I don't know if you went to a French-speaking school in Belgium, but I was told the same thing in a French school. The French "continent" certainly refers to a large mass of land and its surrounding islands [1]. Hence, the continent is Oceania rather than Australia.
That's how we learned it in middle school and beyond here in the US, but the Australia question boiled down to "yeah, technically it's an island, but are you really going to start your conversations about Australia with a bunch of quibbling around islands v. continents?".
40 years ago in Spain 5 continents only, no Antarctica, my guess is as no one was living there why worry about it. Don't know if it has changed, I'll ask my son.
North and South America are on different tectonic plates, while Europe and most of Asia are on a single plate. If anything, the geological definition of continents seems to support separate Americas and a unified Eurasia.
The best argument for separating the Americas is probably the existence of the Darien Gap. I’m not sure there is more inhospitable route in a populated area anywhere in the world.
The continents are defined geographically and culturally, not geologically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent points out how they "are generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria" and lists "several ways of distinguishing the continents", with the 7-continent model, two different 6-continent models. It also mentions the "four-continent model consisting of Afro-Eurasia, America, Antarctica, and Australia", as well as how there were only three discrete landmasses present during the Pleistocene ice ages, when the Bering Strait was instead land.
You can see the cultural influence in:
> In the English-speaking countries, geographers often use the term Oceania to denote a geographical region which includes most of the island countries and territories in the Pacific Ocean, as well as the continent of Australia.
> In some non-English-speaking countries, such as China, Poland, and Russia, Oceania is considered a proper continent because their equivalent word for "continent" has a rather different meaning which can be interpreted as "a major division of land including islands" (leaning towards a region) rather than "land associated with a large landmass" (leaning towards a landmass).
They are not defined by geology nor continental plates. For one, the word and current use is far older than our first glimmers of understanding plate tectonics. https://www.etymonline.com/word/continent says the meaning in the 1550s was "continuous tract of land" and by the 1610s became "one of the large land masses of the globe".
> The definition of a continent is a continuous expanse of land.
That is both vague and by no means the only definition of a continent. A continent is basically defined culturally - different places say there are 4,5,6 or 7 continents.
The closest to a good scientific definition is 'the largest landmass of a continental plate' (which would include Australia but not greenland, but then arguably India, east Africa, Arabia and Central America are really also on their own plates)
Perhaps the most challenging problem with the plate definition is that it would place northern Honshu and all of Hokkaido in North America. Treating the Caribbean, India and Arabia as continents is basically consistent with how we talk about them anyway.
I like having a clear definition like basing it on continental plates, though a map of the plates seems to raise its own set of questions. How small is too small of a plate to count? What of parts of what we call continents that are actually on a different plate?
I mean, Pluto is definitely still a planet in the cultural imagination. There can be exceptions to rules. Even if there are some exoplanets that resemble Pluto, we can still say that Pluto is a planet and those other nameless things aren't.
I cannot understand why the cultural understanding of planet wasn't respected, while still making whatever nuanced distinction scientists wanted.
My solution would have been:
Planet = any standalone body in space, formed around a star or brown dwarf, large enough for gravity to mold it into a sphere, but not massive enough to enable any fusion. (i.e. exclude stars and brown dwarfs).
Then:
Major planet: Planet that has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. We have 8 of these.
Minor planet: Planet that has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. This would include Pluto, Ceres, and many extra-Pluto bodies.
The current scientific definition is tortured. I.e. a "dwarf planet" is not a "planet", which is just unintuitive nomenclature grammatically, as well as violating the regular use of the word "planet".
I wish science would come up with a better definition. Just like we no longer have Pluto as a planet (there were other definitions they considered with different results - the important thing is a useful definition)
That won’t happen, largely because continents are BS scientifically but useful colloquially and in geography. Politics also uses them too, but the usefulness of that I’ll leave as an exercise for others.
If you want science, you want plate tectonics and geography focused around the boundaries of plates and volcanic science. If you want to know what a continent is, whatever model you were taught in school is good enough for government work. The important thing is to know what that land over yonder is if you’re on a boat.
So - in Swedish, "kontenent" is a "continuous expanse of land". But a "världsdel" (which translates to "part of the world" roughly) is I guess "region". So - if you look at the table, "Europe" and "Asia" are both individual "världsdel", but they are one "kontinent" Eurasia. This certainly flies in the face of what I was taught in school - Europe was definitely a continent, as was Asia. Also notice, Oceana is a "världsdel", Australia is a "kontinent". But Google translates both words to "continent" in English, but the words are different.. kontinent is "geographical", but världsdel is "cultural".
"continuous expanse of land" would imply at least that any island is its own continent, but perhaps even that each bank of any river (while water is in it) would divide continents. So that does not seem right.
Wikipedia actually contradicts you in the first two sentences in the "Continent" entry [0]:
> A continent is any of several large geographical regions. Continents are generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria.
If you define the continent as a continuous expanse of land, then the Americas and Afro-Eurasia are continents, albeit divided by the Panama Ithsmus, Suez Ithsmus, and...Ural Mountains?
Panama and Suez are divided by a canal, but those are artificial with a floor higher than sea level. If you stopped maintenance on the canals for a geologic blink of an eye and it would return to a land bridge, but it's narrow...I can see arguments both ways.
However, the only argument for calling Europe one continent and Asia a different continent is that Eurasia would be too big if it were a continent. Afro-Eurasia is right out!
Something does not add up for me here. If you say that Australia is a continent, but Oceania a region.. then how is New Zealand classified?
Shouldnt it count as a continent too? (What is probably wrong)
I think all those things are quite cultural: after all Europe and Asia are connected, arguably with Africa too. Same for both Americas which could be counted as one big thing. On a side note does: Panama canal work as a real divide between both Ameican continents? Similar question for Suez Canal
> Something does not add up for me here. If you say that Australia is a continent, but Oceania a region.. then how is New Zealand classified? Shouldnt it count as a continent too?
Why would it have to? Oceania is a region that consists of one continent and a bunch of islands, done, problem solved. There's nothing that says "a region" can only consist of continents or islands, is there?
Ok so the bulk of Great Britain is a continent, Northern and the Republic of Ireland form a continent, the Isle of Wight is a continent, ...?
Or for the NA readers: the bulk of NA&SA form a single continent, not two, Russia and continental Europe sometimes join it, Hawaii is a continent, ...?
We learned this in Chile as well, Oceania is as Asia is as America. Also that no country is at the same time a continent. Are Aussies taught that their country is the actual continent?
Not really. If an American doesn't know where Oceania is (and they likely don't), then they are left to assume that Australia is the continent, not an island.
Hence, I was providing a counter-example to your dubious claim that "Americans know of islands and continents". Come to think of it... what do you even mean by that? What does it mean to "know of islands and continents"?
I know, I know. English speaking countries refer to the continent as "the Americas" rather than America, as the rest of the planet does but, then, the rest of the planet refers to the "United States of America" as the "US" and (normally) not as "America" .
Now seriously, America is a given name for the whole continent (with Noth America and South America as its two subcontinents) and was never meant to be used as the name of any one of its 35 countries.
Many in the EU are often doing the same chauvinistic thing, refering to themselves as "Europe" forgetting that there are 23 European countries that are not part of the EU. That case is slightly (just slightly) less annoying because at least is 27 EU European countries vs 23 non EU European countries, so at least they can claim to be the majority of countries. US case is one country vs. 34, so objectively even more absurd.
This comment seems confused. In English, "the Americas" isn't a continent nor are North America and South America "sub-continents"; rather, North America is a continent, South America is a continent, "the Americas" refers unambiguously to the collection of both continents, and "America" refers unambiguously to the United States of America (and "American" refers unambiguously to a US citizen). The only chauvinism occurs when speakers of other languages insist that the English language adopt their model of continents and the corresponding toponyms and demonyms (for example, many Spanish speakers use "Americano" to refer to inhabitants of the Americas, and since that word looks like "American" in English, many of these Spanish speakers believe English speakers should modify the meaning of "American" to mirror their "Americano").
Using "Europe" to refer to the EU member states in English is different because "Europe" in English traditionally refers to the entire continent and referring to the EU as "Europe" introduces ambiguity. I don't think this ambiguity is a significant problem and I wouldn't call it "chauvinism" but perhaps I could be convinced otherwise.
> "America" refers unambiguously to the United States of America
When people say "Columbus discovered America", it most certainly is referring to the entire landmass and surrounding islands (he technically landed in the Bahamas).
By the way, one thing I always wondered? Are Canadians annoyed by that usage, or more or less accepted that they're not "American" in English? (I would especially appreciate if a Canadian shared their thoughts about this)
My two cents is US people are the ones who have an unusual take on the word "America". Outside the US, it's not very idiomatic to call the country "America", or even "USA". "US" is more common (and in both Spanish and Portuguese, it's almost always called "Estados Unidos").
The term "american" is mainstream both in Canada and elsewhere. I imagine that's probably at least partly a function of "unitedstatesman" being too much of a mouthful. (BTW, if you think that's a ridiculous word, in portuguese "estadounidense" is an actual word, albeit with a connotation of being something a "woke" person might say).
> many Spanish speakers use "Americano" to refer to inhabitants of the Americas, and since that word looks like "American" in English, many of these Spanish speakers believe English speakers should modify the meaning of "American" to mirror their "Americano"
Spanish speakers, or, rather, the Crown of Castille created the word "America" and "americanos" to refer to the new continent and their people. English speakers adopted the same word, but with a different meaning.
Not saying that it's wrong for US people to refer to their country by anh word that they chose. They are free to do so. But it is useful, I think, to understand that people for other countries of America, who call themselves "americanos" because that's what they are, can be surprised to be told they are not "Americans", even though they are "americanos". I guess it's confusing for them, at the very least.
Just imagine that Colombians started to call their country "America" and when you went there they would insist that you are not American ("americano"). I guess you would not be amused. I don't know.
I'm not "americano", but European, so it doesn't really affect me. Just trying to give some context to better understand others. Peace! :-)
That's what I wrote, that in English speaking countries you refer to the whole continent as "the Americas".
The name "America", though, was given to the whole "New World", which is what we now call "America", the continent. British started using the name just for what is now the US, so in English speaking countries, the usage is different nowdays. In other countries "America" continues to be used for the whole continent (it is still considered one conti nent, not two).
In her 1961 book The United States and the Southwest Pacific, American author Clinton Hartley Grattan commented that, "the use of the word Oceania to cover Australia, New Zealand, and the [Pacific] islands now has a slightly old-fashioned flavor."
When people use things like this I try to catch it. This isn't a reasoned argument. It's meant to have the reader or hearer feel a certain way to change minds.
Why do you interpret her reporting that the term is "old-fashioned" as an argument that it shouldn't be used? She's not making an argument, just remarking on the term.
Language is only useful if we all agree on a common meaning for it. If you use old fashioned language I may still recognize it, but it is still wrong: you need to update your language to whatever is current (this does change!) so that we continue to understand each other.
Maybe I can't define why it is old fashioned, but if it is old fashioned it is wrong. I would hope that people who better understand the details have a better definition of the terms in use and could apply it, but all I know is your usage is old fashioned. (Note, the above doesn't preclude the idea that I'm wrong and the language is current, merely that we both need to do more research and should be more careful in this area until/unless we do!)
> Language is only useful if we all agree on a common meaning for it.
Is it possible to agree on a common meaning for language using the language for which we are attempting to agree on the common meaning? On a logical level, I think I reject such an idea, although I would be fascinated in an argument that suggests such a thing would be possible.
> all agree
Information theory suggests that commonly used symbols should be short and rare symbols should be long. Any subgrouping of people will encounter scenarios requiring different ideas to be discussed at different frequencies. Jargon differing amongst people is to be expected and is what at least I have observed. I also reject 'all agree' on an information theory level.
> Language is only useful
And finally on a personal note. I generally misunderstand what most people are talking about most of the time. I think of it in terms of being weakly immune to peer pressure, but the other side of the coin is that I have a hard time keeping up with whatever group I'm a part of. And vice versa, I often say things that others quite obviously misunderstand.
However, I still find language useful. Even when there is no agreement on common meaning. Even when jargon necessarily forms differently between groups (and often even between individuals). Even when we try imperfectly to define language basing it upon itself. Using old fashioned language (or simply uncommonly agreed upon language) isn't 'still wrong' even if recognized. It is, I assert, the only way language can even be.
There are schools of thought with 4, 5, 6, or 7 continents, but all of them consider Australia a continent, and Oceania a region, at least according to Wikipedia; though "some geographers group the Australian continental landmass with other islands in the Pacific Ocean into one 'quasi-continent' called Oceania."
> In school in Belgium, we learned that Oceania is the continent and not Australia. So for us, would Australia then be the largest island after all?
No, whether you call the continent “Australia” or “Oceania”, the land mass that makes up the entirety of the mainland of it is, ipso facto, not an island, and neither is the country occupying the entirety of that landmass and some adjacent islands (though, of course, it contains several islands.)
> In school in Belgium, we learned that Oceania is the continent and not Australia. So for us, would Australia then be the largest island after all?
How weird. (So it's not only Chilean schools that are idiosyncratic in this regard.) To the rest of us, the actual continent -- you know, the biggest contiguous landmass in the region -- is called Australia. Maybe you're just translating Erdteil (Ger; whatever the corresponding concept is in French or Flemish) to the English "continent", and mistranslating too literally? In English "continent" is the land mass, which is definitely Australia. Oceania, as a whole "Erdteil", is more than a continent; it's the sum of the continent of Australia and a whole bunch of islands. (Possibly most of them situated on the same continental shelf? Or not, Idunno.)
French:
> On retrouve ainsi certains systèmes de continents qui considèrent l'Europe et l'Asie comme deux continents, alors que l'Eurasie ne forme qu'une étendue de terre. -- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent
If stuff that is just one actual literal continent can be called two "Erdteile" since forever, another "Erdteil" can consist of a continent plus some other stuff.
West Flemish:
> De meiste eiland'n in de Stiln Oceoan vormn t'hope mè 't continent Australië e weirelddeil die Oceanië wordt genoemd. -- https://vls.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent
Oceania is not Australia. After the Wikipedia article: "Oceania is a geographical region which includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia".
In English, Australia is just Australia. The Australian continent includes the Australian mainland, New Guinea and several islands within Australian or Indonesian jurisdiction.
Oceania is this designation of convenience that excludes islands that are non-Continental and would otherwise be lumped in with Asia, and in addition to Australia there are three groupings of island territories which are ethnically classified as Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.
Melanesia includes New Guinea (remember, part of the Australian continent, separated from the country by a strait), and running east goes to Nauru, southeast to Fiji, and then west to New Caledonia which is essentially one of the highest altitude masses of the mostly submerged continent of Zealandia (the other land masses being New Zealand and a few islands belonging to the country of Australia). Melanesia also includes the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
Micronesia is a region that from Palau runs east through the Federated States or Micronesia to Kiribati, northwest to the Mariana Islands (including Guam) and back down to Palau and is mostly in the Northern Pacific.
Polynesia forms a near-triangle often referred to as the Polynesian Triangle with New Zealand in the Southern corner, Hawai’i in the Northern corner and Easter Island in the Eastern corner. There are too many island groups here for me to want to list them all, but this is essentially where Polynesian peoples settled.
Which brings us back to Oceania. There’s all these islands people live that if you squint your eyes a little look like they’re close enough to Australia. Why not just group them all together and call them a continent? And from what I’ve gathered that’s exactly what a lot of countries have done for a while or started to do. Continents are basically arbitrary BS anyway, good BS that serves a useful purpose colloquially but still BS; and it looks like to me like it’s just a way of keeping the list of “major regions” shorter than it otherwise would be because between Australia also being a country and all of these archipelagos spread out across the Pacific being both low population and underdeveloped, nobody wants to append them to a list of supposed “continents” as separate entities, so Oceania it is.
And if you did that, what about India? Arabia? Madagascar? The western portion of North America basically divided by the Rockies? This would start to get political after a while.
So eh, Australia is a continent in English, but Oceania is a region that includes Australia. Whether the continent of “Australia” includes the obvious portions like New Guinea, well, not when I was in school, but I don’t think that matters.
Yes, if you grew up being told that the continent is Oceania, and all the people around you were also told the continent is Oceania, then Australia is indeed the biggest island. Language is fun like that.
I’m definitely a minority in this regard, but I completely support increasing the price of games across the board. Development is more expensive & involves more people now. The cost of games has been $60 for what, 15 years? One additional problem is that everybody wants to cash in on subscriptions and micro transactions for continuous money, even when you’ve already paid “full” price.
> I’m definitely a minority in this regard, but I completely support increasing the price of games across the board. Development is more expensive & involves more people now.
But that’s only one half of the story. The other is how tools, assets, hardware, knowledge and training have become much more affordable, streamlined and widespread.
What used to be a somewhat niche industry with barely any formal entry ways, is now a massively formalized industry dwarfing even Hollywood.
Just the publishing side alone saw a massive falling of gates with the emergence of the indie scene. IMHO there are very real economies of scale effects to this.
I don't know if I agree with this. Not that you're wrong but I don't think it's the full picture.
15 years ago games were still largely physical. That $60 included the physical games, cases, manuals, distribution, warehousing, etc. These days everything being digital companies don't have to pay that anymore. Sure there's a commission you have to pay on Steam/EGS but I highly doubt it's close to what having a physical distribution method cost.
So the way the $60 pie is split up today is totally different, and I imagine a much, much larger portion of that goes to the developers.
> The cost of games has been $60 for what, 15 years?
Not really. $60 is an introductory price, but most games at that price launch with at least one $80+ special edition and are supplemented with $40+ of post-launch content with much higher margins than the original game. And that's before considering some of the more contentious monetization practices like micro-transactions and "loot boxes". In many cases devs and publishers slash the initial price of a game shortly after launch (usually a year or two) to increase player counts, because more players generally means more sales of post-launch content.
And that's something else nobody ever seems to bring up when discussing the stagnant price of video games - the ever-increasing sales volumes. The cost of producing additional copies of a game is negligible, especially with the rise of digital distribution, so each copy sold after breaking even is pure profit. Since there is basically no production cost, developers (in theory, at least) dump part of their profit into the development of their next title. This allows them to stay competitive and results in skyrocketing budgets. The high budgets are a sign of a successful industry, not a struggling one.
Despite the increasing budgets and seemingly stagnant launch prices, video game developers are more profitable than ever. It's because they are selling more copies than ever and have figured out plenty of ways to bring in extra revenue after the initial sale. If you ask me, things should go the opposite direction. A huge selection of cheap, high-quality indie titles have affected the relative value of "AAA" titles, to the point where I rarely consider spending full price on a game launched at $60. Either way, the industry has recently been dipping its toes in the water with a new $70 shelf price. We'll see if it sticks.
1: What are you afraid of, now that the engine is partly owned by Tencent? The engine is OSS after all. What paths do you see for potential break of trust?
2: What are your use cases that you need a game engine for (making mobile games, console games, PC games, arch viz, ...)
3: What points make you feel like Unity is remarkably better?
I'm asking these last 2 points because I'm in the field myself and I do have some different experiences regarding choice of engines.
Thanks!
* And what do you
I hope that second 80% wasn’t a typo because it made me spit my tea out in laughter. I’ve tried my hand at a few indie games like probably every programmer/gamer and wow does that last mile to “done enough to say done with a straight face” seem to stretch on into infinity.
Hi luka-birsa,
Do you think E-Ink computer monitors will ever be a thing?
This is something that I'm personally really looking forward to to relieve eye strain commonly caused by LCD monitors.
You can acually buy them today - Dasung did manage to productivize them enough for people to try them out. But it's really hard to compete on price, especially with consumer 27" 4k display costing 100-200$.
Pricey, small and really not the best design, but it's a start. I say it's a start but at the same time I'm afraid this is the best we're likely to get, given that the e-ink market is not growing and the technology isn't competing with cheap LCD screens and tablets.
A shame; I wouldn't mind a modern, affordable take on the typewriter with an E-ink screen (13 or 15 inch) and mechanical keyboard. I could probably build one if I have a lot more expendable income and time.
It's a very niche product. Most people opt for modern OLED displays for consumer needs, so it's really a chicken and egg problem. I'm sure if you start buying in bulk companies will notice. Sony is working on a bunch of consumer E Ink devices and I'm sure they would be more than comfortable doing this at scale, as long as there is a need.
Thank you for your reply Luka. Do you personally think E-Ink monitors can offer consumer advantages to LED monitors?
Can the same latency be achieved in these displays? (< 4ms between input and result on screen)
With current E Ink technology no. Even if it was technically feasible (not sure about that), nobody is focusing on high refresh rates. Increasing refresh increases battery consumption and that means you're taking away one of the key benefits of EPD.
We tested 8fps video on our devices a while back and in the end you're getting a B&W display with 8 FPS updates... Why wouldn't you go for something like LCD or OLED instead? I don't believe you can beat LCD at being LCD.
There are other technolgies that promise fast update times, that offer similar characteristics (look into ClearInk), but they are nowhere near where E Ink is in terms of maturity.
I'm using lastpass with firefox nightly and I don't have this issue. copying the password to clipboard without seeing it works out of the box using the browser extension.
That's what they do with formulas in Excel.
There it sucks HARD. Try googling for documentation on StackOverflow for example. Anything you want to copy paste doesn't work because Excel is expecting the commands in a different language.
That sounds like there's a demand for a code-help service that is syntactically aware enough to perform translations into the viewer's native language. I'm sure it would be harder to implement than a basic text-only + syntax highlighting site, but imagine how nice it would be to have your user's language preference (or, if not logged in, with a dropdown "pick $human_language for this $programming_language snippet"). You could also optionally integrate Google Translate or similar for the non-programming-language parts (obviously with less accuracy, but still better than nothing).
Searchability would be tricky, since google etc. might detect the very-similar-but-for-code-snippets links as duplicate/spam and bury them, but there are hopefully ways around that--up to and including asking google to somehow improve their algorithm; it seems like they might be sympathetic (because they're programmers and because there's money to be made) to a request to accommodate such search patterns.
Not only would that solve the problem you posed (googling for stuff on SO is tricky for you as a (presumably) English speaker if it's in another language), but it would also address a far wider-reaching problem with big implications: the relative inaccessibility of programming, especially at the early-beginning stages, to people who are not fluent English speakers.
If you google in your native language you'll get results in that language. I agree that it takes a bit to relearn all formulas (and I find it too confusing to use different versions at the same time) but when I was still using a non-English version I had no problems finding solutions.
I think it was exactly the right thing to do. Excel formulas are often used by people with little knowledge of programming who aren't aware that "if" is a common keyword. Using the local variant makes formulas much easier to understand (and to get people closer to actual programming).
I agree it's a good move from Microsoft to make Excel more accessible. It's just not something I was expecting the first time I stumbled upon the problem.
I have a programming background so I'm used to searching everything in English, even though that's not my native language.
I inserted sqrt() in my non-English Excel and it didn't work. I thought I had a completely broken version of the program.
Took a while to figure out it was a language problem!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania