There are plenty of books which are scarce but not sought after. Not necessarily because they lack intrinsic value but simply because they are forgotten. Beautifully crafted antique books which can be bought for almost nothing nowadays since the collector’s value isn’t there.
The unfortunate thing here is that the swastika was appropriated by a genocidal regime. The symbol still has a totally different life in India and Japan.
I once visited an army surplus store which stocked a kind of string vest which looked like a fish-net but with thicker cords. The proprietor claimed it was developed by the Swedish military for its effectiveness in hot weather but didn’t become popular because of pushback from soldiers who didn’t want to wear it because it looked kind of gimpy.
Even if they are ugly when they are living, they're wonderful to behold when they burn! I would hazard a guess that they're unpopularity with people stems from their popularity with ticks.
In languages which are truer to spelling in pronunciation than English, changing the spelling of loan-words is usually necessary. For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling, whereas in Norwegian it is written 'byråkrati' which, pronounced according to Norwegian spelling rules, sounds roughly the same. One result is that Norwegians tend to pronounce any word they see as if it were Norwegian, resulting in a kind of 'Norwenglish' where words, after being loaned, seemed to take on a second life. In this way, I feel English spellings 'reference' their origins where possible and English speakers often learn to detect the roots of words and adjust pronunciation appropriately.
I suppose it depends on your definition of civilisation. I agree that emotionally the quote conveys a laudable sentiment but technically, it would probably be more correct to state the opposite i.e. that civilisation began with slavery. As the beginnings of civilisation are usually correlated with the the beginnings of agriculture and agriculture, arguably, created the demand for workers which allowed slavers to flourish.
Of course, the lengths are just doubled. If someone travels twice as far to get to someone’s home they also have to travel twice as far back. If the two met in the middle instead there would be four journeys but each would be half as long (2+2=1+1+1+1).
Nicotine is only toxic in high doses, which naturally greatly exceed that which you get from a patch. You could say the same thing about basically anything; say someone recommended eating a banana to cure cramps. Potassium is also toxic in high doses. I agree yoga is a great practice but that doesn’t exclude the beneficial effects nicotine can provide. For example, I can chew nicotine gum during exams but I can’t do yoga.
They mentioned they are currently developing twistrons made from other materials. They state that the current material, carbon nanotubes, are too expensive for large scale applications.
There can exist a third category in which things are neither just nor unjust. It really depends on whether your logic system is two-valued or many. There isn’t any universal standard. Can’t you see that there are distinctions in strength between trust, don’t trust and distrust? If you’ve never dealt with someone before, you might not trust them. But you wouldn’t distrust them without specific reason.
The article is a little contradictory on that, it first states that Brian Sibley is the editor but in the quote of Brian Sibley he states his task as 'bringing together J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings (under the editorship of Christopher Tolkien) relating to the dramatic history spanning the Second Age of Middle-earth'.
Agreed. William Burroughs conducted cut-up experiments in the 20th century, where he would take disparate texts and splice them together. The surprising result was how often they recombined into new meanings. One of his motivations was to stimulate his creativity through accidental quasi-random inputs. I am content with seeing reading in a similar light; texts carefully written but carelessly read - like in abstract art, we are usually happy to let the text recombine in ways which say more about ourselves!