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On finding the centre—let's assume the field is marked with the circumference. You need a rope or a piece of string at least the diameter of the circle, and either two people and one person and a peg.

1. Fix one point on the edge of the field, then holding the rope, walking to the very opposite edge. Keep pulling until you find the furthest distance between each other. That's the diameter.
2. Halve this to find the radius.
3. Fixing a point… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:16 PM on October 12, 2020

Let's assume an approximate fuel consumption rate (and therefore range) is known—but it's exactly that 'approximate' variable of error I'm interested in. Do people use iron laws of 'must have 30% margin' when they drive, and how do they decide what the percentage is?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:31 PM on October 7, 2020

I had leg surgery a few years back, the surgeon had to reassemble my tendons after an accident with broken glass. This kind of surgery is so routine for them it’s a ‘do half a dozen people’s legs, then we’ll hit the golf course, see you at three’ arrangement. I barely even have scars any more.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:26 PM on October 4, 2020 marked best answer

Do you mean how easy would it be for an American to arrange a migration pathway between now and Nov 3? To NZ or Australia, not at all easily, without an existing family/work/study relationship. Immigration applications are lengthy and expensive.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:56 PM on September 30, 2020

Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads, for a reinterpretation of that set of specific routes (and trying to reorient the question of where the 'centre' of the world has been).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:46 PM on September 27, 2020

Tex Perkins’ Real Love:

And it ain't in the kisses
It ain't getting your wishes
It's doing the dishes
Thats real real love

posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:20 AM on September 27, 2020

Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire won the Hugo in 2019, is science fiction written by a political historian, and it shows.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:18 PM on September 24, 2020

Go with the STAR format (a standard process for these writing tasks), and be broad in your definition of leadership.

This is worth doing merely for the paragraphs you'll have at the end of it, that you can cut-and-paste into the next applications you do. It's not about self-doubt or self-confidence—you shouldn't approach the task as having any kind of personal meaning at all, good or bad. It's just paperwork. Take it from someone who spent a lengthy time unemployed and… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:14 PM on September 24, 2020

For the NSW Police in Australia, there was a survey made in 2012 which is reproduced in this report, pp20-21. Note that when it says 'high risk', it's referring to integrity risk (creating real/perceived corruption or conflict of interest), not to physical danger.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:32 PM on September 23, 2020

George C. Scott's monologue in the 1970 film Patton, as General Patton, was based on notes taken by a number of people of a standard speech, and offhand comments, the real Patton gave to different audiences of soldiers in 1944. The film won an academy award and was, apparently, repeatedly watched, and shown to guests, by then-President Nixon in the White House.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:44 PM on September 17, 2020 marked best answer

Kalinka! And then hit up the rest of Eastern Europe and Russian folk, the spiritual home of the accordion.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:30 PM on September 15, 2020

Father-in-facto.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 12:04 AM on September 15, 2020 marked best answer

Dr Strangelove is a really pretty accurate depiction of nuclear deterrence theory and the concept of 'mutually assured destruction'. I know it's used in international relations classes, I've seen it on syllabuses for Cold War history.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:08 PM on September 10, 2020

For comparison, I rent in Sydney, NSW, which is extremely expensive, has been a landlord's market for two decades, with a gross inequality of power in favour of property managers, and all these clauses seem (hilariously) excessive to me.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:00 PM on September 8, 2020

Years ago I answered a related ask question in terms of the occult, which I think still holds up. It's a search for a meaningful, if malevolent, explanation for events, as solace for a lack of control over life we all experience. And I really do think that occult thinking—in the broad sense, of creating patterns and making links between disparate phenomena, rather than the narrower sense of tarot cards and hexes and the I Ching—is a fundamental part of contemporary culture.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:51 PM on September 6, 2020

This genre is Alexander McCall Smith's ouvre. And he acknowledges cribbing from Armistead Maupin's Tales Of The City, which is also what you're after.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:12 PM on August 26, 2020

Ignore the under-over, it honestly doesn’t matter. C41 colour film is far more tolerant than people give it credit, you can underexpose or overexpose a long way in either direction before your image will become unusable. Before people had the kind of false precision that comes with expensive modern light meters—I’m talking as late as the 2000s—they used ones that went stops only, or used ones where the speeds didn’t really correspond to their camera (hello 1/100”!) and before that, did it by… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:22 PM on August 22, 2020

A lot of people will come to suggest specific activities and all of them will be good or bad depending on what you yourself like, but what it sounds like you need is a project—something that will take you longer than the evening of when you're doing it. Something that will take stages of research/learning, planning, preparation, review, and so on. Buy a junk bicycle and repair it. Build a computer from scratch. Sew a jacket. Design a garden. Something of that order of scope.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:06 PM on August 9, 2020

An option, if what you decide you want is an EPIRB, (for the ‘pull tag for rescue’ effect and nothing else) is that it’s probably cost effective to hire one for each every-few-months bushwalk. In Australia there’s a bunch of companies who do this.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:12 PM on August 8, 2020

Could it be a disused union bug? If it's in a cabinet used for electrics, there might be some similarity to the IBEW's logo.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:58 PM on August 6, 2020

There are plenty of such 'ghost' towns in Australia, most of them former mining or logging sites. You wouldn't want to live in one, unless you wanted to deal with the kind of asbestos or heavy metals contamination that would make an environmental engineer's hair curl, but assuming you did:

- In Australia remote places like these are rarely strictly private; they're either parts of crown leases, or are owned directly by the Government, or are on Aboriginal owned or… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:02 PM on August 6, 2020

I’ll recommend Vuescan as well, it makes a huge difference to quality and automation options (consider the value of your own time!) and doesn’t bear comparison to usually terrible proprietary scanning tools.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:13 PM on August 1, 2020

Motorbike repair.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:42 PM on July 30, 2020

Joe Tex’s I Gotcha, as featured by Quentin Tarantino—who is a master of this catchy-loathsome genre—on the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack. (Joe Tex also did Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman) which is, well, it’s what it is in the name)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:40 PM on July 30, 2020

For what it’s worth, I’m not sure about what you mean by ‘shared HVAC’ but no air conditioners in well-designed buildings should be able to (re)circulate air between different dwellings—the intake may be common, but it’s usually on a roof, the whole point of a well designed system is to prevent recirculation (and especially of aerosols, fumes and droplets!). If droplet/aerosol transmission through HVAC were common you’d see more buildings getting slammed with Legionnaire’s, rather than COVID.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:51 PM on July 29, 2020

It's a famous quote, and 'the historian' here is just the indirect object of the sentence (where 'the facts' are the direct object). His formulation is metaphor whereas yours is more purely descriptive; historians as a generic group don't go to the fish market. Carr's essay is deliberately making this about a direct relationship of historian-to-facts, definitely thinking about a single, admittedly imaginary historian, because the rest of the argument is about that individual's choices. The… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:56 PM on July 27, 2020

I've 'solved' this problem with a bad fix, which is to set a vertical page space for the image to be placed with page breaks, then placed the image there with text wrapping and 'in front of text'. Yes, if you change things you have to manually check positioning, but likely only the next image until the next page or section break. There's no ethical word processing under capitalism.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:13 PM on July 23, 2020

If you know the height-dimension of the image you'll put in (say 10cm), set enough text on that page to leave that space below, insert a page break, then insert an image above it. Set the image 'wrap text' to 'in front of text'. Then move it on the page to where you'd like it.

It's not automatic placement, but it's the next best solution, because as you say, Word is not fit for this job.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:40 PM on July 23, 2020

You can do them in a pilau; fry onion and vegetables in oil in a pot, add rice, then add water/stock and the defrosted fish, put the lid on, that's it.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 12:15 AM on July 22, 2020

Twinkle twinkle, little spook
You can't see me if you look
If you stare though, to the side
That is where I like to hide.
Twinkle twinkle little spook
You can't see me if you look
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:59 PM on July 20, 2020

I’ve met someone who left his entire folder of archive notes in a taxi, pre-word processing. He didn’t finish his [history] PhD.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:54 PM on July 20, 2020

Assuming you're an American, and would be travelling on a US passport, this is what the US State Department advises:

In May 2020, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) National People’s Congress announced its intention to unilaterally and arbitrarily impose national security legislation on Hong Kong that could fundamentally alter its autonomy and freedoms. As a result of this action by the PRC, U.S. citizens traveling or residing in Hong Kong may be subject to increased… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:26 PM on July 19, 2020

she said her car would not go in reverse

This car and driver shouldn't be on the road, and you should follow it up through your insurance company.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:59 PM on July 19, 2020

Homer Simpson’s rule (‘Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t strike, you just go in every day and do it really half-assed’) was a joke, but the reason it’s funny is because reflects the oldest form of industrial negotiation, available to the most undedicated and worst treated. That’s the smallest kind of protest you can make on your own.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:57 AM on July 19, 2020

Melbourne in Victoria is currently subject to an outbreak, and the State Government there has issued recommendations about outside exercise—the ABC has a summary of them. Golf solo or in pairs (but well separated from other pairs), hiking (but not if you're making day trips to remote locations), and so on.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:40 PM on July 16, 2020

Could it be an extremely stylised Polish coat of arms (a white eagle on a red shield)?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:26 PM on July 14, 2020

It’s likely any automated tool would be *very* unreliable for this, at any level of complexity, because the base assumptions are so difficult to establish. This exact task, analysing written material and assessing its political implications, is late high school to university level work and generally leads to discussions that aren’t resolved either way. Like GCU above said this is a task that’s beyond a lot of human readers.

The late Christopher Hitchens was a good… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:21 PM on July 14, 2020

It didn’t have any good visual qualities compared to today’s technology, or to film. Its quality was that consumers could record and overwrite their own tapes, and then see them right now (without developing), which was profoundly new, with a break in understanding about how many images we could have. It’s really hard to imagine now the preceding world that wasn’t so saturated in moving images. It was cheap, fast, but mostly cheap.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:19 PM on July 13, 2020

You might be able to find an artist, craftsperson, or even a rigger, to create an ornamental knot—it's hard to get more Celtic than that. I've seen them used as framed artworks, necklaces, as parts of clothing (shirts, dresses), as mats, as tableware.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:59 PM on July 9, 2020

There's no one to be angry at!

I remember a union organiser I spoke to once told me that people don't get organised because they think they're being underpaid or their conditions are bad, they get angry because they sense a lack of respect. It's not about the car. It's not even about the money. People get mad at these things when there's a fundamental relationship of disrespect, rather than a financial consequence. So yeah, if you don't feel as… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:58 PM on July 6, 2020

I’ve heard-read ‘sudaca’ used as both a slur, by Spanish people against Latin Americans, and also as a reclaimed word by those same Latin Americans against the Spanish. An old use though, of the 1980s-1990s.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:19 AM on July 6, 2020

You might be interested in the concept of a cultural landscape; a variety of 'heritage' in legal protection/conservation, for places which aren't confined to a single location or item, and where there's an important element of human/natural interaction. As per ICOMOS:

Cultural landscapes are increasingly understood as complex systems where cultural relationships are developed within an ecological context, recognizing the mutual and reciprocal influence of nature and… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:36 PM on June 28, 2020

One way to do it would be to use the tab to move between fields, instead of scrolling, though that doesn't solve your problem.

You can make custom styles for bibliographies, to omit fields you don't use and prioritise ones you do, but it looks like kind of a pain (involving XML markup). It seems the existing bibliography types (Book, Journal Article, etc.) that Word uses are hard-set, like the dialog box for entering citations.

If your work is at… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:14 PM on June 14, 2020 marked best answer

Not quite in the form you're after, but she's probably seen Halley's Comet over forty times.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:42 PM on June 9, 2020 marked best answer

If they're writing to someone who is going to publish their letter, then, 'correspondent'.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:22 AM on June 7, 2020

The context for these quotes would have been completely obvious to the pre-modern authors, but it needs some reminding for us. They had little, if any, experience of military forces that could be depended upon not to take sides or be disinterested in politics, or keep taking orders. National supreme commands were a thing of the future, forces in European wars were raised locally, paid haphazardly, and led by prominent people with political roles and ambition. They could, and did, change sides in… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:41 PM on May 14, 2020

Many of the founding fathers of the United States were profoundly ambivalent about democracy or even hostile to it—in the 19thC 'democracy' was not understood as an obviously good thing, let alone as the founding principle for a country. The 'wicked' here is another way of describing demagoguery, the practice of political figures inciting crowds to rule. Quotes like this are a warning against majoritarianism, or rule by the simple vote of people.

One way of looking at… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:07 PM on May 6, 2020

You can use the import package in each of your documents' preambles, to specify the files you want to use:

\import{~/Documents/uni_logos/}{logo.pdf}

Which would then be recognised by the usual \include, \input methods.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:55 PM on May 3, 2020

I absolutely recommend D.W. Pasulka's American Cosmic, maybe one of the most interesting books I've read in the last few years. Pakula is a professor of religious studies, but it's emphatically not a book just for academics. On the surface it's about UFOs, alien contact and about the people who investigate such incidents, but is far more about what constitutes belief and what religious/spiritual faith actually is, and things like how we in modernity answer the questions that… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:21 PM on May 3, 2020

Australia
Pros:
- Clear path to both of us getting citizenship

Unless one of you has an Australian passport or an Australian family member, or you have a sponsoring employer lined up already or you've engaged a local (i.e. in Australia) migration agent who's advised you, it's likely to be less easy than you think. Australian migration is notorious for being opaque, bureaucratic, and lengthy, even if 'clear'… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:39 PM on April 21, 2020