Bizarrely, Germans call themselves Deutsche and the Dutch call themselves all sorts of crazy things. Swiss, Spanish, oh the whole of Europe.
As for Japanese, Chinese, Russia ... errm most of the rest of the world 8)
In English we don't really get America(n) "right", and they are one of the larger populations that speak the bloody lingo! Oh and lingo: lingua - Latin with a twist, that's how we Anglo-Saxons keep it real!
"The Navajo are speakers of a Na-Dené Southern Athabaskan language which they call Diné bizaad (lit. 'People's language'). The term Navajo comes from Spanish missionaries and historians who referred to the Pueblo Indians through this term, although they referred to themselves as the Diné, meaning '(the) people'."
Those letters mean: "Welsh not". Back in the day, Welsh children would be punished for speaking Welsh (instead of English) and made to wear a wooden board with WN on it around their neck. The board would be passed on through the day to the final transgressor who would receive a thrashing or similar punishment. Generally all of them would get a thrashing anyway - it was good for them!
Edit: Not, not no ie WN: "Welsh not". Small but important difference.
Start with the handy precis that Mr A leaves at the top in yellow. You can drop that into conversation right now with some confidence! Mr A has quite some clout hereabouts let alone elsewhere, so that seems reasonable.
You can't know everything but knowing what you don't know and when to rely on someone else to know what you don't know and to confidently quote or use what they know that you don't know, is a skill too.
"Critical thinking", and I suspect you do know how to do that and whilst this blog post might be somewhat impenetrable it is still might be useful to you, even as just general knowledge. Use your skills to determine - for you and you alone - whether it is truth, false or somewhere in between.
A genny has a 12V car/lorry battery to start it. My work one is basically a lorry diesel motor on a floor bolted chassis. It is the other side of an external wall (double skin of brick). Ironically enough the genny is inside the same room as the hot water boiler which is gas powered. The original heating was a coal fired boiler which was converted to a weird oil squirting "hair dryer". That's all gone now.
The fire risks that I worry about do not really include the genny. The fridge in the kitchen is potentially far worse. I have, of course, put in a fire detection and suppression system inside the computer room.
At home I actually have a more involved fire risk assessment than at work. My wife does dog boarding at home and one day I will stop her leaving a cloth to dry on the cooker ... sigh. Anyway, making sure that humans and dogs get warned and get out safely is quite involved.
As we all know there are three ingredients required for fire: a source of ignition, a combustible material and finally: oxygen. Remove one and fire does not happen. Unfortunately some reactions will generate copious amounts of heat and oxygen, ie all three requirements for combustion and become self sustaining. Lithium batteries for example can do this. It's a bit of a nightmare but techniques are being developed to deal with "self igniting metals" and the like.
Diesel fuel is particularly hard to ignite which makes it not too much of a worry in a fire. By the time the fuel tank is on fire the fire department has given up on your building and are just trying to stop the spread to other buildings.
What a beauty! Its been rebuilt (restored is a tricky concept here) in largely the same materials and in the same form as the original, prior to various restoration efforts through the centuries, with a few knobs on.
This means that we get a mediaeval cathedral looking like it did when it was conceived and built (with an extra spire and a few other things). The colours are amazing.
Elderly churches, mosques and temples (int al) have a habit of losing their original colours and "feel" across the centuries. They change - age. Stone walls age and thanks to modern pollution darken. Pigments age, disperse and peel off.
Notre Dame has been restored. Not to how it was in 2018, prior the fire ... but to how it was intended when built, with a bit of sympathetic interpretation.
With a different spire. Notre Dame used to have a spire until it was removed early in the 19th century.
> Notre Dame has been restored. Not to how it was in 2018, prior the fire ... but to how it was intended when built, with a bit of sympathetic interpretation.
This is quite important. It was difficult to reconcile texts talking about how gothic cathedrals were full of light and colours with the aspect of a lot of these cathedrals, which felt dark and dull with their walls and windows blackened and covered in grime. The renovated interior is properly breathtaking.
You can see a contrast in pictures of the Chartres restoration. See [1], 5th picture down. The light areas are the restored, painted areas (if I remember correctly, they carefully scraped off the grime with scalpels to reveal the original paint, although I don't know if they did that for the whole surface or just used that information to scrape it off and repaint it). The dark areas are the unrestored areas.
After 900 years of smoke from burning candles, and an oil furnace in the 20th century, the surface got pretty dark. The restoration was controversial because some people thought that we should either keep the "patina of age" or they thought that the patina was the natural color of the stone.
I'll be interested to visit when I'm probably in Paris next spring. Notre Dame always seemed to me more impressive on the outside than the inside where, as you suggest, it felt pretty dark and dull compared to a church like Sainte-Chapelle.
The videos I've seen of the people who did this remarkable work show such a sense of pride, as they should have. It's an amazing testament that France was able to do this work, relatively quickly, in traditional ways. Maintaining that kind of expertise on the scale needed is astonishing.
I was wondering exactly about that: how did they keep this expertise? Even in France, I don't think anyone is building medieval-style buildings anymore. Is the work done in restaurations enough to keep the know-how for actually building things almost from scracth?
It may surprise you but people are still building medieval castle in France: https://www.guedelon.fr/en/ (youtube has numerous video from them showing medieval technics of building)
And France keep some of the building tradition through something called "compagnonnage" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnonnage (sry but there no en page for this article).
The answer is simple, there's an endless amount of churches and castles to maintain in France, so many of them that it's actually impossible to maintain them all. As long as the state cares about maintainance, there's going to be jobs for it.
They were established in Charleston SC after Hurricane Hugo when it was discovered that the US did not have enough craftspeople to repair all the historic homes that had been damaged. You can get an accredited Bachelors degree in architectural ironwork, plastering, timber framing, and stone carving.
I mean it's a living church. The entire thing can be rebuilt and it will still be the real Notre Dame de Paris. It'd have to stop being used for the original function.
Similar to how the California missions that are still parishes will continue to be complete. The ones that are museums will deteriorate.
The beauty of a building is more than just its physical materials but also those things for which it was built and those people who built it
> The entire thing can be rebuilt and it will still be the real Notre Dame de Paris. It'd have to stop being used for the original function.
This is demonstrably wrong, as we have many examples of old buildings and we know what people actually feel about them.
Consider two very famous examples of buildings that completely changed their purpose, but are still the same building: the Pantheon and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The Pantheon was a Roman temple to all of the Gods when it was built in 126, and became a Christian church ~400 years later, but everyone recognizes it as the same building. The Hagia Sophia was a Christian church built in 537, and 1100 years later became an Islamic mosque, but it is still the same building to everyone.
Then for the opposite example: St Peter's Basillica at the Vatican. This was built in 1506 on the site of a much older church, also called St Peter's Basillica (commissioned by emperor Constantine), which also served as a Christian church, was also used the parish of the Pope, was also the location of papal coronation and so on. And still, no one would say "St Peter's Basilica was built by Saint Constantine", because the current basilica is universally recognized as a new building, despite serving the same function.
A building is recognized for the beauty and specifics of its structural and painterly elements, not for its role. If it is destroyed and rebuilt in almost the same size and shape, then it is recognized as the same building; regardless of entirely changing its purpose.
Conversely, if a building is rebuilt into a completely different shape, even a universally admired as beautiful one, it is considered a different building, even if keeps serving the same purpose.
The Pantheon no longer exists. It is now the church of St Mary and the Martyrs. And this is the difference I'm getting at.
The Pantheon is a temple dedicated to all the ancient Roman gods. It cannot be both that and the Church of St Mary and the Martyrs. When the Church took it over, it ceased to be the Pantheon.
There's no doubt the building is the same, and we can argue about how 'true to form' it is. But that's the point. When it stopped being what it originally was, its 'form' is now a goal to never deviate from.
Whereas, the various depictions of the martyrs present within the Church of St Mary and the Martyrs, for example, has no such ideal yet. The Church can (and does) shift that around. However, if it were to stop being the church of st Mary and the Martyrs, then it would have an ideal form that any restorer may want to restore it towards.
You could try doing a search for the Pantheon vs the Church of St Mary and the Martyrs to see which is alive in the general consciousness and which isn't. Ultimately, the Pantheon is not a temple to the Roman gods, it's a particular building in Rome. It used to be a temple, now it's a church, maybe 100 years from now it will be an exhibition space. It will still be the same building. And the building is far more culturally important then the current parish inhabiting it.
IMO, they're both right, but for anon291's reasons. tsimionescu's perception of The Pantheon is reflective of a shared cultural consciousness, albeit one that's cosmopolitan and intellectual. He and anon291 (maybe) see different buildings because they either have different cultural perspectives--i.e. perhaps anon291 is a practicing Catholic (or esoteric pagan?)--or at least anon291 is cognizant that many people would see a space with a meaning quite distinct than tsimionescu's. The Hagi Sophia is great example--most foreigners see one building, local Eastern Orthodox see another, and local Muslims a third.
It's difficult, if not impossible, for people to see architectural spaces in the way an animal or alien might see them. Even when the culture which built it is totally alien or unknown, that basic fact, plus the context in which it is seen by the observer (including how they arrived there), as well as typical architectural features (e.g. steps) imbue it with meaning that color everything about it. Our whole world is like that. Take, for example, a stop sign--we simply can't perceive that object, at least without effort, without the culturally imbued meaning. It's not just a red & white octagon with shapes in the middle; the meaning vastly overshadows its raw physical properties.
A more favorable interpretation would be that the church consists of more than just its worldly parts; its place and use are also part of its identity. Even if you'd completely rebuild the church building, the other parts of its identity would persist. Therefore, the "ship of Theuses" argument doesn't apply, as, in this case, we would never replace all parts of [the identity of] this church.
In that problem we re asked to consider if a ship with all it's parts replaced is the same as the original..
My argument is that so long as the ship is being used for the same purpose by the same people then it is. Without a purpose, wood in the shape of a ship is not even necessarily a ship
Our own bodies are ships of Theseus. I've read once that every atom in our bodies are replaced in 40 years. In 40 years, our bodies change a lot and so are our minds. What make Theseus' ship the ship of Theseus, is that Theseus is the owner of the ship. Ownership is a social convention, a construction of the mind.
What makes Notre Dame, is that people generally agree it is still Notre Dame. If hypothetically we were in a time of modernism craze, and that our government decided to rebuilt it in some modern style (there actually was proposals like that), it would still be the people who makes it Notre Dame de Paris or not.
That is not really applicable here. The cathedral itself was never really destroyed even though the Christian rejectors’ mob ransacked it in the “French” Revolution and the latest fire also did not really cause structural damage.
It is also still a functioning Christian church with services.
Well, it survived 700 years without, and it survived the 1960ies where everyone was smoking everywhere, and it survived two revolutions where the police wasn’t active. So a working fire detection system isn’t the problem.
Yeah, I don’t buy the official investigation that concludes with spontaneous combustion.
I'm actually still disappointed that they did not chose some bold and modern solution. France has no shortage of gothic cathedrals, many of which are much more interesting than Notre Dame of Paris, this was a once in a century chance to do something completely new and interesting, and they got cold feet. Such a shame. It's still very good work, but it will forever feel like a missed opportunity to me.
That would be nothing short of cultural vandalism. It's certainly the prerogative of the French people to do that if they wish, but it would be an awful thing. The world doesn't need more ugly modern buildings.
It was a restoration, not a grand re-imagination. When works of art (like a painting in a museum) are damaged, they restore them to their previous state.
The French government held a design competition [1] [2] to gather proposals for a new spire, so the assumption at the outset was not that it would be a mere restoration.
> “The international competition will allow us to ask the question of whether we should even recreate the spire as it was conceived by Viollet-le-Duc,” [prime minister] Philippe told reporters after a cabinet meeting dedicated to the fire. “Or, as is often the case in the evolution of heritage, whether we should endow Notre Dame with a new spire. This is obviously a huge challenge, a historic responsibility.”
However, the senate passed a bill explicitly requiring that the traditional design must be used [3].
There are very, very few old buildings in the world that haven't been rebuilt and reimagined at least once in their lifetime, for the majority of them the parts that we find most esthetically pleasing are later additions
You know that brutalism is long dead, don't you? At this point it's just a scapegoat, if you cannot see beaty in at least some parts of modern architecture, you clearly haven't been paying attention. Just look at some of the alternative designs for the restoration of Notre Dam and tell me that they're ugly and not interesting
> You know that brutalism is long dead, don't you?
that's kind of the point with modern architecture. It's at best lame, often outright ugly from day one, and aways never age well. The only merit is that it is made of non-durable materials (concrete, glass and steel), so no one will look down on our civilisation in 800 years since there will be nothing left.
Because they are actually.. quite revolting. Even by modern standards, pretty disgusting. At that point you might just as well just bulldoze the whole building and put something new entirely there.
Af French, I’m happy they took that way. Especially many submissions were quite ugly.
I prefer the approach taken at The Louvre and it’s pyramid of glass that is built next to the historical buildings without modifying them and giving a nice mix between history and modernity
Thank you for your description of your first hand experience - very interesting. Life at sea is rather different to on land!
"except the cop is heavily armed commandos in an Apache attack helicopter."
Apaches don't deploy at sea. They are land based beasties. They don't carry commandos either. Pilot and CPG - two crew. Perhaps you meant a Blackhawk, if you are thinking about an American setup, which I think has a maritime variant or two. Brits will come at you with a Lynx or a Merlin.
You'll probably never see an Apache at sea. Their usual targets will sink without any assistance Anyway, I think you mean marines in a Blackhawk. Commando is also a bit British.
When someone use an analogy they are not saying that something is literally like that. They were not saying they had apaches or whatever, but that it was like being pulled over by a cop in an apache helicopter.
Just the same way that if I say that there was this dude helping me out with carrying a dead tree, and it was like it was a elephant had strolled by and decided to pick up a toot-pick. I am not saying that it was a literal elephant.
I'm aware that Apache helicopters don't carry troops. My analogy was a quick aside and should have been clearer that I wasn't suggesting Apache helicopters deploying troops at sea. I was drawing a parallel to a more familiar circumstance because some might assume that a warship confronting a freighter at sea is similar to a routine law enforcement encounter like a police officer pulling your car over in your home town - where a well-informed citizen might reasonably assert their rights if the officer exceeds their authority.
However, a naval warship isn't typically used for law enforcement like customs, harbor police or immigration. A warship confronting a freighter at sea isn't at all routine, it's extraordinary. It would be more akin to having your car pulled over in your home town by a squad of special forces backed up by attack helicopters and tanks. Any rational person would immediately realize this ain't a routine traffic stop by local cops, it's something very fucking serious. A reasonable person might conclude today may not be the day to quibble over legal technicalities and instead just cooperate, at least until they figure out what the hell is going on. That's certainly what the captain of the freighter I was on decided. And as I stared down all those guns and twitchy locked and loaded sailors on the open sea, I fully agreed with him - despite usually being quite concerned about due process when I'm going about my business in the U.S.
The point being that the captain of that Chinese freighter refusing to cooperate with those warships is not akin to a civil rights enthusiast merely asserting their rights during a routine traffic stop. It's either somebody with a cavalier disregard for their own near-term safety or a person under orders they cannot afford to refuse, possibly reinforced by phone calls from family members suddenly in custody back home. Assuming that captain was being paid to drag his ship's anchor in a certain location, I suspect he now realizes it wasn't nearly enough to become an overnight seagoing celebrity who never captains a ship again. Not to mention being detained, possibly charged and having his ship impounded. Most people who hire freighter captains prefer boring, predictable pros who ensure their owner's ships arrive quickly and safely, not detained by warships on the international news. If he's lucky he'll only lose his license and be blacklisted for life by insurers.
They're creating an analogy saying that getting stopped by a warship at sea is like getting pulled over on the highway by an Apache. Not literally saying an Apache at sea.
Why on earth is anyone whining about the processes behind making an Internet Change Request, aka RFC?
I once spent around 18 months to two years getting a corporation to use DHCP properly (ie stop registering all devices MAC addresses for static leases) and I consider that a quick win.
RFCs deal with the entire internets and should require quite a lot of oversight. Three and a half years for a BGP change is a breathtakingly fast change and frankly reckless!
I'm terribly sorry, but all of your italicized fragments, taken in isolation, do paint a stark picture of the murder of a person.
You might have beef (or whatever you call it these days) with his job and industry but in the end a man was murdered. You may not like and "hate" seems appropriate to describe how you feel about a legitimate industry in the USA. Your issue is with a deeply embedded part of the US experience - health insurance, and not with this man.
Please attack the industry that you hate and not the individual ... who was murdered. That is what the journos are doing.
As for Japanese, Chinese, Russia ... errm most of the rest of the world 8)
In English we don't really get America(n) "right", and they are one of the larger populations that speak the bloody lingo! Oh and lingo: lingua - Latin with a twist, that's how we Anglo-Saxons keep it real!
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