In some of these countries, nationality is a weak proxy for what actually matters for name order; ethnicity. Take for example Malaysia. Yes, ~70% of the population are Malay Muslims who (mostly) follow the convention mentioned here. But you also have 20%+ Chinese, ~7% Indians (with considerable ethnic diversity!), and an assortment of native peoples, all who follow their own conventions.
Readit Newsasmala commented on A basic guide to using Asian names asiamediacentre.org.nz/fe... · Posted by u/bear_with_me
No way this is going to work for Finnish use. The person who has made this clearly has no idea that in Finnish ä, ö are completely separate letters from a, o
If I’m mostly writing Finnish text, then the native Finnish layout (with separate keys for Å, Ä, and Ö) seems better. And if I’m coding, I personally prefer the US English layout where [, {, ;, etc. are more easily accessible. But I could see this layout being a better fit if I’d need to frequently swap between multiple different languages and still have convenient access to the most common symbols used in coding.
asmala commented on America aims for nuclear-power renaissance economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/pseudolus
The problem with storage is that the only method with significant production mileage is pumped hydro. This undoes a few of the stated benefits of renewables. You need to use significant land where you exterminate current nature. Catastrophic failure is a major ecological disaster for a large area… And actually hydro is the second in death toll after coal, isn’t it? Worst of all, you’re limited geographically on where and how much you can put.
Hydro is indeed 1-2 orders of magnitude worse than other renewables on a deaths per TWh basis, but still 2-25× safer than all fossil fuels. (Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...)
asmala commented on Asia Sentinel Blocked in Singapore asiasentinel.com/p/asia-s... · Posted by u/tim_sw
Medium.com was definitely blocked in Malaysia for several years. Glad to hear it no longer is.
Unblocking reddit in Indonesia via DNS depends on the ISP, or did as of a couple of years ago.
https://www.engadget.com/2016-01-28-malaysia-medium-block-ex...
Ah, you’re right, Medium was blocked in Malaysia for a few years for hosting Sarawak Report, a publication that shed light on the 1MDB scandal. Wikipedia tells me the ban was lifted in 2018.
asmala commented on Asia Sentinel Blocked in Singapore asiasentinel.com/p/asia-s... · Posted by u/tim_sw
There's nothing surprising here, although it's important to call this out. As I've traveled around SEA a lot over the past few years, I've found that many sites are commonly blocked and surprising how little it seems to be discussed. In particular, medium.com and BBC.com seem to be blocked in at least Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Probably Singapore too. Those are the ones I noticed, I'm sure there are many more blocked that I've not seen.
There's no "great firewall" level blocking going on and the blocks are easily circumvented using a proxy or alternative DNS.
But blocking media sites when they publish anything critical of the government is unfortunately standard in this part of the world.
Neither bbc.com nor medium.com are blocked in Malaysia (source: I’m there presently), and I don’t recall either being blocked in Singapore or Indonesia. The sites blocked in Indonesia (e.g. Reddit) cannot be accessed by using an alternate DNS (e.g. Google’s) but are available via VPN.
asmala commented on Elements of AI course to be made available in all EU languages elementsofai.com/eu2019fi... · Posted by u/Anchor
I wonder if there is a rationale for this particularly strange selection of languages. They propose, for example, Irish (Gaelic), which is the native language of about 80.000 european citizens and is understood by about a million. Yet they do not propose Catalan, which is the native language of 4.1 million and understood by about ten million.
As a staunch partisan for the unity of the EU, and native Catalan speaker, I cannot but feel dismay about this continuous lack of tact from my institutions. I know this is due to ignorance more than malice, but it really looks as if the institutions are purposely shadowing our very existence.
I think they're just going with the list of official EU languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...). That list does not, unfortunately, include Catalan, even though the Spanish government pushed for adding it to the list (along with Galician and Basque).
asmala commented on How Helsinki Built ‘Book Heaven’ citylab.com/design/2019/1... · Posted by u/jnieminen
The single most thing that a library could do to be of more use to the public is to stock more books, and from that respect, this does not sound that much of a nice place, they could have a lot, lot more books given the space, but they haven't.
In my experience, the size of the collection in any given library building is never much of an issue as you can always order books for very low fees from any library in the country. Because of this, the other facilities are a much bigger value-add than a larger on-site collection.
asmala commented on A newly discovered tea plant is caffeine-free economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
There are lots of herbal teas that don't have caffeine already out there. What makes anything "tea" beyond putting some type of [dried, possibly ground-up] plant into a strainer in hot water, then drinking the result?
While “herbal tea” is indeed a very loosely used term, botanically speaking “tea” refers to the species camellia sinensis. Hongyacha is, to my knowledge, the only known case of a caffeine free camellia sinensis.
It's the engagement ring that traditionally has a stone, not the wedding band, which is often just a pure metal (in the US), though many have small stones around the ring.
In Nordic countries, the order is reversed. We wear simple bands after the engagement, and give the fancier ring during the wedding.
Can you explain? I have many educators in my life and I'd love to share it, but not if it's BS.
The Finnish news sources I follow paint this as a pilot initiative trialed primarily in Helsinki, and even then limited to a few courses. A country-wide scrapping of subjects seems still a long way off. The following passage from The Independent article seems the closest to the truth:
"Finnish schools are obliged to introduce a period of “phenomenon-based teaching” at least once a year. These projects can last several weeks. In Helsinki, they are pushing the reforms at a faster pace with schools encouraged to set aside two periods during the year for adopting the new approach. Ms Kyllonen’s blueprint, to be published later this month, envisages the reforms will be in place across all Finnish schools by 2020."