tcl's less well-documented features. Most books and online tutorials either ignore it completely or, at best, provide perfunctory discussion and examples.

The other poorly documented feature is the objected-programming framework which was belatedly added after Tcl fell out of the mainstream of programming languages and so languishes unused.

The biggest problem of all is that that there is no online forum for Tcl users now that Google has dropped Groups. Usenet comp.lang.tcl was the main discussion forum and it is now gone.

John E. Hopcroft, Jeffrey D. Ullman, Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation.

> In the same way Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand’s prime ministers > serve at the King’s pleasure. It’s ceremonial, much like the monarchy itself.

This is incorrect: the British monarchy is not ceremonial. Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand were self-governing dominions of the British Empire, with their own parliaments, and each nation still has a governor-general who is nominally approved by the monarch but who is actually selected by the government of each nation from time to time. Hong Kong was a Crown Colony, a.k.a. Overseas Territory, and had a governor who was selected by the British government in London and approved by the monarch. Governors-general and governors are quite different things. Governors-general are the representatives of the monarch and exercise the monarch's reserve powers according to the constitution of the nation. The Hong Kong governor was a colonial governor and had much more power over administration than the governor-general of a dominion.

>They had a full democracy after 1997. That was self determination.

This is incorrect: The creation of a democratically elected administration in Hong Kong was fiercely opposed by the People's Republic of China from 1949 onwards, even threatening violence to prevent it. The last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, created a parliament, the Legislative Council, which was partially elected by universal suffrage. The Legislative Council was declared illegitimate by the PRC and was immediately and permanently shut down after the PRC takeover of Hong Kong. The government of Hong Kong since the handover consists entirely of people selected and appointed by Beijing who are all, or mostly all, members of the Chinese Communist Party.

For all the pontificating in this thread about the need to follow safety advice regarding the wearing of seat belts (and bicycle helmets!) at all times, please note the following from the BBC report:

> the London-Singapore flight suffered a sudden drop as a meal service was under way.

Meal service is probably the single most vulnerable moment to encounter turbulence. How many of the safety-first-at-all-times brigade could dine while tightly strapped to their seat? And no matter how tightly strapped in you are, you could not avoid being splashed by scalding coffee, as some passengers on the in the report were.

Also, the flight time from London to Singapore is 13 hours and 15 minutes (non-stop). How many of you would stay tightly strapped in at all times for that long?

Your counterexample is not even close to being accurate. Italy and Switzerland have much more in common than China and Japan. Italian is even one of the official languages of Switzerland. Switzerland and Italy are both essentially federations of distinct provinces. Both are recognizably Western European. China and Japan are worlds apart, as are China and India.

It is called Pythagoras's Theorem precisely because Pythagoras, according to legend, first proved the statement of the theorem within the framework of Greek geometry. Proof matters to mathematicians, and Pythagoras is justly famous for his achievement. There is archaeological evidence that much older civilisations than the Greeks, such as the Sumerians, Babylonians and the Egyptians, were persuaded of the correctness of Pythagoras's Theorem. But there is no surviving evidence that anyone other than the Greeks produced a satisfactory proof, nor did any other civilisation even possess a formal mathematical system capable of representing a logically correct proof.

I can confirm this is 100% correct. Anyone who doubts it just needs to compare quality of old editions of SciAm from before 2000 and those after 2000. The decline in quality is stark.

I watched the first episode the Sympathiser last week. It occurs to me that South Korea is the only Asian country that has produced significant modern-era (i.e. Cold War and later) espionage dramas that have been widely distributed in the West: these with the two Koreas as protagonists, of course. The only other Asia-focussed espionage dramas that spring to mind are a few with pre-WWII era plots involving Imperial Japan.

I do agree that the "Deutschland 83/86/89" TV series was great espionage drama, but I also think your Eurocentric bias is showing. I have often wondered why Asia has been continuously overlooked in the espionage TV drama stakes. Even John LeCarré's "The Honourable Schoolboy" never got adapted to the screen. My conclusion is that it is not due to a lack of good material but due to political and cultural reasons. Westerners are uncomfortable with portraying Asian geopolitical adversaries such as Communist China and North Korea because they don't want to be accused of racism. When was the last time you saw or read a tale about Chinese spies? Sadly, this has resulted in a vast, unexplored region of espionage drama being totally ignored. I wonder if they make Asia-focussed spy drama in Japan?