TIL a new word! Awesome!

This is actually a more interesting statement than one might think at first.

When we describe the habits of various species of animals, it’s my understanding that once a description is obtained, you can look at more or less any particular member of that species and see pretty much the same behavior. Monogamy trends included.

Not so with humans. You can find an average, describe trends, but pick any specific individual human and they’re almost certainly not going to behave as that description.

Some humans pair bond for life and beyond, never seeking other companionship after one partner dies. Others sleep around constantly with dozens of partners in a lifetime. And everything in between.

A base-neutral system for naming numbering systems (by jan Miseli) is my favorite solution for this problem.

Mind your tenses. Will die, not have died.

If a pillbug/rollypoly/potato bug/doodlebug/ <whatever your region calls it> is a bug? Then lobsters and crabs are absolutely bugs. This actually doesn’t bother me.

No, that exact thing, interacting with the particle, is what he was saying does not happen, or at least is not required for the effect to happen. This is where his explanation lost me, because my understanding had aligned with yours, and he spent a good half hour trying to explain how I was wrong, and to be honest, it didn’t quite sink in.

I remember there was a lot of math in his explanation, and multiple different interpretations and angles of understanding — but my takeaway was just that he strongly claimed no interaction with the particle whatsoever was required for uncertainty and the weird particle/wave dichotomy to take place, and that experimental evidence has been provided for this. Furthermore, that I have no fucking idea what observation means, but it doesn’t apparently mean interaction with the particle at all.

I’ve asked this of a physicist friend of mine, and he insisted there wasn’t actually photon touching being involved. I honestly didn’t understand his explanation fully though. Photon touching makes sense to me. Whatever he said was much more confusing… yet he gets grant money to actually study lasers and put out research papers, and I don’t, so…

I think your wife’s case was actually significantly different from “flat earthers”, as a community. There’s ignorance, which can be corrected with knowledge and information and reasoning, and there’s willful defiance, which cannot. The very fact that she was freaked out and had a crisis, which enabled facts to enter her head, demonstrates that.

Flat earthers don’t believe in a flat earth. What they actually believe is that Satan is fighting a war for the minds of people, and education is a tool of satan to lead you away from god. All other nonsense they spew stems from that— they don’t believe the earth is flat because evidence shows it, they find evidence to support the earth being flat because the education system, which they believe to be from Satan, tells you it’s spherical.

And most (but not all) flat earthers have moved on to the next conspiracy that supports their central belief (Satan is fighting a war for your mind) and don’t care much about flat earth anymore. Flat earth was never the point, not being swayed by Satan is always the center.

Can’t you swap out DMEM for sports drinks anyway (with the Japanese brand Green Dakara being the best replacement)? That implies DMEM is basically a sports drink itself, if you think about it.

Yep, but he needed to push through legal and investor complaints, so rush rush rush, damn the risk. They’re “captains of industry”, they couldn’t possibly fail!

The correct GREEK plural, which would be used because the root of octopus is Greek, could be octopodes. However, in ENGLISH, people have started intuiting that words ending in “~us” pluralize to ~i, akin to cacti. So this isn’t about being a Latin rule, it’s actually an emergent English rule.

25-27 is about right for me. When left on my own without responsibilities, such as back in my college days, my wakefulness hours would slowly rotate through the day/night. Nowadays, I still rotate a little when I have time off, only to have to painfully snap back when the time off is over— whether this is a weekend, a three day weekend, or actual vacation time.

And advice given to always keep the same sleep schedule whether you’re working or not? Fuck that. Fuck that with a red hot poker. Keeping my work schedule is strain— and strain needs relief sometimes. That “steady sleep cycle” advice is for other people. Genuinely, I mean that. Some people thrive under those circumstances. I don’t.

The emotional flashback against the definition of a planet was probably foreseeable, and I think the framing of it as a “demotion” was what makes people bitter to this day. People’s mental model still has an orrery of 9 objects spinning around the sun, with that last one “cast off” because it’s “too small”. That garners pity.

But note that mental model… it doesn’t even include Ceres. That got “kicked out of the club” too, and no one cares. Why? Because it’s part of the asteroid belt. That’s not a demotion, it’s a reassignment to something different but just as cool!

And yet…… that’s EXACTLY THE SAME CASE AS PLUTO. Pluto isn’t just the 9th and smallest object circling the sun far far away, it’s a member of the Kupier Belt! And that’s awesome, there’s a whole second belt! But Kupier is hard to pronounce from the spelling, and Kupier isn’t a sci-fi common word like asteroid…

Not to mention that using the adjective “dwarf” just sounds insulting.

Sigh. Pluto is definitely not a planet, but the terminology definition conference definitely screwed up the framing bad.

This IS the descriptive approach. Trying to wrangle fish out of ghoti is simply not how people read.

Reminder that according to the actual rules of English orthography, “ghoti” can never be pronounced as “fish”, because said rules feature “position within a word/syllable” very prominently. An onset g simply can’t be pronounced the same way as a final gh, and in fact, any “gh” followed immediately by a vowel must be pronounced with the hard /g/ sound. “ti” is only ever allowed to fricitize to the “sh” sound if it’s followed by another vowel. Ghoti can only be pronounced the same as “goatee”, and English speakers know this intuitively even if they can’t articulate why they know this, the same as we internalize hundreds of other language rules without knowing that we know them.

Yes, TLA is a three letter acronym. A four letter acronym, on the other hand, is an ETLA, or “Enhanced Three Letter Acronym”. For advanced cases, you can get an EETLA (or XETLA) for Expanded/Extended Enhanced Three Letter Acronym.

Just so you know.

I agree with you, except that I think the time system is great. It was deliberately designed to be maximally divisible, and makes a lot of sense in that manner. 12 hours of daylight— a highly divisible number, with 60 small (minuscule, or “minute”) divisions of the hour, which is even MORE divisible than 12. Then when time keeping got more accurate, they added a second division of 60 more parts, and… well, called ‘em seconds.

Basically, 12 and 60 are just so divisible they make really good bases.