Whoever the writer thinks should be faster, so as to serve the needs of the story being told.

The EU already has a land border in the Americas. French Guiana is part of the union and it touches Brazil and Suriname. So the gate is already open to work it from the south up instead of the north down.

I read somewhere – great source, I know – that the existing rule is that the country has to be in Europe, though, not that it has a border. Otherwise Malta, Ireland, and Cyprus would not qualify, and the UK too back when they were in.

Oddly enough, the Canadian/Danish border is a questionable one for this purpose anyway – Hans Island (where the border is) is part of Greenland and Greenland is not in the EU. It left in 1985 and is now one of the “Overseas countries and territories” that have special rights in relation to the EU but are not actually in it.

It’s not a precedent – this has already happened several times. John Turner was PM in 1984 without having a seat. Mackenzie King won an election and became PM all while not being an MP in 1926. He was even a seat-less PM for a couple of months again in 1945.

Prior to the convention of standing for election soon after becoming PM being a hard-and-fast thing, John A. McDonald was in a similar position at Confederation in 1867, and so were two more 19th-century PMs, Abbott and Bowell.

Given the way that the Conservatives blew several conventions out of the water last time they were in power (proroguing Parliament inappropriately, and refusing to allow a coalition second crack at forming a government after an election) I agree it would be a good idea to make this a law. But ringing an alarm bell over Carney specifically is a bit too much. The Liberals are already talking about which back-bencher will resign and Carney run: somewhere in the West Island of Montreal looks like a likely candidate as they are super-safe Liberal seats.

They have Kenya listed as an Asian country.

No, they do – it’s just not a codified constitution like almost all other countries have.

Uncodified constitution

Proponents of the idea believe that a constitution that has evolved bit by bit over a long period of time and across a bunch of different charters and unwritten agreements/customs is stronger that one that’s done all in one shot. You’ll see the unflattering metaphor that “a tree is stronger than a weed”, which seems a bit unfair but it’s reasonable point – if not one that’s beyond argument or anything.

Commonwealth countries are politically conservative, small “c” and not big “C”, as the general attitude is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, even if it’s objectively kind of stupid”. There was a good reason for every one of the decisions that led to today, don’t &^%$ with it, just in case.

The key word in “constitutional monarchy” is “constitutional”, not “monarchy”. The monarch must follow the parliament’s requests, and not doing so is unconstitutional. Parliament is sovereign, at least in all of the countries that derive their monarchy from the UK’s.

Outside of the UK there wouldn’t be a fight anyway: in all the Commonwealth countries (except the ones that have since gone fully republican), the monarch has a representative called “the governor general” who is selected by the Parliament and recommended to the monarch at which point see above. The monarch has to take the advice of who is to be their governor-general. Issues basically never get to the monarch for them to mess anything up. The loyal-to-his-country deputy gets first crack at everything the monarch does in theory and has no reason to go against Parliament. If somehow the g-g or the king did speak out, it’d be a legal mess but everyone would ignore them. Practically we’d either get ourselves a new monarch or just say to hell with it and become a republic.

To answer your specific question then, yes, it’s pro forma. The monarch’s role is to be the embodiment of all legislative, judicial, and executive power, in a fairly close analog to what the American Constitution is. But the Constitution can’t exercise any of those powers and the monarch can’t either. It’s just a historical oddity that they can walk and talk, unlike a piece of paper.

Commander Keen is probably the one that I liked the most that is also well known.

My personal favorite was Bass Class, which is weird because I’ve zero interest in real-life fishing, then or now.

Though the split happened because the Soviets thought they should be master of all Communist countries and the Chinese had different ideas on the topic.

Yes, the Diplomatic Revolution for one.

In the case of velocity, all neutrinos move at essentially the speed of light (they have the slightest amount of mass which slows them down, each of the three types of neutrino a different mass compared to the other two but still very, very, extremely low masses). Only neutrinos less than 2 eV are noticeably slower than light, and that’s quite a low energy. The almost-exactly-light-speed has been confirmed by, among other methods, comparing bursts of neutrinos from supernovas and other intense sources to the photons coming from the same sources.

The photons move at the speed of light by definition and MeV and GeV energy neutrinos show up in detectors at the exact same time down to as close as we’ve been able to measure it (roughly one part in a billion, I think it is).

Yes, but it doesn’t matter enough. The square-cube law means that the mass being supported goes up faster than the area of the layer doing the supporting does. So each additional brick on the bottom still ends up carrying more weight as the pyramid gets taller.

Depends on the compressive strength of the material. Sooner or later the weight of the pyramid above the base exceeds the base’s ability to support it. Considering that a mountain is basically a stone pyramid, Everest has to be in the neighbourhood of how tall you could go – call it 10-12 kilometers high. Other materials would do better.

I had a quick re-read I think you might be right! I’m wondering if I picked it up from the movie instead.

Oh, I’ve read all of his stuff! It’s a red letter day for me when a new story is published. None since 2019, though.

My odd choice of his would be Seventy-Two Letters. I find him most interesting when he follows through in the consequences of an old disproven scientific theory or theological explanation of the universe, and he manages to fit two of them in here.

He’s written some “Notes” on the story when it was printed in his first short story collection and said that it has the same theme but that he wasn’t inspired by it directly. The roots were Paul Linke’s play “Time Flies When You’re Alive” and the principle of least time in optics – if you treat light as a ray, it has to know its future destination in order to know the path with the shortest time it will take to get there (though not if it’s a wave). Then there’s a bunch of diagrams and discussions about the principle’s implications for free will that will stretch your brain. It’s pretty fun.

It’s based on a short story called “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. He’s published only eighteen stories in his career (starting in 1990), nothing longer than a novella and mostly short stories. Despite that they’ve won him four Hugos, four Nebulas, and six Locus Awards. He’s worth reading, is what I’m trying to say.

It’s the only one in English unless you allow things like “The absolute value of -20”.

She might like Little Kitty, Big City. You’re a cat, it’s an open world, you explore, make friends, and wear hats.

I’m fond of the Imperial County of Reuss, which was semi-independent in the Holy Roman Empire. The madlads named all their rulers “Heinrich”, resulting such personages as Heinrich LXXII (“Heinrich the 72nd”).

More recently there’s the Saar Protectorate, which the French encouraged to become a fully independent country after WWII. But the inhabitants wanted nothing to do with it and rejoined West Germany.