Zompist Bboard Again

It's just about conceivable that the PM could be a member of the House of Lords, in extraordinary and temporary circumstances. (like, if Gordon Brown suddenly died, and his deputy was Lord Mandelson, maybe Mandelson could have been a caretaker PM while they conducted a new leadership election). It's...

As I mentioned in the random section recently, I've completed (for now...) a key bit of Rawàng Ata grammar. Some people suggested they might want to see it. So... Do you want to find out how to say things like "the sailor makes a canoe out of stone" ( dattà kuruburu songàya ) or "the ...

Just wanted to mention that I approve of the approach here. It makes me kind of want to go back to my own aliens (I try to come to aliens from what you might call a 'bioeconomic' point of view, looking at how the alien basic physical and social nature is reflected in their society).

Well, you can define the word how you like - it's not a word with a particularly robust, consensus definition. I think the core of the concept is extensive self-awareness. Things like: - recognising images of the self as self - recognising images of the self in the past as self - distinguishing betw...

Speaking of Irish, have you guys ever looked at the diachronics of it? They are just nuts. Like, kudos for effort, but no one could really speak this! I linked to that already Oh jeez. I guess I haven't looked at the first post in a while. :) In any case, thanks to both of you for getting me to rea...

Which - given that different parties are more or less popular on different issues and the moderators know this - would mean that the moderator would in effect choose their favourite parties to debate, and would make sure the parties they didn't like were instantly eliminated.

Well, at this election it actually IS possible that Swinson might become PM. Or it was, until the latest Tory-BP deal. It was never likely, but it was a genuine possibility. The key is that there are a LOT of seats (i.e. the South) that are Tory-Lib Dem. A large vote for the BP, as originally predic...

Doesn't BP contesting the Conservatives in Labour seats just guarantee that those seats stay Labour? I would expect if Farage is trying to form some sort of alliance those would be the seats he concedes to Johnson. Depends on the constituency. There are some constituencies - heavily working class, ...

Why not allow Jo Swinson on the debates? Because if you allow the Lib Dems to debate, then you have to allow the SNP to debate - they're officially the third party, after all, with far more seats than the Lib Dems, and they're the dominant party in Scotland. And if you allow the SNP to debate, you ...

I'd echo quinterbeck in identifying adrenaline as key. 'exhilarating' is more intense, but more specifically it's intensely physical . Exhilaration is a physical sort of excitement (and yes, I think the latter is an umbrella that includes the former as a subtype). It's often provoked by something ph...

Why is it so common for computer mice to get malfunctions where they start interpreting more and more regular clicks as double clicks? I guess it depends on the exact technology involved. But two options present themselves as likely: - if there's any sort of gunk in the mechanical clicker, then whe...

bradrn is correct that it's sometimes not intuitive for a learner which vowel letters are silent. However, <aoi> is a bad example, because <ao> is just a digraph of its own, representing /i/ in Ulster and Connacht and /e/ in Munster (and in derivatives of aon ). So in <aoi>, it's actually the <ao> t...

Err... huh. That's a very flattering response, people, and honestly not expected. To be honest, it would actually be helpful for others to look at it, to see whether anyone else can make sense of it - I've tried to set it out clearly, but it's an area in which Rawàng Ata is quite weird in some ways,...

No, don’t bother trying to look for any sort of sanity in Irish spelling. I’ve tried a couple of times to understand it, and haven’t succeeded yet. Well, it's mostly very regular and predictable, and generally quite intuitive, with the exception of a few vowel combinations. Here’s some more interes...

He didn't have the charisma or smarts to reach out to the other side, I think his approval rating would sink like a rock if he did this. Just look at how conservatives reacted when he was talking about tightening gun regulations or whatever it was ... the modern GOP electorate wants *NO* compromise...

I have finally (or arguably 'again') finished a rough draft of a description of the syntax of basic verbal clauses in Rawàng Ata... ...it's forty pages long, and features 73 (sets of) examples. Finishing it is quite a relief. On the positive side, it's a huge chunk of the grammar of the language. On...

Clearly in "it tables uponly", "table" is the verb, and "uponly" is the adverb, describing how it tables (i.e. in an upon-ish fashion).

I found this short 17-page quick guide to writing mathematical statements a bit interesting. https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~amenta/w10/writingman.pdf I was surprised, in passing, that no mention was made of 'therefore'. In school, our maths teacher insisted on us writing the 'therefore' symbol at the ...

Just a couple of comments I'd make... You may well ask, why have an ideology? Ideologies are stupid! And in many ways they are, but what an ideology offers is a consistent set of principles, a deeper analysis of our political environment, and deeper knowledge of (at least one set of) historical acto...

I’ve posted something that might be charitably called a blog post – it probably isn’t really structured enough to count as one. It doesn't have anything to do with my meager attempts at conworlding or conlanging. It’s just a bunch of mostly disconnected thoughts, mostly about politics. It’s here: h...