Stepping Stones: rocks to step on, to avoid the surrounding mud or water. When crossing a river, the more stepping stones it has, the better. Walking across six stepping stones feels much better than hopping across three, and hopping across three is better than jumping to one stepping stone in the middle of a river, …

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GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) is better than good, it's necessary. But the gpg UI inflicts more pain than 100 Microsoft Office licences combined. The Autocomplete Options Typing gpg<TAB>, I get this nonsense: 1gpg gpg-wks-client gpgsm 2gpg-agent gpg-wks-server gpgsplit 3gpg-card gpgconf gpgtar 4gpg-connect-agent gpgparsemail …

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Going to a gathering in a synagogue, my partner said something about the 'Jew party'. This raised a tiny heckle, but I couldn't see why. She'd invited me to a gathering with her community. Most were Jewish, some brought non-Jewish partners (like she brought me). What's the problem? Her native language is Slavic, and …

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Reading Plato's various Dialogues, I've come across a few very strange choices from the translators. Firstly, a pig could be dedicated as a 'sacrifice' to a god. I've read that people would then eat the 'sacrifice', and initially thought this was a cop-out - if you eat the meal, then you're not really sacrificing …

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My basic education included 11 years of French classes, and I don't know any more French than 'le chat'. Those lessons could hardly have failed harder in Britain's schools. I recall the counting in Maths, and most people can square something, and understand what, roughly, Maths can do. I still read well, so evidently …

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1 When you're eating bacon... 2 3 4 I don't each bacon. 5 6 7 Right, but when someone eats bacon... I find this sort of thing happening routinely. I suspect everyone else feels more comfortable with waiting for the meaning of a sentence to emerge later. Whatever happened to saying 'one', as short for 'someone'? It …

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Native English speakers commonly muck-up every sentence thrown at them in a way one doesn't normally find with Spaniards, Serbs, Finnish, or Germans. This cannot come from the same reasons that few Europeans can pronounce Cantonese words - that we simply don't have those sounds. We have 'con', but cannot say 'pivo'. …

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Fun fact: There's no such thing as a fish. This 'QI'-style factum results from the notion that fish do not all belong to the same genus (or 'family', or 'phylum', or some other Biological category). If we take one genetic branch of fish as the real fish, then we miss out a lot of animals which everyone calls 'fish'. …

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Instead of looking up how to spell a word, I always look up the Etymology and find a link to another word I can spell. I don't know Latin or Greek, but just seeing the links between words often shows why people construct the spelling in this way or that. Defence or defense? It's 'defence', because it has the same root …

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My friends had a spirited debate after too many drinks. I suggested bringing back the Greek-style symposium, and it lead to a far more interesting debate. First, we agreed on time - two minutes. Then someone kept the time, and motioned to indicate when only thirty second remained. Everyone felt heard, nobody …

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