Opinions sought. I vaguely remember that the expression "This is right" (meaning "I agree with what you just said") appeared in the 1970s. And I remember it because, if I remember correctly, it replaced in no time the till-then familiar phrase "That's right". Forty years later, it's normal to see sentences like... this:  "...inflation reached 200 percent. This led to a major upheaval..."   ...whereas, it seems better/more logical to use "...200 percent. That led to..." - because "this" suggests something that's coming (e.g. that example above), while "that" has more a sense of what just passed ("I'll catch this bus, I missed that bus").    But then, dictionary.com says "this" means "used to indicate a * just mentioned", while "that" is "used to indicate a * mentioned before". So "this" should be the first choice. But it sounds wrong to my ear.
Learning and using English I'm always confused about what word to use for referring to things that have been described by me a few sentences earlier: "that" or "this".   Confusion comes from the fact that only the equivalent of "this" is always used in my native language for such referring. But I've noticed that in English for such referring "that" is used as often as "this" (or maybe even more often).  Some examples for illustrating (just tried to google something appropriate to convey my idea better):     We assess local... the demographics of the local population. What are the natural traffic drivers in the area. Things like cinemas and pubs and retail and office and all that type of things and we now put together a bit of a matrix and actually give a weighted score to each of the things we know help our business. That helps us decide in a more scientific fashion.   or:     The problem of Cervantes' origin became after that into a tough matter. Some experts believed that the Cervantes from Alcázar, in the times of the Lepanto Battle, was in the age of a child, more concerned about gathering nests and that type of things than about fighting as a soldier.   and for "this":     I believe lot of people who involved fishery industries in Mexico Gulf are suffering now but as for economic issues, U.S government and other countries will support them and give an utmost response to it. Important thing is that we learn from this mistake and make sure this type of things will never happen in the future and protect nature environment thus we have to take this technology to get energy from water very seriously. I really hope this technology will be available and used for everybody as soon as possible.   Is there a rule describing proper usage of these words in cases like this? (or should I have written "..in cases like that"?)
What is your favorite method to handle errors in Bash?  The best example of handling errors I have found on the web was written by William Shotts, Jr at .   He suggests using the following function for error handling in Bash:  #!/bin/bash  # A slicker error handling routine  # I put a variable in my scripts named PROGNAME which # holds the name of the program being run.  You can get this # value from the first item on the command line ($0).  # Reference: This was copied from &lt;http://www.linuxcommand.org/wss0150.php&gt;  PROGNAME=$(basename $0)  function error_exit {  #   ---------------------------------------------------------------- #   Function for exit due to fatal program error #       Accepts 1 argument: #           string containing descriptive error message #   ----------------------------------------------------------------       echo "${PROGNAME}: ${1:-"Unknown Error"}" 1&gt;&amp;2     exit 1 }  # Example call of the error_exit function.  Note the inclusion # of the LINENO environment variable.  It contains the current # line number.  echo "Example of error with line number and message" error_exit "$LINENO: An error has occurred."   Do you have a better error handling routine that you use in Bash scripts? What is the " := " operator in (VB).NET or what is it good for? Can I start a new Clash of Clans village on my iPhone separate from my account on my iPad? If I download Clash of Clans on my iPhone, can I start a new village despite my account on my iPad? I want to make a village for my younger brother. What's a good phrase for "refining a process which is hopelessly broken"? I'm looking for a turn of phrase to describe a situation where the powers that be wish to continue making small improvements to a process which, due to deep-rooted flaws, will never be close to accurate.  I'm working on a process for estimating the states of business objects, and there's interest in fixing some edge cases which have been noticed.  This could be worthwhile, but because of missing data we're already making heroic guesses.  So if implemented, we might get from 80.0 to 80.1% accuracy.  If we were at 99.5%, I'd be happy to get it to 99.6%, but in the current situation it doesn't seem productive.  We have some CS people on E.SE; what would you call it when someone wants to optimize a two-second process to load data, though once loaded it will be chewed on by an inefficient algorithm for hours?  Something like "bailing the ocean" or "fixing a leaky faucet in a burning building" is close to what I have in mind.  There's also "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic," but that carries an implication that the changes are wholly useless, and that events are coming to a head. How does he have those memories? How to combine various armatures? Not only in ortho: top, front, back.  Please don't link this answer   I want a background image like this guy has -> Query Activity for ORDER BY xxx DESC LIMIT I'm trying to create a query activity in order to show, from a Data Extension, only the last 5 articles ids. I tried with the formula ORDER BY xxx DESC LIMIT 0,5 as in SQL but it is not working and it is returning this exception:     The ORDER BY clause is invalid in views, inline functions, derived tables, subqueries, and common table expressions, unless TOP or FOR XML is also specified   How can I use ORDER BY in a Data Extension? Adding Edge Loops Around Airplane Window I would like to add an edge loop around each one of these windows and are not 100% sure on the best way to do it even after watching some videos.  If someone could point me in the right direction that would be great. Thanks. Error: Declaration of MyClass::start_lvl() should be compatible with that of Walker_Nav_Menu::start_lvl() Word for someone who repeats words As  shows, we nearly always use the possessive form of personal pronouns for friend of mine/his/ours/etc.  But when it comes to actual names, we prefer  without the possessive apostrophe. That preference is even more marked with, say, . Not that I think the usage itself is particularly American - it's much the same with .  Personally, I find friend of him grates. In general I've no strong feelings either way as to whether it's friend of Peter or friend of Peter's (though I deplore the possessive in ), but in line with many others, I really don't like the possessive in relation to things like countries.  Why is this?   Edit: Noting an apparent "progression" (pronoun -> person -> nation) marked by reduction in use of the possessive, I checked at a finer "granularity". NGram shows that although it does occur,  virtually "flatlines" against friend of mine. But the bias reduces through of you, of us, and by the time I get to  it's much less extreme. There seems to be something "egocentric" about the double possessive.  Presumably when babies learn to speak, they soon notice that possessive pronouns, possessive apostrophes, and the word "of", all do the same job. Parents would correct a child who says "of mine's", but probably wouldn't even notice the same "redundancy" in "of Peter's". Younger speakers are unlikely to even be talking about something "of America's". Perhaps as we mature we tend to discard the "double possessive" for the more "distant" things that only adults are likely talk about, but we keep it for "closer" people because that's how we spoke when we were younger.  EDIT2 I note that I'm a great fan of him is vanishingly rare compared to ...fan of his, but with ...fan (of John) the double possessive occurs far less often than ...friend (of John's). Usage seems to be affected by the noun before "of" as well as the one after it. This is getting complicated... Shared email on 2 Facebook accounts is stopping access to both accounts My husband wanted me to set up a Facebook account for him and I accidentally used our shared email address, which is set against my own account.  Since then, neither of us has been able to log in, so I can't alter any settings.  Can anyone advise how to resolve this please? Is it wasteful to use a heating element, instead of doing useful work? Consider a computer CPU consuming electrical energy to perform calculations and consequently emitting heat.  Assumption: That a CPU consuming x Watts of power, emits the same amount of heat as an incandescent heating element which consumes the same amount of power.  The rest of the question assumes that this is true: the energy has to go somewhere, and I can't see that the outcome of the calculations counts as "somewhere".  I've long repeated the claim that "wasteful" appliances such as incandescent lightbulbs, over-full kettles, computers left running, etc. are not wasting power if we make the assumptions:   the appliance is in a room which we aim to maintain at above a certain temperature, warmer than the external temperature (cf a home in winter) the room leaks heat to the outside faster than the "wasteful" appliances emit heat. the room contains an electric heater the electric heater is regulated by a thermostat   In these circumstances, I think (?), if a light bulb produces excess heat, its only effect is to cause the thermostat to switch off sooner, so what energy you've "wasted" in the light bulb, is "saved" at the heater.  I don't think that's controversial.  But my question is:   If a CPU does useful work, and emits all the input energy as heat as a side effect But a heating element emits the same heat, without doing useful work Is it therefore wasteful to use heating elements? Is it more efficient to (for example) run  on a CPU, to get "free" computation as a side-effect of heating?   One reason to heat a room with a heating element, rather than with CPUs, is that the heating element is much cheaper to produce. But ignoring the initial cost of the hardware, would a "heater" made out of 20 CPUs, each running at full capacity and consuming 50W each, output less thermal heat than a 1KW element that does nothing else useful?  To be useful, of course, the CPUs would need to output the result of their computations, which would account for a tiny amount of energy. Let's assume that's negligible.  I'm sure there's a flaw in there somewhere; probably that the assumption above is false. What have I missed? Why are the United States often referred to as America? What are the scars on the face of Dryden Voss? Dryden Voss, the iconic villain in Solo: A Star Wars Story, has some pretty radical facial scarring.    I'm wondering if there is any evidence how he got these scars?  In particular is it possible he got the scars in battle, or from exposure to a particular substance or drug.  It also seems he is under the service of a Sith Lord (if not an apprentice himself) and if so, could this have come as part of an initiation into, or training with, the dark arts. Where does the phrase "on the lam" come from? According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, lam means:     "flight," as in on the lam, 1897, from a U.S. slang verb meaning "to run off" (1886), of uncertain origin, perhaps somehow from the first element of lambaste, which was used in British student slang for "beat" since 1590s.    Does anyone know of any other explanations? Youtube video lag on 18.04 I just upgrade from Ubuntu 17.10 to Ubuntu 18.04, there is an issue when playing youtube video.The video stops play but audio playing, then I move the cursor &amp; video is playing...... What should I do?? In my preamble, you'll find:  \renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1} \renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault} \usepackage[sfmath]{kpfonts} \usepackage[mathrmOrig]{sfmath} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{animate} \usepackage{anysize} \usepackage{arcs} \usepackage{array} \usepackage[scale=0]{background} \usepackage{blindtext} \usepackage{calc} \usepackage{cancel} \usepackage{chngcntr} \usepackage{CJK} \usepackage{CJKspace} \usepackage{CJKpunct} \usepackage{colortbl} \usepackage{enumitem} \usepackage{epstopdf} \usepackage{etoolbox} \usepackage{fancybox} \usepackage{fancyhdr} \usepackage{float} \usepackage{framed} \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{hyphenat} \usepackage{ifthen} \usepackage{latexsym} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{multicol} \usepackage{multirow} \usepackage{mwe} \usepackage{pgffor} \usepackage{rotating} \usepackage{tabularx} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage{tgheros,tgtermes,tgcursor} \usepackage{tikz} \usepackage{times} \usepackage{tipa} \usepackage{varwidth} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{wboiboites} \usepackage[abs]{overpic} \usepackage[breaklinks,colorlinks=true,linkcolor=red,citecolor=red, urlcolor=blue]{hyperref} \usepackage[framemethod=TikZ]{mdframed} \usepackage[breakable, theorems, skins]{tcolorbox,empheq} \usepackage[default]{gillius} \usepackage[document]{ragged2e} \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} \usepackage[spanish]{babel} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[total={18.59cm,26.5cm},left=1.5cm,top=2.5cm]{geometry} \usetikzlibrary{matrix,arrows, positioning,shadows,shadings,backgrounds,calc, shapes, tikzmark} \usetikzlibrary{shadows.blur} \usetikzlibrary{shapes.symbols} \usetikzlibrary{patterns,fadings} \tcbuselibrary{skins,breakable,listings,theorems}    I'm trying to draw an arrow for X axis and Y axis.   \begin{tikzpicture} \draw[yellow!10, fill=blue!5](-1, -1) rectangle (7, 5); \draw[dotted] (-0.75,-0.75) grid (6.75,4.75); \node[below] at (-0.25,0){$O$}; \draw[-&gt;,black, thick] (-0.75,0)--(6.75,0); \end{tikzpicture}   But I get this error:    Additionally, if I remove -> from the options of \draw the tikz picture compiles normally. Get current editor toolbar tab via Python?