Kolya's comments

The article you linked to specifically says there are only voiceless plosives in Mandarin!

The examples are cherry-picked. I took a photo outside my office window in a built-up area, o3 thought for 5m 7s (!), and it got the location wrong by 40km. Doesn't look solved to me.

There are ways you could establish eligibility without a birth date. For example, they may have a WW2 service record but no record of their birth.

Yep. Anybody who’s ever read written Cantonese or Shanghainese would realise they are often unintelligible unless you speak those languages and understand how they’re written. eg 「佢冇做乜嘢」

And yet the incorrect parent comment has been voted to the top of the thread by those who think it’s helped them.

Writing the pronunciation above a character is normal when the character is rare or has an unexpected pronunciation. For example recently 龘 was often written with the pinyin above.

Writing a different pronunciation with a different sense is also often seen on WeChat or in adverts. Often with a positive meaning in characters and a negative meaning in pinyin.

I would prefer if Darwin remained on the £10 note and Turing was put on the £5 note instead.

$0.0013 doesn't sound a lot. But it's equivalent to about $1.50 if somebody listens to an album 100 times.

That's less than if they were to sell the album in a shop. However they don't have the same distribution costs and Spotify users are almost always going to listen to far more music than they would if they bought CDs.

So while $0.0013 per stream sounds stupid, it's closer to a sensible level than one would intuitively think.

The title should be "Xinhua Applauds UK Move To Restrict Access To Social Media".

The relationship between Xinhua and the Chinese government is complicated. Treating them as synonymous is a little clumsy.

Based on what they showed on UK news this evening, much of the police aren't well-prepared.

In Africa and the Middle East, the riots were heavily motivated - the rioters had strong political reasons to be there. In London, it's just some socially disaffected youths and looting opportunists. So I don't think they are all that comparable.

Well, they were in a big town and were told by the county council that there were no charge points remotely nearby. Whatever you think of Top Gear, that fact does not reflect well on electric cars.

The most popular crosswords in the UK are the same type as those in the US. But some newspapers have an additional 'cryptic' crossword. (I don't know more than a couple of people who actually do the cryptic crosswords, but I guess they must have some sort of following.)

I'm surprised to see a crossword editor use the phrase "crosswords in England". It's not what you'd expect from someone so concerned with trivia.

'common' and 'special' aren't antonyms.

as a guess, i would think the short-term churn has increased.

most heavy users of fb that i know are people that signed up a long time ago. it was an important part of their social life and most still use the site.

but recently, i've had a few more (older, less tech-savvy) friends on fb. they 'got around' to joining fb eventually. but because it wasn't as important to their social life to join, and they only bothered doing so after knowing about fb for a few years, they are more likely to drift away.

i don't know if that's true, but it doesn't sound too unreasonable.

It's interesting he uses Andrew Wiles as an example. Perhaps FLT would have been proved faster if Wiles had not mostly shut himself away.

His achievement was exceptional, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he went about reaching the goal in the optimum way.

While it is always nice to see someone turn their life around, I'm not sure how important or appropriate stories like these are. He has a nice voice. That's a nice novelty. But the novelty will wear off.

And I can't help finding claims like "he has had his prayers answered" irritating. What about the hundreds of millions of people for whom the world who - for whatever reason - don't "get their prayers answered"? They receive only silence. And what about the brilliant scientists who put prayers aside and achieve results through exceptional diligence and creativity?

Don't get me wrong - I'm very happy for the guy. But I'm worried about what the interest in trivial feel-good stories says about our society.

That isn't a reason against incest per se. It is merely an objection to certain forms of incest - specifically, those that lead to children.

With freely-available contraception and abortion, it's hard to think of any good reason for the absolute cultural taboo against all incest.

One of the goals of literature should be to challenge cultural taboos. Any good bookseller should realize it.

What are the names of the studies that demonstrate that?