xkcd

DanD

The next roundabout along the dual carriageway was briefly home to a deer or two, but I don't think it is any more. how big are your roundabouts that they have enough vegetation to house a deer or two? good grief. I've lived in some areas where deer were quite densely populated and practically live...

DanD

We do have a good answer for the hair/balloon/lightning thing ... it's called the tribolectric effect. What's wrong with that? Too empirical? Beware ontic dumping; If you answer "Why does static charge build up when rubbing a ballon on hair?" with "because of the tribolectric effect&...

DanD

So the market doesn't correct bad assumptions? Not a very conservative idea there. Did I ever claim to be a conservative? But I do think "the market" will probably correct such mistakes in time, it just might take a few failures before the suits figure it out. This still has the fundament...

DanD

As others in the thread, I am at least incidentally aware of Insane Clown Posse, but they are not the first thing that comes to mind when viewing an XKCD comic. (Despite this being the 3rd such reference).

DanD

My brain does the same whenever I heard the word "economics." Let me try my hand some economics magic... If demand (price) goes up when supply goes down, why are wages low in certain sectors and people are saying there's high demand for labor in those sectors? Because there are multiple i...

DanD

Industry tends to be biased towards what works and produces profits. So apparently liberal ideals work and produce profits. Possibly, but people can make mistakes, industry leaders would only need to think that's true. Entertainment is probably where this is most relevant. If say movie execs think ...

DanD

Copper Bezel wrote:I still want to know what a liberal bias across industry would even mean.

Industry tends to be biased towards what works and produces profits. So apparently liberal ideals work and produce profits.

DanD

You're both making the mistake of assuming that because one group is smaller, the other must be legitimate. The fact is that mainstream everything tends to have a rather extreme liberal bias that more or less runs on the same principle; "Your evidence is good as long as it confirms our core be...

DanD

What infuriates me is professional-looking studies from the journals of professional-sounding organizations actually staffed by real people of the profession in question... who all have a particular ideological bent (these particular professionals at this journal, not all people of that profession)...

DanD

This comic got me lost on Wikipedia reading about voting systems again, and I find myself wondering if anyone has ever come up with and named an idea I've rolled around in my head for a while now. The idea is that every individual gets a vote on each decision made by an office , like in a direct de...

DanD

The word "pornography" originated from the literal Greek "writing about prostitutes." Not sure what a "food prostitute" might be." :mrgreen: Quite literally, a restaurant, or at least the staff therein (and most likely grocery store staff, as well). A prostitute i...

DanD

That's very exciting! The bad news is that it's a risk factor for lots of things. "Dying, for one thing. So far as we know, beings in that gene pool have a 100% mortality rate." Surely that is only 99.999 something % right? Some of them haven't died yet... Considerably less. Under most wa...

DanD

A sandwich to me is just a substance (or substances) pressed between two slices of bread, but not a substance (or substances) pressed between a bun. How do you defined grilled chicken between two halves of a bun, with LTO, etc? I've never heard that called anything but a grilled chicken sandwich. L...

DanD

As for sandwiches, hot dogs don't qualify because you eat them from the end instead of broadside. I would suggest that the orientation of the exterior is a better criteria. A hotdog opens vertically. A sub opens horizontally (nominally, and obviously "overstuffed" subs are iffy in this ca...

DanD

I had, fortunately, managed to avoid all knowledge of the emoji movie until this thread. Even on first reading, I thought it was a joke. It is not. :( However, given the plot, it sounds more like it could be derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Men than the emojis themselves. While this is...

DanD

* the three secrets to French cuisine (butter, butter, and butter (no, butter shouldn't be yellow)) Depends. The original yellow color of both (some) butter and cheddar cheese was naturally occurring, when cows grazed particular mixtures of plants that were high in beta-carotene. You are correct th...

DanD

I would read this as referring to things that are generally selected by color, rather than by flavor. (With a partial exception for chocolate). Jellybeans, skittles, etc. No one asks for "lime" skittles, they say "can I have a green one". In particular, given the time of year, je...

DanD

Astronauts have better than average healthcare and they were selected for not having any health problems when they became astronauts. I don't know if the graph takes that into account. But they also tended to be test pilots, with the associated lifestyle (hard drinking, hard partying, etc). And eve...

DanD

This reminds me of the (novel) sequel to E.T. which I read decades ago. E.T.'s home planet is described as the "Green Planet" as it's covered in plant life, by contrast to Earth, the Blue Planet. Much later I wonder whether that was fair. Plant life obviously depends on the water cycle, b...

DanD

But you know what's worse than the e-mail provider filtering out what they think is spam? The e-mail provider sending you spam Hotmail went through a phase of spamming me with emails about how good their spam protection was. I don't know whether that stopped or if their own filters are catching it....

DanD

A disappearing bug on an electrical or mechanical system is typically something loose. A wire, a joint, whatever. Correct reassembly eliminates this without the disassembly step revealing it. (It's not always obvious that a plug is not seated when you pull it). However, most of these are not true he...

DanD

http://www.medicaldaily.com/cat-bites-pose-risk-infection-1-3-patients-bitten-hospitalized-teeth-inject-bacteria-joints-tissue Now, admittedly, this is just for those patients who seek medical attention for cat bites, so it's not clear what percentage of total bites are serious, but it is clear that...

DanD

Thanks for this comic. Seeing it just added a "TO DO" for me... talk about abusive relationships with my 12-year-old daughter (and probably son too now that I think about it). I grabbed this for talking points: http://www.ywca.org/atf/cf/%7BC783A7F4-5C12-4A12-ACCF-0C665D3DA10C%7D/Red%20Fl...

DanD

Maybe it's just your workflow that is broken.

DanD

Is it bad that I initially thought it was about suicide? There might be perfectly reasonable reasons for you to initially link it to suicide. There might also be not. It's hard to tell when you don't voice your whole environment, relations, identity, history and more. :roll: Do you use a Facebook a...

DanD

EDIT: Since I'm not exposed to the whole US election thing as much as the locals are: is this comic almost definitely still about the election? I initially interpreted it as being about things like war, rape, oppression etc. in general. I think for most on the left side of the US political spectrum...

DanD

For the few people voting for Trump to "bring the jobs back" -- well, the jobs are fucking gone, due to automation. Bringing them back will, at best, be heavily subsidized, mostly unproductive, and lead to a lot of disaster, as with the proposal to bring back coal mining. Better solutions...

DanD

Trump got about 60 million votes, so there are 30 million KKK members in the USA? You're assuming that all 60 million people who voted for Trump actually support him. As Michael Moore stated, that is simply not true, for the majority of people he's a protest vote, a Human Molotov to blow apart the ...

DanD

What's with the title? A normal native speaker would say "Map of Britain". Was he trying to avoid the whole England/Britain/UK minefield? I say again, did he accidentally invent real place names? The real Cadbury is pretty small, but Braintree, Essex is a place I was well aware of. I coul...

DanD

ramblinjd wrote:I see a few categories emerging... feel free to edit/rearrange/discuss:
[...]

Others:
[...]
Blandford
[...]

Put that one on the list of real places. Heck, if the dot were on the other side of the name, it would be in just about the right spot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blandford_Forum

DanD

But it does remind me of one of my favorite lines. Extra bonus internetz to anyone who recognizes the source. " I don't get it captain. How come we fell up ?" " Well, in this sector of the galaxy, gravity is not so much a law as more of a local ordinance." I'll admit to it being...

DanD

By many accounts, the Mt. Everest experience of today is positively dreary – just shuffling along in an overcrowded lineup of rich people. Perhaps that will be the ultimate fate of the true "interplanetary experience"? (I bet there's a good short story plot in there somehow.) I liked Futu...

DanD

Which series is it? In safehold the battlefleet is pretty much Ancient history by the time the story opens. Though it sounds like a similar concept. I am talking about Safehold, "Off Armageddon Reef" has a prologue that sets up the history and Nimue's back story. ETA: Although, thinking a...

DanD

In the David Weber Safehold series, the "Church" had enforced Roman numerals as part of their ban on technological development. I think it was basically that Roman numerals were so cumbersome to use that it would basically prohibit the development of advanced mathematics since running lon...

DanD

Plus Scrabble games rarely come down to who knows the biggest words with the most high-value tiles in them. At least in my experience, which admittedly doesn't include the pro scene. The two and three letter word-lists (and knowing what to do with them) are vastly more important. Back when I play W...

DanD

thunk wrote:At least what the comic said is true, neither fungi nor animals photosynthesize.

Neither do a very limited number of plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropa_uniflora

There's a reason why similarity in features has fallen out of favor for classifying life.

DanD

In an ideal world that would be true, but we all know that in reality, no one in the industries actually cares. I'm guessing you've never actually worked in "the industries"? And aren't an engineer in general? Okay, it really was wrong of me to say, and you're right - an insane amount of ...

DanD

As for non-coffee-drinkers entertaining guests, I like how my parents did it: they acquired a coffeemaker and a can of Folger's, and when their brother-in-law is there, they just have him make the coffee. I know how to make it. But my only concession to it is a hand me down two cup pot and a small ...

DanD

I would suggest that that's the main problem with your own argument. "It exists, therefore it can be automated" is what I see it boiling down to. Um, yeah. Because it can. Sometimes it's simple. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's economical, sometimes it's not. But yes, it can be automate...

DanD

No, I am saying there is substantial operational expense. When that kite fails to fly itself, somebody has to reel it in. Somebody has to clean it. Somebody has to fix it if it tears. Somebody has to monitor the weather and wind and make decisions about when to deploy it. Even an "automated&qu...

Search found 251 matches