xkcd

GlassHouses

Randall should get off his prescriptivist horse. Right now millennial just means anyone young in my circles, with a possible backformed etymology that it means anyone born this millennium. (Which, by the way, started in 2000 because the first millennium took 999 years.) I bet that by 2032 we'll be ...

GlassHouses

Given that all of my grandparents died before I was born, my initial reaction to hearing about people having an adult grandchild is “how have you not died of old age yet?” People may be breeding later, but they're also dying later. I think the odds are pretty decent that my parents will live to see...

GlassHouses

Saying "how you say" instead of "how do you say" sounds like a common mistake made by people whose first language does not have do-support, i.e. most languages that aren't English.

GlassHouses

My body's buoyancy is enough to float in the ocean, but not in freshwater. So this is a thing for me only in rivers and lakes, where I have to constantly move to stay afloat. What bothers me is what's in the water. That's another thing of course. I really prefer clear water because of that. Won't h...

GlassHouses

Also, a mile used to make more sense, in its original definition: it was a mille-yard, one thousand yards, a yard there being the Roman yard equal to five Roman feet. The word mile , and other European names for units of length like mijl or Meile , come from the Latin Mille Passuum , meaning one th...

GlassHouses

You're switching definition of "western" inappropriately. Gaul was once the western frontier (of the roman empire), but nobody is saying that Asterix comic books are in the "Western" genre. The frontier moved. When you change both the time and place, you change the setting to. W...

GlassHouses

The Mountain Man era simply doesn't fit the "Old West" genre. Maybe not technically, but the average person would likely say a movie about them was a Western. No, not really: I don't think anyone characterizes The Last of the Mohicans as a western. "The West" used to start farth...

GlassHouses

Pfhorrest wrote:So in a pattern of blue and black stripes, the blue and black are alternate colors, because they alternate.

Wouldn't those be alternating?

/English language breaking my brain

GlassHouses

As I recall there were several other Republicans in the running to become VP to Ford besides Bob Dole, and who might have become VP to Dole. One of them was a Hollywood hack who’d been elected Governor of California. I wonder what ever happened to him? Which one? We’ve had two Hollywood hacks who h...

GlassHouses

What gets me is when the same person uses both English and classical plurals of the same word, even in the same sentence. I once heard a DJ on a classical station announce "we just heard a couple of concerti from the Brandenburg Concertos". But "Brandenburg Concertos" is a prope...

GlassHouses

...and a complete backup of the hard disk of your old PC from 2015, which includes a complete backup of the hard disk of your old PC from 2009, which includes a complete backup of the hard disk of your old PC from 2003, which inlcludes a complete backup of the hard disk of your old PC from 1996, wh...

GlassHouses

What about the people who put the percent sign in front of the number, i.e. "%65"? I assume that's so far off the bottom of the chart it doesn't show up? They are wrong. Same as those who put the currency sign in front of the price. Wait, do you mean "those who put the currency sign ...

GlassHouses

Left emoji have an unfair advantage. Also, the votes from people from less populated areas should be given more weight. Otherwise they will not be able to impose their values on everyone else. Too real. I weep for our voting system. Because protecting the minority from the excesses of a popular maj...

GlassHouses

Deep frying, too, used to be done mostly using animal fat, specifically, beef tallow. The switch to vegetable oil took place quite recently, to serve the growing demand for vegetarian-friendly French fries. According to Wikipedia, McDonald's made the switch in 1990.

GlassHouses

the use of "them" ("...each person...was required to bring with them...") would have been highly unusual for a reputable newspaper in 1921. At that point in history, respectable usage would have required "him" for the "generic person". The singular they may n...

GlassHouses

Is it even possible to build a rigid helium-filled sphere that floats in air? Helium balloons are usually rather large and made out of some flimsy, ultra-light-weight material. How thin would a metal sphere have to be? Regarding the lightning thing, I've seen a Van de Graaff generator cause sparks a...

GlassHouses

One thing that probably tends to rein in the nastiness of plants (or living things in general) is that making all those toxins and thorns and whatnot requires energy, which takes away from the budget for growth and reproduction. The optimum appears not to be "maximum nastiness." Of course ...

GlassHouses

(IMHO, "little end" is plausible enough that "end" should be with moved to the area where "world" and "one" currently are. Maybe not "end", but, given the readership demographic, "endian" should have featured. But the terms little-endian a...

GlassHouses

da Doctah wrote:"It was so clear you could see the epicycles and deferents."

I went walking in the woods one night with some friends, all of us under the influence of some kind of mushroom, and I could see dotted lines connecting the stars, like the constellations in a star chart.

GlassHouses

Even professional YouTubers shoot on smartphones sometimes -- but they know to hold the phone sideways when they do. Vertical video is a sure sign of a n00b.

GlassHouses

Chips contain plenty of oxide, though. The wafer-thin slices of hilariously pure silicon crystal are very commonly doped with its oxide in order to provide the p-n and n-p junctions that make useful diodes and transistors happen. So at the very least, they certainly contain sand. Are you sure? This...

GlassHouses

Pfhorrest wrote:Silicon dioxide has no "ish" about it, that's straight up what most of most stones are made of.

It's not what computer chips are made of, though. That would be highly pure silicon, and silicon is a metalloid, not a rock.

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.

Search found 178 matches