Andrew Dalke's Comments

That's going to be contentious. Like, how do you date "Long before the Spanish" and compare it to roads in, say, New Mexico, where Taos Pueblo is 'one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States'? Or consider the Cumberland Gap, 'Long used by Native American nations'. When did that go from a trail, or route, into a proper road?
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I think it excludes those, similar to how the overseas collectivities of France are not included.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_France says 'Overseas regions have exactly the same status as France's mainland regions', but there are no overseas regions in both the S and W hemispheres.
OTOH, French Polynesia is in the south Pacific, but it's "an overseas collectivity of France and its sole overseas country", and does not have the status of France's mainland regions.
To my surprise, the US does not have land in the S+E hemispheres. Looks like we did until we renounced claims to Funafuti and three other Tuvaluan islands in 1983.
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TIL that my old school district, Dade County (now Miami-Dade), started three weeks later than the rest of Florida until 2004. That Wikipedia link tells me it gave more time to prepare for the state's FCAT exams, which makes sense given how the test results were increasingly used punitively during Bush II.
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That leaves me begging for more details, like how the introduction of A/C affected things (my elementary school in Miami didn't get A/C until I was in 4th grade), or if the starting differences in neighboring states with similar weather are big or small, or the push for a longer school year.
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Okay, Miami boy here, born and raised, in a house w/o A/C. The statement "Experts suggest that the most conducive temperature for sleep is around 65 degrees Fahrenheit" really rubs me the wrong way. The lows now in Miami are 77F. That's a conducive sleeping temperature - if your body is used to it. As Ebben points out in the linked-to article, for most people it's not worthwhile to acclimate because they live up north where heat doesn't last long, and/or they are used to A/C both at home and work.
I know a bunch of northerners who don't feel comfortable sleeping without some sort of blanket, like the model in the picture used in the article. Instead, learn to sleep on top of the bedclothes, or under the thinnest sheet you have. The article mentions cotton PJs (or sleeping nude) - our family all slept in our underwear, which wasn't mentioned.
The classic pre-A/C option for northerners was to spend the summer in the mountains. Now that A/C insulates us from the climate, there's more pressure to stay in the city and work.
Living in Miami w/o A/C worked because I was in a 1940s house designed to co-exist with the heat. The vernacular Florida cracker style, for example, uses design elements to let the breeze through, which is incompatible with running A/C in the heat, where you want a well-insulated house. Having some airflow really helps, both for its cooling ability, and to keep the humidity down. Sure, in winter when it was 40F outside, it was also 40F inside, but frigid temperatures like that only lasted for a week or so.
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My parents wanted a Biblical name that wasn't in the family (up to the size that would come to a reunion, so was about 80 people back then - my g'parents were each 1 of 8 or 10 kids).
Could have been worse. I wouldn't have wanted Phinehas, for example. On the other hand, Zebulon would have been cooler.
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Already by the end of page 1 I was chucking. "Surprisingly, no one has ever done any research on naming strategies (so long as you conveniently ignore [4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25] and likely other work)."
Then page 2, "This set-up gives us convenient parameters for the model and just enough Greek letters to sound smart enough for publication." And how myopic parents with "perfectaccess to baby name data" is "a realistic assumption".
Oh, and citation 6 ("They would be wrong.") is a SIGBOVIK (a satirical computer science conference organized by Carnegie Mellon students) presentation by the authors themselves!
Thanks for the pointer!
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I've yet to stay in a very expensive hotel. My last trips have been on the definite low end, where you hear the drunk neighbors come in at 2am. I could go up a few notches before I enter the global capitalist monoculture.
My experience is that 20% of the tourists I meet visiting the US are Germans. Haven't met many Australians, as per #23.
My favorite jet lag (#37) was on our honeymoon in Rome. Went for a jog at 4am. Was an excellent way to avoid the crowds while going by the Colosseum, etc.

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Profile for Andrew Dalke

  • Member Since 2012/08/04


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