"What are these use?" my son pointed the drainage and asked me.
"These are drainage. If no drainage, the road will flood if raining." I told him.

How do I explaint it to my son clearly the function of drainage?

Isn’t it fairly well acknowledged that a sizeable number of flat Earth arguments are actually making an ironic point about the value of critical thinking. There are some very sophisticated arguments made that apparently support the clearly flawed conclusion that the Earth is flat; it’s not always easy to uncover exactly where the line of reasoning fails. And it wouldn’t surprise me if the majority of the (already very small) Flat Earth Society membership were not also purely ironic. You can get a lovely membership certificate for the price of a postage stamp; what better gift could a science nerd wish for?

Hello, everybody!

I've read the "Legend of Adoniram" (I understand in English it is also known as Hiramic Legend) and wanted to share my take on it and it allegedly being one of the foundations of the global masonry movement.

(By the way, I wanted to post a link to the legend's English text but failed to find one. The Russian texts all seem to be based on translation of the 1863 French book "Les secrets et sociétés secrètes" by Compte le Couteulx de Canteleu).

Now, I am not an expert at all, so I am sure I must be missing a lot of nuances and would be grateful, too, to anybody who helps me to fill these gaps, but here is what I think:

1. This is not and should have never become a worldwide story. This is an internal Jewish story - about a conflict between two different strains within Jewish people (Cain's kin vs. Avel's kin). So the first mistake was that this conflict was somehow projected on the whole world and other people.

2. Another and very practical implication of #1, is that although the legend may seem to lay grounds for a strive to overthrow earthly kings, in fact it again refers only to (one line of) Jewish kings. It has nothing to do whatsoever with, for example, Indo-European kings/tsars, or those in other parts of the world. And then it follows that the five-pointed star on the United States national flag and that in the post-1917 Russia (still there on Kremlin towers), which is allegedly a masonry symbol marking the overthrow of the power of kings, has in fact never belonged to any of these places. It may be a legitimate symbol somewhere in the Middle East, but historically completely out of place in the middle of the Eurasian and/or American continents.

For me this has been a revelation. But again, I've never known much about these things.

So I'd be very interested to know what other people think.

I look at the whole question differently. Rather than ask "When did people stop believing the earth was flat." I'm intrigues by which group, when, actually thought it was flat?

Long before even the Egyptians, the Babylonians knew that the earth was round. Cave art going back further proves that even 10,000 years ago human beings considered the earth a spheroid.

That, to me, is the bigger question: how did beings with no telescopes, or mathematical/scientific knowledge such as ours, know that the earth wasn't flat.

I've heard many young Americans talk about how Christopher Columbus thought he's sail off the edge of the land. A visit to any scholarly data-base about Columbus will show that he possessed a collection of maps - some ancient, some newer, - which prove that falling off the edge was not a problem which weighed him down!

Yeah, sure, there have always been groups of uneducated people through the ages banging on about a flat earth. If any of them happened to be a Monarch or a leader everyone would have had to pay lip-service to this idea - while keeping quiet about what they really thought. As Bob acknowledged, there are still people who believe in supernatural entities like gods, angels, devils even now. That some of them believe too that the earth is flat is just a result of human nature being what it is: some people believe things which seem strange - and often risible - to others.

Until such time as public education is overhauled there always will be.

I think it is pretty funny how the title of this post is truncated on the front page,

There's a mind bender for you.

I agree with Foundit that there should be a possessive before "Mom".

But I'm at a loss as to why the word "his" would be suggested.

The word "someone" is all-inclusive. It encompasses men, women, children, Americans, Africans,Polish, etc. old, young, married, unmarried, criminal, good...it's just a general word referring to a human being.

The question does not ask "Are you one of those men who..." which is the only reason one would use "his".

"Someone" calls for "thier".

"Are you someone who wouldn't listen to their Mom"?

The verb should be in the past tense as this is a wish, hence the sentence should read 'I wish I knew what was happening'.

1. Is there a comma splice between 'wish' and 'hence'?

2. Should the full stop be inside the closing inverted comma?

Hello respected teachers,

Which of the following is better English?


We began to extend the railway track and lay it among more interesting landscape by planting trees, which in turn attracted more wildlife, and by making cuttings through the rock.

We began to extend the railway track and laid it among more interesting landscape by planting trees, which in turn attracted more wildlife, and by making cuttings through the rock.

One more question.

This week - does it mean every day of the week or not every day?