I love this guy, also my favourite Youtube channel and one of my favourite podcasts, he also guests on In Defence of Plants from time to time, I have the impression he's friends with the host.
Loved him ever since I randomly stumbled across his guerilla tree planting video in I want to say 2020?
Anyway, we all must support the train driver turned botanist.
My grandfather said his first job (as an apprentice) was measuring the Lea and Perrins factory for new mixing vats.
It looks like they've replaced them again, since that time.
And couldn't they have told the scientist that it's "Worcestershire Sauce" and not "Worcester Sauce"? Worcestershire is the county, Worcester is the largest city in that county.
At least it's pronounced correctly. Worcester/Worcestershire rhyme with Leicester/Leicestershire, and pronunciation of "Leicester" should be familiar to Americans as the personal name "Lester". ("Wuster" hasn't caught on yet.)
-cester as a suffix to a place name is from the Latin castrum, meaning fort – these were Roman settlements.
> And couldn't they have told the scientist that it's "Worcestershire Sauce" and not "Worcester Sauce"?
I've heard plenty of English people pronounce it "Wooster Sauce". I'm pretty sure they're aware of the difference. I think it's just become a standard contraction.
Worcester Sauce is a common way to refer to it. Even and Lea and Perrins used to do so - here's an advert for it from the 1840s, along with some generic references to it from the 1830s.
I assumed many Americans, like myself, would be familiar with the pronunciation of Worcester from Worcester, Massachusetts. I didn’t even grow up anywhere near New England.
It doesn't help that the correct pronunciation of "Worcestershire", something like Wu-sta-sha, looks a lot like "Warchester". One is tempted to wrongly map the syllables Wor->Wu Che->Ste Ster->Sha.
Btw. this is one of the prime examples why I think we should use phonetic transscription not only for different alphabets, but also for languages that use latin characters with very different pronunciation (like Irish or Welsh), or even for odd English words like this one.
We do, it's called IPA and Worcestershire is /ˈwʊstərʃər/.
Using something similar for actual normal writing would be difficult though, it would hide all the etymological linkages between different European languages, and even obscure connections within each language.
"Worcester" violates practically every convention of English spelling and pronunciation. Is there any other word in which "rce" even appears, let alone is silent?
`egrep '^[a-z].*rce' /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v "'s" | wc` gives 157 for me but there's a lot of duplication - probably comes down to about 35 base words from a quick eyeball.
There are plenty of other place names that end in -cester pronounced as -ster: gloucester, leicester, bicester. It's somewhat of a rule itself. wor sounding more like woo is just the local accent I think.
I think what's confusing for Americans who didn't grow up with a lot of towns named that way is that "cester" is pronounced "ster", but "chester" is pronounced fully. Throw in a "shire" at the end of that and it's a mouthful.
"rce" is not a syllable here, so it's not that relevant. It's Wor + cester, and cester is always pronounced ster. So it's actually not very surprising.
It's not really that "ce is silent", it's that cester is pronounced "ster". It's extremely common in languages that long, old roots like that are elided in speak - in French they basically always elide the last syllable!
cester/caster/chester (from castrum, meaning fort/castle) is a very common place name ending in English and the cester variant is almost always pronounced ster. Think Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester.
Leicester (the city, not the square in London named for it) is just south of the town of Loughborough.
Leicestershire in general has more than its fair share of difficult placenames: Ashby de la Zouch, South Croxton, Kirby Bellars, Belvoir, Rotherby vs Rothley, Frisby on the Wreake, Nether Broughton, Kibworth Beauchamp, Glooston* (not sure of this one myself), Wymeswold.
I have to say the biggest challenge I had was hiking in wales in Snowdonia and trying to inquire about town and village names. I ended up writing them down to show because I butchered the names no matter how much I tried.
Welsh is a completely different language, with its own writing system.
dd → th, ff → f, ll → hl (ish), w → oo gets you most of the way to being understood as a tourist, in my experience. (Though I'm British, so I've heard many of the larger Welsh place names pronounced properly since childhood, via TV/radio etc.)
if you go that route, ketchup share a very similar lineage as well, albeit it picked up more transformations along the way, it still carries the name as legacy.
War over lithium would be totally insane. Every continent has basically unlimited amount of lithium.
Its not an energy source and the ratio of how expensive it is to mine and how expensive you can sell it is nowhere close to oil.
Fighting wars over lithium deposit would be insanely dumb and that will never happen.
Lithium is not a consumable, once you have it you keep it. We need it now to grow the fleet but once the fleet is replaced recycling will be the most economical way to get it.
As a factorio player, energy storages are as important as energy source itself. Especially for renewables since the energy sources are practically unlimited (and the efficiencies are increasing) but very fluctuate.
And if you see from other perspective, oil are both energy storage and energy source, which is "almost" equivalent with solar cells and batteries.
As I said in my other reply, I think the difference is really ERoEI. And that's very likely an important difference. Because you wouldn't get an economical system if you're not able to get a competitive ERoEI from the whole system (including storage). I suspect to take oil's status you'd therefore have to have something that allows you to also cheaply get the energy, not only store it.
Lithium as an input to storage is really just a small part of the whole picture. Like a barrel is for oil.
It's an intermediary source and it doesn't care where that energy came from. The oil analogy is not that far fetched if you consider that both are tied to a geographic location where they needs to be extracted.
That's likely true if you look at network effects, but maybe not so true if you look at energy return on energy invested (ERoEI). In my opinion, the latter is a big part of oil's status as a "universal" energy source/carrier.
It came as a surprise to me but some people are extremely uncomfortable when their environment is silent or at least quieter than they are used to.
I went to camping on Dartmoor with a friend about a decade ago, he just started screaming out and playing music out of nowhere. He grew up in London like me and for some reason he was unable to handle the absence of noise when we were the only people who miles around.
But more seriously: if high federalisation means more mechanisms actually end up working fine without top-down directives, isn't that a good thing...? Without going all Bakunin, surely requiring fewer "chiefs" to achieve the same levels of prosperity can be considered a step forward for society.
Loved him ever since I randomly stumbled across his guerilla tree planting video in I want to say 2020?
Anyway, we all must support the train driver turned botanist.