xkcd

Yeah, obviously lots of crime could be prevented with some kind of prior intervention, but knowing ahead of time that intervention will prevent a future crime is impossible unless we go full Minority Report.

the case you describe has already diagnosed and an established history of mental health problems. If the person in question doesn't have a history or existing diagnosis of mental problems you have to establish that he does before you can intervene, and if they aren't willing to see a mental health ...

I don't know if this deserves it's own thread, but I'll put it here for now: There has been an arrest involving the (long cold) Golden State Killer case. (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-golden-state-killer-20180426-story.html) After all these years! It could also go in Police Misbehavior,...

I don't follow what you are talking about with cylinders but it sounds suspicious. Yeah it's a lot of words that mostly seem to miss the point. Yet upon the surface of the cylinder (featureless, frictionless, and you blind to any landmarks inwards and outwards of the sheet you are sitting upon) you...

I thinkt he best answer is "it's not that special." There is a sort of important analog for a kind-of-special frame used in cosmology -- if you operate at a scale where the universe is just a homogeneous bulk, then there is a frame in which that bulk is at rest. This frame is pretty speci...

Tub's point was that if that's actually the minimum mass a black hole can exist at (not just form, but remain), then it couldn't still be a black hole smaller than that. Whether that means it would suddenly explode and release all its energy at once, or whether it just means that there'd no longer b...

Mutex wrote:Randall isn't saying there are no situations where the speaker isn't the one at fault for being misinterpreted.

I think you used the correct number, but wow that's a lot of embedded negations in one sentence.

bantler wrote:
gmalivuk wrote:Again, that's the mindset if the person is Black. It's quite a bit less common for white mass shooters, somehow.

Black hands look like guns.

Yeah so near as I can tell you've never contributed anything useful or valuable to a discussion here.

Bye!

Again, that's the mindset if the person is Black. It's quite a bit less common for white mass shooters, somehow.

It's mindset, training, and white privilege.

US cops took Dylan Roof and Travis Reinking alive, too.

The point being made in the comic is that the guy's claiming everyone misinterprets him. At that point, it's perhaps worth considering that he is communicating badly.

Tub wrote:If such a black hole were to instantly evaporate into radiation, that would be equivalent to 100 earth-sized balls of TNT going off.

"Fortunately", such a black hole would actually take 2.7e24 years to evaporate.

People sometimes feel personally attacked by Randall's sarcastic observations and then complain that those comics are just preachy and contain no humor whatsoever.

Bigger takes longer, and an earth-radius black hole would require almost a billion Earth-masses (and would take 2x10 77 years to evaporate). Edit: Of course, any black hole that's warmer than the temperature of radiation falling on it is going to grow, not evaporate, and the coldest you'd find in sp...

This calculator says an Earth-massed black hole would take 5.67x10⁵⁰ years to evaporate.

The smallest black holes all evaporate through Hawking radiation pretty damn quick, so you just need to decide how much energy you want the explosion to have and then create a black hole with the equivalent amount of mass. Anything big enough to have macroscopically noticeable effects from the curva...

-20 = really cold -10 = freezing 0 = chilly 10 = nice spring day 20 = warm spring / cool summer day 30 = hot summer day 40 = fuck global warming, people are going to die at this temperature (That is coincidentally a just slightly bigger range than 0-100 F. Its applicability obviously depends on wher...

"It's not about race! It just happens to be something that has only ever happened to black people and occasionally other PoC, but that doesn't mean you can make it a race thing!"

They didn't "refuse to order anything", they said they were waiting for their friend before ordering.

And I suspect their being there for an entire two minutes wouldn't have given anyone a pause regardless of dress or order if they'd been white.

Dude, you can't honestly expect a guy to not be nervous around folks who purposely intend to look menacing. Lots of people enjoy being scary and intimidating; especially in groups. You're still assuming the "purposely" part based on nothing more than the fact that you yourself are easily ...

People who adopt the aesthetic of a punker, metal-head, skin-head, black-panther, thug etc. also adopt the attitude and perception. They have freely and gladly chosen the perception of menacing. It's not racist to be afraid of people who purposefully dress and act to intimidate. That's exactly how ...

They are certainly free to present themselves as low-class thugs Okay just fuck off. If they are told someone is trespassing and causing a disturbance then they have to take a precautionary approach and escort the person out. They don't have to do that, no. They can instead take two seconds to inde...

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/clutter.png I found a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but the idea of reading it didn't spark joy, so I gave it away. You missed the enormous uptick at "inherit my parent's stuff" and the even-more-enormous downtick at "die."

Well if it's too unreasonable to expect you to state what you think the purpose of the death penalty is, if not self defense or deterrence, and if it's too unreasonable to expect you to justify the claim that imprisoned Hitler would somehow still have the freedom to organize genocide, then there's n...

I can use my size 9 shoes to get distances in feet just by counting; getting distances in meters means multiplying by 0.3 (which introduces an error, but if I cared about precise measurement, I wouldn't be using my shoes to measure it). One meter is approximately one stride length, either a long st...

If you ever want to make a pound cake, guess how much of each ingredient you need? If you guessed 1lb, you're correct. Again, you can adjust the recipe to an approximate round number of grams, but you'll get a different size end product Has anyone baking a pound cake put huge significance on the re...

↶ I see white drug-addicts and homeless people denied rest-room keys and asked to leave establishments all the time. If they don't leave the police escort them out. Denying service isn't inherently racist. Sure, sometimes it's classist or ableist, too. But if a white person has to be high or homele...

More than 30 posts and nobody has mentioned the metric units religious war yet? It's about time! There were at least two posts above yours about it. Similarly, online communities should not take sides on arguments that are outside their intended scope, because if they do they will alienate some of ...

jewish_scientist wrote:Do you see any problems with it.

Don't come to the forum asking for feedback or answers to your question if you're going to ignore most of that feedback and reject most of those answers.

Derek wrote:↶
Liri wrote:Ketchup.

That's just the different spelling of the same word.

Seems maybe you missed the question being replied to?

Eebster the Great wrote:↶
Separately, how do you pronounce the word spelled "catsup"? I would say it identically to "ketchup," but I've also heard a more phonetic pronunciation.

Conveniently for homeopaths, only one person in history ever had to collect a drop of rabid dog spit to be able to make enough for the rest of humanity from now until the Sun explodes, given the levels of dilution that make it "effective".

Yeah in Germany no one has the freedom of speech to promote Nazism. I suspect that even extends to people in prison.

↶ ...freedom of speech will be magically preserved in this hypothetical prison (even when it clearly isn't that protected in any real-world prison)? Cutting of all communication with the outside world is a form of psychological torture. Prisons also have the right to talk to a lawyer. So better to ...

Yeah fuck all the way off with that "the police always follow the process exactly by the book" bullshit. It doesn't take more than a page or two in just this thread to see how much that isn't the case.

Madge wrote:This also prevents registration btw

There was a gap in registrations on the 15th, but 18 accounts have joined the site since then so it seems this part of the problem, at least, is fixed.

In natural speech "catch" and "fetch" rhyme, but if I say it more carefully it has the latch/match/batch vowel.

orthogon wrote:
Quiche is pie.

No lid, though.

So it's as much a pie as pumpkin pie, lemon pie, or pecan pie.

Given how many calls police show up hours late to or not at all, there is a clear de facto ability to effectively ignore certain calls whether or not that ability technically exists by law.

Sableagle wrote:↶
The first rule would be "if it's not a verb, don't stick a verb ending on it," wouldn't it?

This is English. We stick verb endings on whatever the fuck we want.

Yeah it's only hundreds of millions of people's lives destroyed, not billions. Why is everyone so concerned?

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