Core Europe: I once killed time in a meeting by trying to list all the European countries, then their capitals. I stopped at about twenty countries but suspected there were more. The next month I got up to thirty and wondered what the real number was. Malta? Azerbaijan? Really? Fifty is the approved number, but I do not approve.
How to win Rock Paper Scissors
New Theory. I still like it.
Always check what the Zero Point is
Suspicion I expand on an idea from CS Lewis's Miracles. In Mere Christianity he noted that people will say there is no foundation to morality but in the next breath get angry at you for cutting in line. Those refuting Lewis's claim that Materialism cuts off the branch it sits on do much the same. They find technical arguments that show there remain possibilities that the evolution of approximate reasoning is enough to trust it. But they don't believe it themselves.
This will be the last from 2012 for a while. I get carried away at times.
I was curious how many European countries had less land area than the rather large US country that I live in; so I looked to Wikipedia for their 'list of European Countries by area'.
ReplyDelete"2,690 Square Miles" is what is stated for Azerbaijan, which kind of surprised me and I found many other references that were over 33 thousand square miles.
It turns out that I need to parse the column-labels of that list more carefully, as what they really mean is that substantially less than 10% of Azerbaijan is on the "Europe" side of the invisible line that distinguishes what's on the European continent vs what's considered to be on the Asian continent.
I find in my own writing I'll often spend a bit of time pondering how to be clear and concise what I mean by 'Europe'. Sometimes saying "EU14" (The countries that were members of the EU before the admission of the former Soviet-block countries) is a simple shorthand -- especially when comparing e.g.: US social programs or crime rates to 'similar' countries. But Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, while they're all in the Shengen free movement zone and have free-trade with Europe, aren't members of the EU.
Like the Venn diagram distinguishing between British Isles, UK, England, United Kingdom, etc.; when I was working in Nordic countries I learned their version of the venn diagram, including the construction "Baltoscandic" to mean a set that includes the Baltic countries and the Nordic countries LESS the parts of the Danish realm that are outside of Scandinavia, such as the Faroe Islands and Greenland.
Read "US county" instead of US 'country' in the above comment.
ReplyDeletere: New Theory and kardde's comments there
ReplyDeleteThere are two informal 'clubs' these people belong to - TOBAL and SODS. Respectively, There Oughta Be A Law and Somebody Oughta Do Something.
Nice Summary!
ReplyDelete