After a couple of years working in Smalltalk, I’ve acquired the hot take that all the code should be in a proportional font. Admittedly it doesn’t work quite as well for brace syntax languages, but in Smalltalk and Python it’s great.
KT is obviously (from context here) Karahan Tepe, and GT thus Göbleki Tepe. ANE is a standard abbreviation for Ancient Near East. For PPNA Wikipeda supplies Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, which is a subdivision of the Early Neolithic period.
Underscore for italics probably has its origins in the use of a solid underline as markup in a manuscript/typescript instructing the typesetter to set that fragment in italics (underscore generally being frowned upon in professionally set material otherwise, I think).
Oh yeah, the good hand crafted grammars are really good. For my PhD I worked in a group that was deep in the DelphIN/ERG collaboration, and they did some amazing things with that.
And even before then, Egypt's peace with Israel (and Egypt's subsequent ~$1B/yr in defense aid from the US) depends on playing nice with Israel in several respects, including deferring to Israeli policy on the Gaza border.
There has been smuggling of course, but (perhaps unintentionally) Israel gives them most of what they use.
> But recent intelligence has shown the extent to which Hamas has been able to build many of its rockets and anti-tank weaponry out of the thousands of munitions that failed to detonate when Israel lobbed them into Gaza, according to weapons experts and Israeli and Western intelligence officials. Hamas is also arming its fighters with weapons stolen from Israeli military bases.
> “Unexploded ordnance is a main source of explosives for Hamas,” said Michael Cardash, the former deputy head of the Israeli National Police Bomb Disposal Division and an Israeli police consultant. “They are cutting open bombs from Israel, artillery bombs from Israel, and a lot of them are being used, of course, and repurposed for their explosives and rockets.”
Also repurposed infrastructure like water pipes and lamposts. But they had plenty of weapons and explosives pre war, before egypt sealed their border to gaza.
The explosives are the part that obviously should be given the main focus.
And quite a bit of what's being talked about wrt to re-manufacturing Israeli unexploded ordance was stockpiled prior to Oct 7th. Israel did not start bombing Gaza only after Oct 7th (and in fact had been bombing Gaza as late as Sept 23, 2023).
These articles are from over a year ago and they all say that Israel took control of the Rafah border.
"On May 7, Israeli forces seized the main border crossing at Rafah, closing a vital route for aid into the besieged enclave."
Understandably, the Egyptian government does not want to coordinate with the Israeli government after seeing how the Israeli-organized aid sites have been going.
Why did Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Europe, Canada etc. take Syrians during the war in Syria but Egypt (and everyone else) refuses to allow civilian Gazans to escape to safety?
> Why did Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Europe, Canada etc. take Syrians during the war in Syria but Egypt (and everyone else) refuses to allow civilian Gazans to escape to safety?
Spitballing here, but it might be continued unease about Arafat. He weaponised the Palestinian population in Lebanon [1] and Jordan [2] in ways that would make it politically untenable for them to accept Palestinian refugees.
To expand on "tin was hard to come by", I believe two major sources of tin have been identified for bronze used in the Fertile Crescent: one in Cornwall, and one in Afghanistan. They had to travel really far abroad to make this stuff.
Arabic script as written in Iran (and Pakistan I think) is in a different style than most of the rest of the world. The style is called Nastaliq (the more common one being Naskh).
Yes I think that’s what it is - only the writing on the map uses a horizontal baseline whereas the real script uses a sloping baseline so it looks weird here.
My property is very irregularly shaped with the longest straight dimension being 6" shy of a quarter mile. The really scary thing is that I recognized that immediately the first time I looked at the property survey map.
To expand a bit on why this is cool: it lets you introduce new abstractions (for example wrapping some code in a database transaction or specialised exception handling) on an equal footing with the rest of the language, all without macros.
My stint with MongoDB was brief, but I too came away with a deeper appreciation of SQL bases. I feel it's a bit like a good type system: yes, there absolutely is an upfront cost, but over time it really does save you from stupid runtime problems. It's especially important when the bugs are in the data storage layer, because if a bug causes bad data to be written to your database, not only do you need to find and fix the bug, you also have to figure out how to deal with (possibly lots of) bad data.
Also, modern SQL is an incredibly powerful language. Good SQL can save you from lots of dumb data munging code if you know how to wield your database properly. Especially for analytical queries, but also more typical application code IMO.
I have spent many years beating the drum that a few minutes spent on constraints today save many, many, many hours of painful data cleanup later
And in fact, good constraints also can improve query performance. If the optimizer knows this column is unique, or that column is guaranteed to have a corresponding value in the joined table, it can do all sorts of tricks...
