The many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XIX

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I've never seen British restaurants anywhere. :D

Haven't ever been in the UK though. And well, Finnish cuisine isn't a thing to brag about either, I think. Or at least that's what foreigners think.
 
If all the world's gasoline powered cars where converted into electric cars how much would the world's electric demand increase?

Using the IEA's 2011 World Energy Stats publication.

Total transport oil use is 2135.62 million tonnes of oil equivalent. Call it 89 exajoules.

This is all fuels, all forms of transport. Breaking out the road transport share is tricky, but I'll use emissions as a very rough proxy. According to this road transport is about 21% of global emissions whilst all other forms are about 6% cumulatively (mostly air and shipping, split roughly evenly).

So that makes road transport about 80% of transport emissions, I'll assume an identical emissions intensity to energy use (not really valid but I can't be bothered with this step) and say 80% of transport energy use is exajoules. So road transport is about 72 exajoules.

What portion of this is gasoline versus automotive diesel? I have no idea. What percentage is private automobiles versus transport fleets? Also no idea.

But I can tell you that 72 exajoules is roughly 20 000 TWh. This is, roughly, total world electricity generation currently. That is to say, assuming my maths is right, that road transport in all forms uses as much energy as we currently produce globally in electricity.

Of course I have no idea how much electricity is required to produce a transport mile as compared to how much oil product.
 
That's some pretty rough math but bravo for answering the query in depth.
 
I know that many species of spiders, especially in Aussieworld, can get pretty big. My question is, do their sheer size inhibit or prevent them from spinning webs?
 
This delightful fellow is by far the one you don't want to meet. It doesn't build a traditional web as such but I can't say whether that is due to it's size making web spinning difficult.

The second nastiest, the red back spider, is very small and builds this crappy, ugly web which functions more like a bungee cord than a traditional web to catch stuff in.
 
Does anybody know Latin here? I need help with some terms.

How would you translate "Land of the Latins" (=people who speak Latin)? Also, "Latin Port" and "Republic of the Land of the Latins" (as in above)?
 
Well, if you're talking about the Latin tribe, I suppose the first one would be Terra Latinorum, though Google Translate suggests that Latine loqui populo terrae is sufficient for "land of the people who speak Latin".

Their republic would then be either De re publica Latinorum or Latine loquentium re publica populi terrae and their port would be portum Latinorum or portum qui Latine loqui.
 
Most of that was Google Translate, as I'm away from my dictionary, so, as they say in the accounting trade, E&OE. :)
 
Well, if you're talking about the Latin tribe, I suppose the first one would be Terra Latinorum, though Google Translate suggests that Latine loqui populo terrae is sufficient for "land of the people who speak Latin".

Their republic would then be either De re publica Latinorum or Latine loquentium re publica populi terrae and their port would be portum Latinorum or portum qui Latine loqui.

Terra Latinorum, Fines Latinorum, Regio Latinorum (probably the best)would all be valid. You've muddled the grammar in the longer ones - Res publica Latinorum is 'the Latins' way of doing politics' (see below), and there's a problem in that last because loqor cannot be passive (it's a deponent verb, meaning that its active form looks passive anyway): Portum ubi Latine loquntur 'the port where they speak Latin' is probably the best.

It's republica, not re publica

Both are valid; written Latin didn't actually use spaces until well into the Middle Ages - a consequence of having a mostly-illiterate population is that the writing system doesn't have the same pressure to evolve to be easily legible: it was considered 'odd' that Julius Caesar, a man of huge intellect, was able to read silently. Res Publica means 'a public [as in 'public sector'] affair' and meant 'politics', and then 'our way of doing public matters' as distinct from that of foreigners - and therefore 'republic'. I don't think that a foreign republic (although I imagine 'res publica sua' to mean 'their political system' would have been valid) as we understand the term - as in 'Republic of France' - would have been referred to in the same way; The Republic was an intrinsic part of the phrase - but I could be wrong.

I can imagine Polis might have been borrowed from Greek to describe a city-state run as a republic, if that helps.

My father always bemoaned that I didn't do grammar in English, let alone in any other language, and my Latin knowledge is entirely armchair variety. I will cede the floor willingly.

Ah, I'm of the generation that did A-Level Latin back in the day because that's what educated people did!
 
My father always bemoaned that I didn't do grammar in English, let alone in any other language, and my Latin knowledge is entirely armchair variety. I will cede the floor willingly. :)
 
Why do the local newspapers seem to go on and on about one thing for a long time and then forget about it almost completely. Is this just a thing where I live?
 
They've written all that can be done on the subject, perhaps?
 
Maybe, but at times it seems like they just won't stop about it.
 
Why do the local newspapers seem to go on and on about one thing for a long time and then forget about it almost completely. Is this just a thing where I live?

Newspapers, all news media, have limited budgets and time constraints. It is cheaper, and faster as well, to continue to follow one story as long as the reader is willing to follow it than it is to go looking for new stories.
 
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