h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

HELP.
Alabaster seems to be unavailable and I am only able to access h2g2 in the new Pliny format.
But nowhere do I see any 'Start a new conversation' buttons.

Nor do I see any access to the 'Technical Feedback' forum where I would properly query about
the current lack of Alabaster.

So, in flagrant violation of the Rules of the House of Hootoo I am posting here via this thread's
reply button to ask my oldest, dearest hootoo friends who I hope will not YIKES me for being
Off Topic:

Why is there no Alabaster?
Where is the New Convo button in Pliny?


~jwf~

While Alabaster was unavailable for the past 12 hours or so,
a desperate situation which prompted my post above, I am happy
that my rattling the cage (again see post above) seems to have
now fixed the prob. Miracle or what, eh.

Carry on.

~jwf~

...time flies...

Pesky litle buggers, quantum jumping backwards and forwards though time and space in a locus surrounding one's head, attempting to crawl into nose, eyes, ears and mouth.

Clap one's hands together mid-air in the middle of the swarm, one gets one, the last of its cognates or avatars, but no matter what one does aftewrward can do nothing about any of its earlier space-time segments.

That doesn't mean, though, that one has to make life easy for the little monster.

Jwf,

I don't know why alabaster was not working.

You can't start a conversation on the Front page, although there is a link to start one in Ask h2g2. You can start a conversation on any entry using the start a conversation button at the bottom.
Feedback is available through a link at the top of every Pliny page.

time flies ...

Time and space are a bit weird ... most go about as if they were absolute "entities" ... but they don't appear to be. Did Leibniz have some ideas about space ... that space didn't really exist, only objects exist or something

Thanks.
I finally found the [START A CONVERSATION] button/bars.

And I thought there were two kinds of FEEDBACK.
I was looking for the TECH Feedback where we are told
to report glitches - but I see now there are links from the
page which opens after clicking FEEDBACK.

That said, Alabaster is down again. I shall report it there.

But the way things move in and out of reality in this timeless/space
it'll be working again by the time I report it. Right?

~jwf~

Yup. Reported it, suggested wiggling some wires
and sure enuff, ten minutes later it's working.

~jwf~

The existence of time and space, and their nature, have been perennial topics in philosophy, but not much in the British English thread.

Newton treated them as absolute entities, which Berkeley A3472986 challenged. Kant labelled them as prerequisite categories necessary for perception.

The mistake is expecting them to have a 'nature'.

Existence is not a predicate, as Kant wisely observed. To say something exists (or doesn't) neither adds anything to, nor takes anything away from, what we know about it.

Sorry to revive the thread with something that is a cross between a Petty Hate and an language thing after Recumbentman's philosophical point.

On the BBC website I have found it repeatedly irritating that they don't seem to be able to use adjectives connected with countries. So it's "The Egypt Prime Minister" and, to quote from today's front page: "Italy bus victims" "China dumpling poisoner charged".

It just sounds dumb.

But yesterday (can't remember where it was now) I noticed that they had an article on "The woollen industry". Surely in that case they could have left it undeclined and just called it "The Wool Industry"?

Prescriptive hat on (somewhat battered but very rarely worn)
"Woollen" is wrong here. What other industry uses an adjective?
The wooden industry?
What about socks? Are they 'wool' or 'woollen'? Or just blessed little cotton?
Blast - I've been repeating "woollen industry", "woollen industry" while typing the above and it sounds all right now. Woolly thinking, I fear.

Woolens (not sure whether there's one l or two) are clothes made from wool. The woolen industry would be the industry of making these clothes and selling them.

The wool industry on the other hand would include the making of the basic product, wool, and everything done with it.

Ah, woolen goods.

That takes me back to better days before
the rise of the Phishing Industries.

~jwf~

This post has also been hidden. There is a prize for the first person to find it. 3-2-1 Olly olly ensen free.

Interesting. Was that last post an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes?

I remember being taught in primary school that woollen has two els. I took such matters so much to heart at that age that I ended up ten years later with a degree in philosophy.

In Dublin there was a shop called The Woollen Mills and another right beside it called The Woolen Something-else that (to me) gave away its derivative inferiority.

The woollen industry would deal in woollen goods. The carpentry industry, and also the furniture industry, would deal in wooden goods. The textile industry would deal in woven goods. Not much of a pattern here.

What about tooling? Fooling?
Schoolling? Poolling?


>> Not much of a pattern here. <<

Yeah... The old rule seemed to be 'double the final consonant'
before adding anything more than an S.

Forbid/Forbidden
Travel/Travelling

I'm hard pressed to think of another example like woolen/woollen
where the 'en' suffix is added to a single syllable word that has a
double vowel. It's like knocking the old bean against a wooden wall.



~jwf~

Wheaten bread is tasty with a salad. But if by 'double vowel' you mean the same vowel twice, that's merely an irrelevant observation about lunch.

I think, ~jwf~, that TC's question was not about the spelling but about calling it 'the woollen industry' rather than 'the wool industry'. That is what my reply addressed.

About the spelling, it's an ethnic thing: 'Woolen (American English) or woollen (British English and Canadian English) is a type of yarn made from carded wool.'

I think I was muddling it up a bit with "woolly" - which means fuzzy, indistinct, undefined. As "wooden" means inflexible and unemotional. So The Wood Industry is different from The Wooden Industry. And therefore "the woollen industry" would be a fuzzy, disorganised industry. Whereas the "wool industry" deals with wool.

Must say I've never heard of the wooden industry ... that would be the timber industry, or the various industries using wood, named after their products.

It's the adjective thing that makes it sound weird. When we talk about the _____ industry, the gap is usually filled by the noun that they make, sell, or work with etc.

The gold industry would presumably be mining the stuff, for example. But "the golden industry" - I think if I read that, I would just think they meant an unspecified industry which was very lucrative.