User talk:Cassowary/2009

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Felix the Cassowary

Australian English vowel chart

your original PNG version

SVG version

Hi, as part of my personal mini-crusade to vectorize all the vowel charts on Commons, I've created a vectorized version of the Australian English vowel chart which you drew. I have maintained exactly the same positions of the vowel points and diphthongs, however I adjusted the position of the labels to account for the standard practice of labeling rounded vowels on the right, and unrounded vowels on the left, with the /ɛː/ vowel left as ambiguous as discussed in the Australian English phonology article. Please let me know if you have any issues or suggestions with this version. Thanks! Moxfyre (ǝɹʎℲxoɯ | contrib) 17:01, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh, and the File:Australian_English_IPA_diphthong_chart.png is next on my list :-) Moxfyre (ǝɹʎℲxoɯ | contrib) 17:03, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

your original PNG version

SVG version

And here's the vectorized diphthong chart... Moxfyre (ǝɹʎℲxoɯ | contrib) 17:29, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Hey Moxfyre, thanks for you work! I'm a huge fan of SVG versions as well, which I don't think were around (or at least not so popular) when I did them. I'm a little miffed tho, it took me so much effort to get the arrowheads pointing right back when I didn't know how to use the Gimp properly! (You can see I settled for "good enough" if you look closely.) I also have one or two minor (but real;) issues about the appearance. Firstly, it looks like the ɪ,ɪə caption is in a different font from all the rest of the letters. Also, I think you're using a regular (circular) colon. The proper glyph to use for the IPA length diacritic is the triangular colon U+02D0 ː (18:00, 17 April 2009 (UTC))

Glad to help! Yeah, MediaWiki's support for SVG was pretty bad until recently, so a lot of people (me included) gave up on it and made lots of useful charts in PNG instead. As for your concerns, good eye: the ɪ,ɪə is actually in the same font, just slightly smaller to make it fit in the template. I agree that it clashes, so I've made it the same as the others and adjusted the layout slightly. I am in fact using the correct triangular colon glyph for vowel length... it's a little hard to see at small sizes, and if you don't have DejaVu fonts installed, your operating system may be substituting the standard colon. Hope that helps! Moxfyre (ǝɹʎℲxoɯ | contrib) 18:15, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

And FWIW, I thought the arrowheads were just fine in your original version... until I started tracing them and noticed that some of them were angled differently from the lines they connected to. Haha :-) Did you have a particular book or article source for the vowel qualities that I could include in the file information, by the way? Moxfyre (ǝɹʎℲxoɯ | contrib) 18:21, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Regarding the triangular colon, how disappointing. Then I guess I'm not a fan of that particular font. (I also reckon the top of the top triangle should be in line with the x-height, but so many fonts do it much lower that I don't know if I'm crazy or if there's a conspiracy of font designers to make triangular colons look ugly.) No matter: It's not your fault.

As for sources, I'm surprised it isn't explicitly mentioned anywhere what the source is. They're adapted from images adapted from Cox (1996) in [1] and [2]. I'm sorry but I can't remember how much I consulted the original Cox (1996), but it was largely based on distorting those images in the Gimp until the trapezium was approximately overlayed on the Wikipedia style trapezium, plus a little interpretation. Obviously the inclusion of /i:/ on the diphthong chart is something I did myself based on other sources in the article. I'm really sorry I didn't mention that in the articles, someone should've hit me for that long ago.

And oh! the arrow in the monophthongs chart seems to be bold now? I don't think it was like that before...

(One minor issue is that Wikipedia uses a sans-serif font for the article content. You've probably done way too many of these images to seriously think about changing it, but maybe DejaVu Sans is a better choice than the serifed DejaVu. Then again, maybe you'll want to hit me for saying that.)

Anyway, thanks again for your work.

(20:13, 17 April 2009 (UTC))

Well, I'm a septic, so please pass the dead horse! (I worked with a bunch of Ossies and Kiwis for a couple summers, who taught me cricket and the rudiments of rugby... good guys.) I'll fix that arrow, thanks. And as for the fonts, I was gonna do sans serif, but someone complained about that previously, because all the *other* vowel charts were already serif :-p. In any case, SVG is machine-processable easily, so it'd be a snap to convert them all in one swell foop if desired. Moxfyre (ǝɹʎℲxoɯ | contrib) 21:07, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Australian crisis & FoP

Thank you for this edit. Fascinating stuff, of which I was completely unaware. I think that the FoP article likely presumes either a unicameral or a de facto unicameral legislature. (Why on earth did you silly Aussies even bother creating a second house for, anyway? :-) Unschool 18:01, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your thanks!

I think you're right that it assumes an essentially unicameral legislature; the thing is, when the British constitution was first described as fusional, their upper house was still powerful and I think it was still reasonably common to have Lords as Prime Ministers. At least people would've been able to remember that. Having two strong houses I suppose essentially means you're going to have at least a degree of separation.

And I don't know if that's why we have two houses of parliament, but I'm sure it's why we keep it. No matter how many times a Prime Minister describes the Senate as “unrepresentative swill” for thwarting him, I don't think any will ever put up a referendum to reduce the Senate's power, for the embarassment they'll suffer when it's defeated!

(Well, I do know that our constitution was essentially a game of "how can we rewrite the American constitution so it looks like the British one?". Both Britain and America—and all Australasian colonies—had strong upper houses; the only novelty was that ours was elected. Probably no-one even thought that it was possible to have a unicameral parliament!)

I like to think our Senate is like the American Congress, and our House of Representatives is like their President. It might be a strange idea at first, but I think it gives a pretty good idea of how they operate.

(18:33, 5 August 2009 (UTC))

Interesting thoughts. Yes, I think that bicameralism exists only because of pre-colonial inertia. Yet, except when it is designed stupidly, I rather like it. Unschool

I'm afraid I don't understand why the US state legislatures are designed stupidly from those pages :( I guess if their voting system is the same in both houses, then it's redundant, but then it's just the same sort of stupidity as the Canadian Senate: the harm that exists can only be fixed by changing the voting system/method of appointment, not by going unicameral. (12:27, 6 August 2009 (UTC))

The national legislature (Congress) has bicameralism with a purpose: one house represents the people, and thus seats are distributed to the states based on population; the other house represents states equally. Until the Supreme Court stuck its nose in the matter, most state legislatures were similarly organized: population represented in the lower house; geographic entities in the upper. But the Warren Court declared such arrangements to be unconstitutional (somehow apparently failing to note that the national legislature was so organized in the Constitution) and so today, all 99 state legislative chambers are population-based. Frankly, I'd just as soon save the money and go unicameral in the state legislatures. Unschool 05:49, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Strikes me the problem is your federal supreme court sticking its nose where it doesn't belong. All legislatures in Australia barring the Senate are one vote one value, but that's by their own choice (and was a little controversial in Western Australia when they recently changed). If you ask me, it's important for every state or country to determine its own constitution without anyone else sticking their nose in. Doing so is likely to cause resentment and political collapse in the long term. It's already happened once in the US...

Ultimately, though the average Joe doesn't realize it, the Supreme Court is the ultimate power in the US system. They can (unfortunately) stick their nose wherever they want, and no one has the will to do anything about it. Unschool

Well obviously is this case there was nothing any amount of will could've done to change it. They overturned state constitutions. What do you do when that happens? They've even decided it's unconstitutional to do by peaceful means what the US founding fathers did by violent means! (I'd like to see them argue the American Revolution was unconstitutional and that they're still a dependency of Great Britain.)

You could save it from being so stupid by using proportional representation, especially if you decided seat size was fixed—so that each county elected n members, where n depends on the county's population size. How do Americans feel about proportional representation btw? In Australia most of the arguments against it only make sense in the context of a parliamentary system (albeit Tasmania has used PR—the Hare-Clark system—to elect its lower house since time began).

Arrghhhh. PR terrifies me. I look at Weimar and Israel and shudder to think how much worse it would be for a nation of 300 million people.Unschool

PR in the US wouldn't pick a government (the executive), just the legislators. It would be more like in Australia than Weimar Germany or Israel because you'd still have one clear government (i.e. whoever won the presidential/gubernatorial election). After that it isn't really much different from having the executive and legislative negotiate when they're from different parties; just a little more oversight and a useful second house. No votes of no confidence and no coalitions. Plus there's many different ways of electing the representatives, which don't even need to explicitly recognise parties. It's easy to create a proportional system that's stupid or dangerous, but that's the case no matter how you vote.

IIRC the US senate was appointed by state Governors until the early 20th century. Have the state upper houses always been elected, or where they appointed at some point? Could they be appointed in the future?

(14:33, 9 August 2009 (UTC))

Actually, before the 17th Amendment, US Senators were selected by the state legislatures, not the governors. I don't know much about the early history of state upper houses, other than the fact that most of the colonial legislatures before the American Revolution were actually unicameral; I'm not sure if any of the upper houses (once created) were actually appointed or not, but my gut instinct says that they were probably elected from the get-go, albeit not using the One man, one vote principle. Unschool 00:19, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Hm, interesting, our state upper houses are the direct decendent of the previous undemocratic means of governing the colony. But the history of Australian democracy is different from the history of American democracy, and/because it's influenced by it. [So first the English appointed Governors, then they appointed Governors as well as a bunch of advisors who formed the Legislative Council, then a real parliament was formed by adding a Legislative Assembly as a fully elected lower house and the Governor acted only on advice as the third member of parliament. (There will be a test in two weeks time about which house is the Legislative Assembly and which one is the Legislative Council.)

(12:57, 10 August 2009 (UTC))

Unhappy with you

Damn you for making mention of this article on your user page; I now have a headache. Unschool 18:13, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

A pleasure! Placing it there was part of my plan to take over the world; if everyone has a headache from reading it and goes on sickleave for the day, there'll be no-one to stop me from taking over! (PS: I'm unhappy with you too, you editconflictor you!)

You should feel honored that I editconflicted you. I have a device (the conflictonator) designed for just such a purpose, but given the high level of energy it consumes, to say nothing of the guilt I feel over violating another editor's privacy, I use it rarely. Now you can tell others that you are special enough that Unschool chose to conflictuate you. Unschool 19:27, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Nah, I'm going to stay unhappy with you. You linked to a page with maps with inconsistent legends, which I had to fix, and lo! they were pngs, so I also had to svgify them. That took up too much of my time, and I hold you responsible. (12:27, 6 August 2009 (UTC))

File:South Australian Governors Flag.png

Can you relicense this image? PD-flag does not work on the Commons anymore. User:Zscout370 ^{(Return Fire)} 18:47, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

The image file is in the public domain. It's a flag. I don't understand why PD-Flag "doesn't work" any more, but it doesn't have to continue working, surely. In any case, if you know what it should be, then make it so.

Tautology (rhetoric) thanks

Thanks for your edit there. I have marked a couple of thinngs in French and Old English, to make the point. It is referenced and is absolutely the fact that the two come from different directions.

But thank you very much for adding to this to make it better. I have made it a little better, but please cast your eye over it. I tink in particular the references should be better placed rather than at the end of the para, would you agree?

If I were a cassowary
On the plain of Timbuktu
I would eat a missionary
Cassock hat and hatstand too.

Fr. Ronald Knox, I think, attr. impromptu, but will check if you like it. Is in Collins Quotations. Not in Oxford though I think.

Best wishes Si Trew (talk) 11:09, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I especially enjoyed the quote, although having never been to Timbuktu I've never felt any need to eat missionaries. I've replied on the Talk:Tautology (rhetoric) page, which I feel is a far more appropriate page to discuss a public matter like this. (15:52, 10 November 2009 (UTC))