xkcd

GlassHouses

But if food can't be verbed, can "feed" be popularized in the intransitive/reflexive sense? It's noon here, so I'm about to feed anyway. "Feed" in that sense is an established usage, although usually used referring to animals. See https://www.dictionary.com/browse/feed sense #11.

GlassHouses

Also, water doesn't get blown across from one ocean to the other just anywhere. This is only a significant effect where the land it's being blown across is narrow, i.e. Central America... and that's in the tropics, where prevailing winds blow east to west.

GlassHouses

Since prime numbers are usually understood to be real numbers, i can't be prime in the usual sense. It's also not a Gaussian Prime. Rather, it is one of the four units in the ring of Gaussian Integers (complex numbers where the real and imaginary parts are both integers). Fun fact: 2 is also not a G...

GlassHouses

toni2068 wrote:
DavidSh wrote:The real map would be mostly "Soda" or "Pop", with small enclaves of "Coke" and "Sodapop", I would presume.

Soft drink.

Doesn't "soft drink" include non-carbonated drinks?

GlassHouses

Is OSI Jenga a thing? Can you try removing different components until the entire system collapses? Kind of: going by the 7-layer OSI model and the ubiquity of HTTP/HTTPS traffic, you can safely take out layers 5 and 6. Because for some reason everything from encrypting a connection to request/respo...

GlassHouses

A lot of podcasts are sponsored by mattress companies. I have no idea why. But there's a burgeoning industry of a whole bunch of different online-storefront mattress retailers, and they all advertise heavily on podcasts. Interesting. I don't listen to podcasts, but I still have a newspaper subscrip...

GlassHouses

mixing Latin and Greek is always a bad idea It could be worse. Consider, for example, " megatsunami ". :) If you follow that link and then use the language switcher thingy to jump to the equivalent Japanese page, you find 巨大津波, pronounced "kyodai tsunami," meaning: "giganti...

GlassHouses

The birthday thing was solved ages ago. I still know people who have birthday calendars in their bathrooms. All it takes is one glance whenever you're sitting down to do your business, and you'll be reminded of all upcoming birthdays. Are these things going out of style? I have to admit I don't hav...

GlassHouses

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/reminders.png Title text: The good news is that if the number of work and friend relationships you have exceeds your willingness to do the bare minimum to keep up with everyone's life events and stuff, one way or another that problem eventually solves itself. The birthd...

GlassHouses

But if metric units are involved, you can just use prefixes properly and say "the Earth is 150 gigameters from the Sun" instead of nonsense like "million kilometers" How would you express the volume of the observable universe in metric units using prefixes properly? Four hundred...

GlassHouses

Showing timezones in a graph and not labeling the time axis in UTC? That's a paddlin' Randall chose the time zone he himself lives in. As someone who lives in that time zone as well, I feel that this is an entirely reasonable choice. :D Speaking of time zones, the third largest jump in the graph, a...

GlassHouses

I also keep forgetting that most of South America is farther east than most of North America, so even in the Eastern U.S., we're really pretty late to the party.

GlassHouses

jeanrenaud wrote:This is why we begin to see "M$, G$" in some publications. With the computer era, most people will understand these terms and their signification is the same in every language.

Except in financial jargon, M means thousand and MM means million...

GlassHouses

I don't remember ever hearing of this kind of operation back home in the Netherlands. Maybe because I lived in a more densely populated area there? There definitely were geese out and about, but I never heard of any efforts to chase them away. Maybe because they were more easygoing, being feral des...

GlassHouses

I've read that sometimes specially trained dogs are used to chase geese away; I have trouble picturing that It's definitely a thing . I used to work in an office park in New Jersey where I'd sometimes see signs saying "Border Collies at work," though I have never actually seen the dogs. T...

GlassHouses

xtifr wrote:Anyone who disagrees is welcome to explain why they no longer write or speak like the author of Beowulf.

That's easy: because everyone sucks at English nowadays.

Also, Italy is a country full of people who speak really, really terrible Latin.

GlassHouses

when the thing that you were 99.9999% sure was going to happen, happens, that's not news. Dog bites man, and all that. It's News if Her Maj decides to sod the speech and goes down the pub instead. True, but if you're setting aside 30 minutes a day for broadcasting the news, and there is no news, yo...

GlassHouses

LtPowers wrote:May 16, 2001, was fairly uneventful, but it must have taken some extensive research to prove that definitively.

Powers &8^]

Mulholland Drive premiered at the Cannes Film Festival? Sorry, that was clearly not an uneventful day. Try again.

GlassHouses

I've often thought middle latitudes were the best. You get actual seasons, and you don't have to deal with 24 hours of daylight or 24 hours of sunlight. I tend to agree, but this time of year, when the trees have mostly shed their leaves and winter is about to begin in earnest, does get a lot of pe...

GlassHouses

I hear people born in the 2010s have smaller feet than the national average in their home country. on a related note: I have more than the average number of legs (and I will guess that most of you reading this do too) Everyone has either more or fewer than the average number of legs. That depends o...

GlassHouses

Wow and LOL! My job is *literally* going to a customer support counter with a tool trolley and asking "hello, where's the staff entrance?", and being shown to it, and there asking "hello, where's the server room, I'm here to replace the routers" and being shown to it *and* *left...

GlassHouses

Lately I've found myself watching sports movies, despite having no interest whatsoever in any sports, and I find some of the stories pretty engaging aside from the sports angle. In that case, take a look at Bull Durham , if you haven't already. I found it highly enjoyable, despite not giving a fig ...

GlassHouses

Meh, literature awards have nothing to do with how entertaining the story is and everything to do with whatever the literary critics consider to be “high art”. Sometimes they get it right. Example: one birthday many years ago, a relative gave me One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márqu...

GlassHouses

I've honestly always been annoyed that kg is the SI unit for mass. Shouldn't the Gram be the unit we're defining with our arbitrary nonsense? The cgs system was tried for a while, but that of course has the same problem with centimetre. As normal human activities go, m and kg fit a wider range of a...

GlassHouses

The_Alchemist wrote:I keep thinking it would be nice to redefine the second so that there are 10 hours/day, 100 minutes/hour and 100 seconds/min.

Small is small, right? What could possibly go wrong?

It's been tried. Didn't catch on.

GlassHouses

Assuming the turbulence and wind shear around the tornado doesn't destroy the drone before its gets inside the funnel, it probably wouldn't see anything. Those funnels are usually opaque, which suggests that inside, visibility is going to be close to zero. That's certainly what it looks like in this...

GlassHouses

Two of my friends on Facebook frequently post self-affirming memes about how other people can't tear you down and cut those people out of your life and you're better than all those drama queens. One of them, I know the other side all too well. I know that SHE is the drama in everyone else's life, a...

GlassHouses

This entire post boils down to "it's OK because the private sector does it worse." Given that I was replying to your post, which boiled down to "the private sector always does everything better," that shouldn't come as a huge surprise. If I had agreed with that point, I wouldn't...

GlassHouses

but there are also a vast number of things that the government does with absurd inefficiency, and the root of that is in the bureaucracy rather than the legislative branch. Government just isn't good at most of what it tries to do and it has a natural tendency to grow. If there really is such a &qu...

GlassHouses

Libertarianism, or, I suppose, anti-Statism, comes from a distrust of government in general, not the dysfunction of a particular branch. Paranoia appears to be a wide-spread condition, but as a basis for rational discourse, I rather prefer evidence. Some people are pretty reactionary and have more ...

GlassHouses

The thing you're ignoring there is that if the Free Market, or the Wisdom Of The Crowd, or whatever other Invisible Hand, were effective at dealing with issues like the ones mentioned in that Pelosi quite, there wouldn't be so much support for government activity on those issues. Of course politicia...

GlassHouses

This strip is funny to me because I just did that today. I read about the distinction between "strong" and "weak" emergence, and I immediately thought, "Strong emergence = denial of material reductionism". Denial of material reductionism is done by people who want to c...

GlassHouses

There’s also an amount of linguistic snobbery in refusing to use phonetic conventions from outside of the language being spoken. Remember, French is a language that has its own official institute for the preservation of linguistic purity, dedicated to the prevention of the adoption of foreign-isms....

GlassHouses

As someone who occasionally glances at French newspapers, it amuses me to no end that the French spell the Russian president's last name "Poutine." The reason for this is that, if it were spelled Putin, it would be pronounced like 'putain', which is french for whore. Calling him Poutine i...

GlassHouses

da Doctah wrote:I find it amusing that the current presidents of the US and Russia both have surnames that so readily lend themselves to fart jokes.

As someone who occasionally glances at French newspapers, it amuses me to no end that the French spell the Russian president's last name "Poutine."

GlassHouses

This nomenclature should be extended even further.

Planeplane:

GlassHouses

Actually, the obsession with named logical fallacies is way more troubling than any particular linguistic pet peeve. I see some arguments online consist solely of trying to name the fallacies used by the opponent and suggesting they "look it up." Oh god yes. In particular, I cringe every ...

GlassHouses

To do this properly you need Cantonese. https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/29512256_1502849993157077_1429751131823326588_n.png?_nc_cat=0&oh=1da30e0c52342bfa612527de7f0e3124&oe=5C2EE846 I guess if you live in a culture with strong extended families, where people tend to have speci...

GlassHouses

Also, just because a fight will probably be lost doesn't mean it's not worth fighting. What could possibly be the value of this fight? If losing or surrendering means they're going to rape you to death, eat your flesh and sew your skins into their clothes, and if you're lucky they'll do it in that ...

GlassHouses

most important equation? My vote is for: U+2205 U+2260 U+2205 If you want that in a prose form... "everything can be divided into two categories - those things that can be divided into two categories, and those that can't". watch for inappropriate binaries. aljohnso So, ∅ ≠ ∅ My prose int...

Search found 156 matches