Hacker News

Roman industrial hub discovered on banks of River Wear

68 points by andsoitis 5 days ago | 12 comments

> OSL measures when minerals such as quartz were last exposed to sunlight. Over time, these minerals build up a tiny store of energy while buried. When stimulated with light or heat in the laboratory, the minerals release this energy as a faint glow, which tells experts how long they have been underground.

Now that's just magic, plain and simple.

b112 10 hours ago

Being it's the Romans, and there are a lot of years of Romans, wouldn't one expect such a hub...

Every Wear?

scott_w 10 hours ago

While I get what you're going for, unfortunately, the pronunciation of Wear means it doesn't work. The correct pronunciation is more like Whee-ah (sounds a little bit like wheel) as opposed to sounding like "where" ;-)

graemep 7 hours ago

Near enough for a dad joke, and works perfectly visually (a bit like "there are 10 types of people - those who know binary and those who do not"). In fact I find your lack of appreciation of the humour a bit wearing, not to say wear-ed.

syspec 9 hours ago

Still works, just Aussie

dkdbejwi383 8 hours ago

The vowel/diphthong in wear (as in wearing a towel, rhymes with “care”, “there”) and Wear (homophone with weir, rhymes with “steer”, “near”) are not the same in Australian English.

syspec 6 hours ago

I guess that's why it's called comedy.

c22 5 hours ago

I was thinking Boston could pull it off.

nkrisc 7 hours ago

So more like “weir”.

Kye 6 hours ago

"Correct" is doing a lot of work there. Dialects are a thing. I have never heard anyone pronounce it like whee-ah. They would get a lot of chuckles here where it's pronounced the same as where.

Whee-ah is a little emphasis away from sounding like a donkey.

0x104-238FF 8 hours ago

Architecture in ancient cities was subject to nature in rerum natura.

jstanley 10 hours ago

For some reason I was expecting a large wheel hub.