"Jim cleaned it up and recorded it but had a dentist's appointment that afternoon (for a filling) [...]" Sometimes Wikipedia really tries to relay all of the most important information.
I enjoyed
"The precise mechanism by which the Heslington brain was preserved is unclear, however; in a bid to shed light on this question, researchers buried a number of pigs' heads in and around the campus to see what happened to them[needs update].[7]"
...and am looking forward to an update in which we learn the name and then age of the undergraduates that dug them up and what pranks they played with them.
The writing style is surprisingly enjoyable in several history-related articles. I really appreciate the effort some contributors seem to put into not only the research but also the actual writing. I've definitely found myself reading a big article top-to-bottom like it's a magazine article.
Ritual murder = we kill because it's our custom; e.g. captured warriors could get killed to celebrate victory.
Human sacrifice (a form of ritual murder) = we make an offering and we expect certain rewards. E.g. we sacrifice 100 citizens because we believe we need to meet a quota and otherwise the sun won't go up.
I'm pretty sure in a Venn diagram the "ritual killing" circle would include human sacrifices.
Ritual killings have elements not related to the act of killing, serial ritual killings demonstrate a repeated pattern of ritual .. it's killing with obsessive complusive and|or psycho sexual flourishes.
I would guess that a sacrifice is made to please some Other with powers mere mortals don't possess, like a deity or a spirit, and a ritual would be a more general term for a spiritual tradition without necessarily pleading to a higher power. But what do I know.
Thank goodness they are not as hung up on having a button as it initially appears:
"We are currently considering adding single-click functionality for the most-frequently used languages."
Sadly, while that means that the overall experience will be improved, it will solve exactly nothing for those who are unlucky enough to use a less-frequently-used language.
It has already taken multiple clicks for users wanting to read English Wikipedia in a language that wasn't one of the nine in the sidebar. In fact, clicking the "287 more" link at the bottom of the left sidebar in the old design brought up the exact same box that clicking the "297 languages" link at the top of the new design does, with the same list of languages in the same order.
Alternatively, one could create an account and set a default language, or visit a wikipedia site dedicated to that language.
I've always seen all the language links in the sidebar without clicking anything. I can see how, if you have had a different experience, the new arrangement might seem less of a disruption.
I think they might mean most-frequently used of that user (I think the "suggested languages" already are supposed to work like that.) But that presumably requires an account.
By making text flow to 100% of the width you can easily resize the browser window for everyone's perfect reading width.
I usually run my browser tiled to 50% of the screen, the new design wastes a lot of space at that size (you have to shrink to really narrow width before it enters 'mobile mode' and uses 100% of the width again - I mean it's pretty insane, you can see more text at say 30% width, but at 40%-60% it pops out that useless white space padding on the left leading to a narrower effective text width)
Yeah, I just tried it out and it looks pretty good! (If I resize my window to be 1/3 the width of my monitor, that is.)
I totally agree with you: I like to use my browser at ~50% of screen width on a 27" screen, so it looks terrible there because of all the wasted space. If they made it work at 50% width like it does at 30% width, I'd have no complaints.
I would have loked to see a quotation from the parts of the standard that are referred to here: "Although few implementations support its full generality in file compilation, a strict reading of the Common Lisp specification seems to imply that writing the following should be acceptable".
