Jakub Marian

440 is actually an international standard, not American. >In 1939, there was an international conference held in London that resulted in a recommendation to use A = 440 Hz, as a compromise between the various tuning systems used at the time, some of which reached beyond 450 Hz. This recommendation was further supported by the fact that the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz because 439 is a prime number, and the corresponding frequency was hard to generate electronically with standard electronic clocks. Eventually, in 1955, the standard A = 440 Hz was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).* * https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theory/

> From what I understand, it's biodegradable above 50° C. Not something you'll find outside Death Valley. We’re not that far off in Europe. Give it a couple of years more and climate change will make sure we get there. https://jakubmarian.com/highest-recorded-temperature-by-country-in-eur…

This is one of the confusing idioms. I found that page that explains all but, anything but and everything but: https://jakubmarian.com/all-but-vs-anything-but-vs-everything-but-in-e… A lot of native speakers tend to use them inappropriately. An interesting song if you are learning english that shows some of the common horrors people commit is Weird al "Word crimes".

Not seeing the Romanian letters ș, ț, ă, â, î anywhere on the keyboard. Romania is in Europe, too. (â and î are even needed in French, what am I missing here?) I'm sure there must be many other letters missing. Not to mention Bulgaria and Greece. No qualms with the layout, it's probably impossible to cram all European letters and common programming symbols on only ~four layers -- it's just the name that's somewhat provocative. Interesting reference: https://jakubmarian.com/special-characters-diacritics-used-in-european…

It's an old one, but this alleged Steam screenshot handles the problem quite well, as well as fixing the use of the UK flag for English: https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/english-traditional…

German is not a pure SVO language rather it is classified as V2 (verb second language) in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses. At least I prefer to look at it in that - admittedly unsatisfactory - descriptive manner.[0][1] There are some folks (like in Generative Grammar) arguing that it has an underlying SOV layer which makes kind of sense because it gets processed like half of the time essentially like pure SOV languages. But alas. In English you have to go through the extraordinary effort of a wedding ceremony in order to utter the words in SOV order: "With this ring I thee wed." That is some pure SVO energy right here. [0]https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/german-is-sov-sho… [1]https://jakubmarian.com/is-german-an-svo-language/

The J is pronounced as an English "J" ("jay"). ψ – psi – pronounced "psaai" (as in "top side") or "saai" (as in "side"). from "Pronunciation of the Greek alphabet in English": https://jakubmarian.com/pronunciation-of-the-greek-alphabet-in-english…

Is that milk products? I like cheese and yogurt and so on and drink 0 milk. Locating the source for a reddit post with high numbers, it does include milk products, other than butter. https://jakubmarian.com/milk-consumption-in-europe-in-liters-per-year-…

Actually not, it's /ˈɡɒdoʊ/ GOD-oh pronunciation is where phonetic alphabet shines[1] and English totally sucks [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet [2] https://jakubmarian.com/english-words-spelled-the-same-but-pronounced-…

> »« is allowed but mostly used in Switzerland I think it's «...» in Switzerland, while »...« is widely used in several countries, including Germany, and is the "main" system arguably only in Denmark. See https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-languages/

Yes :-) There’s a nice list of other heteronyms at https://jakubmarian.com/english-words-spelled-the-same-but-pronounced-…

> 440Hz 'A' tuning changed to 432Hz That's very Terry of the authors, considering the conspiracy theory involved here. (Yes, it's a whole thing: https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theory/)

It is true. Here's a map of what Germany is called by other countries in Europe: https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/germany-european-la… Interesting that Finland/Estonia call them, essentially, Saxony. The Latvian/Lithunian name for Germany is the only one I don't understand. Does anyone know?

This is what you see if you look at the Perceptions of Corruption Index. That only looks at the public sector (not private companies), but one could reasonably assume the two correlate: https://jakubmarian.com/corruption-perceptions-index-of-european-count…

Reminds me of this nice map of what tea is called across Europe: https://jakubmarian.com/tea-in-european-languages-map/ As a Swede, I can just add that the spelling come in quite many forms: te (official), té, the, thé, tea...

Sanitisation habits. https://jakubmarian.com/a-study-reveals-how-many-europeans-wash-their-…

Thanks. Got caught exactly by what this website describes [1]. “Heaven” was logical from French. [1] https://jakubmarian.com/is-it-tax-haven-or-tax-heaven-in-english/

Alternative headline from "fish fish fish eat eat eat" [1,2]: Hitman hitman hitman hitman hitman hires hires hires hires hired [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231097 [2] https://jakubmarian.com/fish-fish-fish-eat-eat-eat-is-a-grammatically-…

14 is a common age of consent in East-EU/Balkans https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/age-of-consent-euro…

A quick google search seems to contradict your statement: https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/number-of-languages… Average number of languages spoken: France: 1.8 , Germany: 2.0 , Spain: 1.7 , Portugal: 1.6 , Italy: 1.8 , Greece: 1.8 , Poland: 1.8 , Sweden: 2.5 , Finland: 2.6 , UK: 1.6

You are getting downvoted for some reason but you are right, in fact this problem and this attitude is present in almost all countries from post-soviet block [0] Men are not allowed to be 'weak' and any display of it is usually ridiculed by society [0] https://jakubmarian.com/suicide-rates-by-country-in-europe/

Depends which area. Europe is dying out with a fertility rate in most parts of much less than 2.1 as required for sustained population. https://jakubmarian.com/fertility-rate-by-region-in-europe/

Where did you get your obesity figures from? https://jakubmarian.com/percentage-of-obese-population-by-country-in-e… puts the Netherlands only slightly below average with 19.8%. (The UK seems to have a problem though; with its 28.1% it's a bit of an outlier in Europe.)

It apparently existed pre-Tolkien [not really surprisingly as it's one of those weird English plural forms that can go multiple ways] and there's at least some evidence that he retconned it as a deliberate choice. e.g. https://jakubmarian.com/dwarves-or-dwarfs-which-spelling-is-correct/ ADDED from the link: Tolkien himself admitted that “dwarves” was a misspelling. In a letter to Stanley Unwin, the publisher of The Hobbit, he wrote: "No reviewer (that I have seen), although all have carefully used the correct dwarfs themselves, has commented on the fact (which I only became conscious of through reviews) that I use throughout the ‘incorrect’ plural dwarves. I am afraid it is just a piece of private bad grammar, rather shocking in a philologist; but I shall have to go on with it."

Yeah, it definitely seems wrong to me. B2B2 has twice the probability of any other event listed in that table. edit: I guess it's more nuanced than that. The explanation and interpretation sections on this blog post [1] and on wikipedia talk about the controversy. [1]: https://jakubmarian.com/the-day-of-the-week-boy-or-girl-paradox-explai… [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_or_Girl_paradox

Relevant - Number of seats in the national parliament by country in Europe https://jakubmarian.com/number-of-seats-in-the-national-parliament-by-… If only they had scatter plot!

> After a few half-hearted explanations on my part about how Christmas doesn't really involve cake Hang on... https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=christmas+cake&source=lnms&t… You'd have been better off saying that Christmas doesn't really involve Santa Claus: https://jakubmarian.com/christmas-gift-bringers-of-europe/

That may be a part of it, but it's mostly due to homeownership. Germany is a super risk-averse country, thus few people invest their money. Most people hold everything in cash, thus they get very low returns. It's also the reason why they are hit so hard in a low-interest environment. https://jakubmarian.com/wealth-per-capita-by-country-in-europe-map/ It's describing the median wealth based on a Credit Suisse Wealth Report You can also find these results in the ING research ("Surprising differences between countries", page 14ff): https://www.ezonomics.com/pdf/Household-wealth-in-Europe.pdf "When dividing the Eurozone into a group of countries often labeled as ‘core’11and a group of Southern-European12countries, it turns out that Southern-European households are more capable of keeping up their standard of living compared with those living in the core countries (see figure 18)" "It is striking that German households have fewer assets than Eurozone households have on average. They not only own relatively little real estate(see figure 20)but also hold less financial assets than is common in the Eurozone(see figure 21)."