merry_flame

Thanks for sharing. Also very impressed that this is a <1 hour job ("timed post").

This is being repeated over and over again on this page, but it's factually untrue… I've tasted dozens of kinds of wine grapes, and lots are tasty or at least as palatable as some of the blander table grapes – some are even widely recognized as such (muscat!). Also, even varieties that are not great for eating can often be used to produce some very nice juice – cabernet sauvignon, merlot, chardonnay are all used for high-end, monovarietal grape juices in France for instance.

Not if you consider externalities. Privatizing profits and socializing losses and all that…

Nonsense. I've even had hens that paired together to open doors – one flying repeatedly on the handle, another one pushing the door. And those were reform hens that seemed particularly blunt relative to their peers.

I agree with the sentiment, but Normans speaking a Breton variant of French… Oh gosh… And why "they"? What's with the lumping of 300+ million French speakers with the personal opinion of one person? What's that talk about relevance as if not being number 1 meant that the language was damned?

Nice anecdotes, but the last one is a misinterpretation that got me into a rabbit hole. "poe-tat" is juste "patate" and is widely used not the least because it's just faster to say than "pomme de terre" (following Zipf's law of abbreviation and the principle of least effort). It's more informal, but it's pedigree is excellent as it comes from Taíno via Spanish, was first recorded in 1582 and recorded by the French Academy in 1762… which was actually only the case for "pomme de terre" in 1835! It seems that "pomme de terre" referred to other tubers in the distant past, but that the famous agronomist Parmentier remarketed "patates" as "pommes de terre" in the 18th century to promote their acceptance.

And yet, you'd say "the House of the Virgin Mary" or "the House of Windsor" in English (which translate to "la Maison de la Vierge Marie", but the "Maison Windsor" in French). English grammar has incorporated a lot of key Romance features alongside its Germanic ones.

The term "Old English" is completely misleading in this context given how distant modern English is from that language. Both were spoken in England, that's about it. Applying the same logic to "France", should we then consider Gallo-Roman works like Ausonius's Mosella (c. 370 CE) to be "French" literature?

The Beowulf manuscript dates from around 975 CE and is written in what might be better termed Anglo-Saxon. How much can you understand from this random sentence: "þa me þæt gelærdon leode mine, þa selestan, snotere ceorlas"? ("So my vassals advised me well…) I personally can't understand a single word or even relate it in any way to the English I know.

On the other hand, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia was composed in "Old French" in 880 BCE and seems rather intelligible to me. I also just took a random sentence from the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100 BC) and can understand all of it: "Seignurs, vos en ireiz. Branches d’olive en voz mains portereiz, Si me direz a Carlemagne le rei Pur le soen Deu qu’il ait mercit de mei." I'd even go so far as to say that's closer to modern French than Shakespearean English despite being written in Anglo-Norman … Which also means it should probably count as being English literature if Beowulf qualifies…

I guess the lesson here is simply to remember that reality is always a lot more granular than we first expect and that any sweeping judgements on languages, countries, etc. over the span of millennia make very little sense. By that criteria, the linked article was pure clickbait to begin with.

Ridiculous. Dropping meat is upwards of 90 pc of the welfare impact.

Interesting mix of wood too. The 1619 viola has a very tight grain spruce top and the maple back has a beautiful curl. Same with the 2019 Beilharz cello and the 1785 Storioni violin – the curly maple really shows. The back on the 1705 Goffriller cello seems very plain on the other hand, and suprisingly so does the 1717 Stardivari's. The 19th century Hopf violin has nice curly maple, but the grain on the top seems extremely loose. Any idea how do these compare musically? And does someone know if Stradivarius ever used curly maple and when curly maple was first used for musical instruments?

In Western Europe at least, cows are kept in pastures, which are permanently dedicated to that use and not used as fields to grow crops. All in all, cows are probably only low carbon in premodern rural contexts in West Africa and Asia for instance.

> Multi-metallic systems often involve variable exchange rates between different classes of money, and I've mused that this might be something worth reintroducing to modern financial systems. How and why? Even as arbitrage is easier to effect as ever? The point of the bimetallic system was that gold wasn't available in high enough quantities for the needs of the economy (monetary mass) and was too valuable for small-denomination coinage. Those aren't problems we currently have…

Lol, crazy theories require real proof. Netherlands: 10% obesity rate, 12% smoking rate.

Good point. This needs an update though now we know more about zoonotic spillover. Pigs, monkeys, bats, etc. should be off the list asap.